Postscript: Political Science
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would still talk to these people, and on December 19 we were informed
by phone of the final repudiation. As a last-ditch effort, I wrote a letter
of appeal to the chief VA administrator, who'd shown favorable interest
in our work a couple of years before. I asked him for a hearing and
investigation, but to no avail.
The lab ceased to exist on New Year's Day 1981. The local VA chief
had the gall to offer Andy and Joe jobs as night administrative officers.
Instead, Marino went to work at Louisiana State University Medical
School in Shreveport, where he still investigates the positive silver tech-
nique on a small scale. Spadaro also remained in orthopedic surgery, at
the SUNY Upstate Medical Center right there in Syracuse. Maria
Reichmanis decided she'd had enough of professional science, quit re-
search entirely, and got married. This was the end of the foremost group
working toward limb and spinal cord regeneration and one of the few
bioelectromagnetism labs outside the DOD-industry orbit.
I've taken the trouble to recount my experience in detail for two rea-
sons. Obviously, I want to tell people about it because it makes me
furious. More important, I want the general public to know that science
isn't run the way they read about it in the newspapers and magazines. I
want lay people to understand that they cannot automatically accept
scientists' pronouncements at face value, for too often they're self-serving
and misleading. I want our citizens, nonscientists as well as in-
vestigators, to work to change the way research is administered. The
way it's currently funded and evaluated, we're learning more and more
about less and less, and science is becoming our enemy instead of our
friend.