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No, Most sales people are very intelligent. There are others though for instance that believe a stand alone DRE is an acceptable test for cancer. They do not understand the science behind the currently available tests or that of a superior Recaf test. They have relied upon bad tests believed to be good and have difficulty understanding the results of a great test that could save many lives/hardships...Hard to believe isn't it?
For these people it takes more than a memo or two to explain even simple issues. In fact some of them could go on for years and never get it.
Therefore it would probably be prudent for Dr. Moro to hand pick the bright ones and pass on the others for the sales force that will be advertising Recaf for sale.
Even you Gold had a very difficult time understanding many posts from TheBOCX...Remember? He attempted to write something up in a few days and get it into your hands in even less than a week...but you didn't seem to grasp what he/she was trying to convey. I could go back an find a few of those if you need more examples. Anyway I am sure that it requires more than just a casual conversation to relay the science...wouldn't you now agree?
Gold, The question was not whether Vets had them or not...
The question was, "Gold stated,"Couldn't he write something up in a few days and get it in the hands of sales people within a week?"
The answer is no. I am surprised you even asked the question...
Gold stated,"Couldn't he write something up in a few days and get it in the hands of sales people within a week?"
you would think so Gold but then you were not that sure when we were discussing the centrifuge...Remember?
May be Dr. Moro has to train challenged individuals so as to make sure they can answer questions that might be very simple to Dr. Moro but challenging for sales persons.
Remember the extensive training I provided you for something you viewed as very difficult?
Gold here is a 14 second lesson on a centifuge.
Please pay close attention to the on off buttom for the centrifuge. A right twist is on...A left twist is off. kind of like a radio dial.
see link below
Nice try Gold...
Authorship
Only those persons who contributed directly to the intellectual content of the paper should be listed as authors. Authors should meet all of the following criteria: 1. Conceived and planned the work that led to the paper; 2. Wrote the paper, or reviewed successive versions and took part in the revision process; 3. Approved the final version. Holding positions of administrative leadership, contributing patients, and collection and assembling data, are not, by themselves, criteria for authorship. Other persons who have made substantial, direct contributions to the work but cannot be considered authors should be acknowledged with their permission. In a cover letter, authors must disclose any financial interests, direct or indirect that might affect the conduct or reporting of the work they have submitted.
Statement of Authorship
All authors of papers accepted for publication are required to sign a form affirming that they have met the criteria for authorship, have agreed to be authors, and are aware of the terms of publication.
http://www.current-oncology.com/index.php/oncology/about/submissions
Gold....Are you serious?
WHY PUBLISH WITH CURRENT ONCOLOGY?
Current Oncology is indexed in PubMed, Embase (Excerpta Medica
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DOAJ, Google Scholar, Emcare, INASP, Science Citation Index
Expanded (SciSearch), and Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition.It is also a participant of the HINARI program, and is archived
in PubMed Central.[\b]
CIRCULATION / READERSHIP
Total circulation of up to 3200.
Why is Current Oncology a vital media purchase? Because Current
Oncology is distributed and read by a growing community
of engaged and knowledgeable oncologists, specialists in allied
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Respirology, Dermatologists, Clinical Trials)CURRENT ONCOLOGY ONLINE
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The results presented here show that a recaf -based serum immunoassay can discriminate, with high sensitivity and specificity, 504 normal subjects and 50 patients with benign breast lesions from 147 patients with breast cancer. More importantly, the assay can detect the early stages of breast cancer with a sensitivity and specificity unattainable to this point with other cancer markers.
Selecting a low cut-off value (4.6 K recaf units) maximizes cancer detection: sensitivity of 93%, with 95% specificity against normal subjects. In the blind group (Set 1), increasing the cut-off to 7.3 K units resulted in 100% specificity against normal subjects, and yet, against early cancers, the sensitivity remained relatively high (72%).
The sensitivity and specificity values in the blind samples (Set 1) were obtained when samples from stages i and ii breast cancer were tested. At those stages, the 5-year survival rates are 87% and 75% compared with 46% and just 13% for stages iii and iv 24. By contrast, the sensitivity reported by an expert panel from the American Society of Clinical Oncology for cea in stage i breast cancer was only 10%; for stage ii , it was 19% (both measured at 95% specificity 25 against normal subjects). In the same study, the sensitivity reported for ca 15-3 was 9% in stage i cancer and 19% in stage ii , with a specificity of 95% against normal subjects and a specificity of 80% against benign breast lesions 26. In the present study, the sensitivity exhibited by the cea and ca 15-3 tests was higher (39% and 41% respectively, both at 95% specificity). When sera from cancer patients were compared with sera from patients with benign breast lesions, the sensitivities for cea and ca 15-3 were also higher than the published data already mentioned; and yet, the performance of the recaf assay was significantly better than either one of those two markers.
Using a cut-off value of 7.3 K units, the discrimination of positive cases among benign sera in the blind samples of Set 1 was 15%, which is slightly less than the 20% reported for ca 15-3 25. In two thirds of benign samples, testing showed levels of less than 6 K recaf units.
The results from Sets 2 and 3 (open samples) were consistent with those from the blind group (Set 1), thus significantly expanding the number of samples.
It is unclear why some benign lesions are recaf -positive. It is common knowledge that, in general, cancer markers detect a certain percentage of benign lesions. Several explanations are possible:
Some benign lesions are considered premalignant, and the expression of cancer-associated markers might precede the morphology changes detected by a pathologist. Using TP53 as a prognostic marker, Rohan et al. concluded that p53 protein accumulation appears to be associated with an increased risk of progression to breast cancer in women with benign breast disease 27. The most recognizable premalignant lesion of the breast is atypical hyperplasia. However, unfolded lobules and ductal hyperplasia could be considered earlier premalignant epithelial abnormalities 28. The risk of a benign lesion evolving into cancer appears to be related to the degree of epithelial atypia 29, with fibroadenomas having the lowest risk. Interestingly, one of the patients in Set 1 had a histologic diagnosis of fibroadenoma, and yet, among the benign sera samples, hers had the highest amounts of circulating recaf . A year later, this patient was diagnosed with breast cancer. Removing her from the benign group in Set 1 would increase the specificity of the test from 85% to 89%.
Another reason that the discrimination between benign and cancer samples might be worse than the discrimination between normal and cancer samples is that healthy subjects do not normally undergo biopsy, but patients with benign lesions do. This difference introduces an additional source of error that can be measured by studies of agreement among pathologists examining the same breast lesion slides 30,31.
Future work on the biology of recaf might explain why some benign breast lesions test positive and might perhaps provide insight into how to better interpret the results of the recaf test.
http://www.current-oncology.com/index.php/oncology/article/view/979/826
Hungryleon,
I disagree with your assertions.
USING THE IMPACT FACTOR WISELY
Thomson Reuters does not depend on the impact factor alone in assessing the usefulness of a journal, and neither should anyone else. The impact factor should not be used without careful attention to the many phenomena that influence citation rates, as for example the average number of references cited in the average article. The impact factor should be used with informed peer review. In the case of academic evaluation for tenure it is sometimes inappropriate to use the impact of the source journal to estimate the expected frequency of a recently published article. Again, the impact factor should be used with informed peer review. Citation frequencies for individual articles are quite varied.
http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/free/essays/impact_factor/
Dog, Do you mean this one? The one where Goldseeker did extensive research?
So who says the science Works you ask...
Goldseeker said it. .
I have done extensive research into the technology that RECAF uses and it WORKS. It will be a huge seller and IMO, look for some data to be presented at the July 24th conference in a presentation by the lead developer of the RECAF test at Abbott. Dr. Moro will go down in history as one of the leading developers of cancer detection and treatment.
The personalization aspect of the test is huge. Any developing cancer will cause your RECAF level to dramatically increase. It detects the level of cancer cell division so any change in your normal level is a RED ALERT. Researchers are developing treatments that use the same technology so it does not really matter where the cancer is.
"I have never stated that RECAF could not be used for therapeutics."
"It works like nothing else out there" "I know the test can detect cancer cells." "I in fact agree that studies show it does detect if cancer is present in the body."
"The test works and was proven at the ISOBM."
"I think that RECAF may get approval to monitor existing cancer "
"BTW, I have always stated that the RECAF test does indeed work."
I have an IDEa that we will see news shortly...
Cancer Screening in U.S. Lags Behind for Asians and Hispanics, CDC Says
By Michelle Fay Cortez - Jan 26, 2012 12:40 PM ET
Americans aren’t getting screened for cancer as regularly as the U.S. government would like, with Asians and Hispanics leaving themselves most vulnerable to the second-leading cause of death nationwide, a study found.
Colorectal cancer screening is particularly underutilized, with 58.6 percent of the population getting one of three recommended tests for the malignancy that kills more than 50,000 Americans each year, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute. Less than half of Asians and Hispanics get the tests, well below the 70.5 percent Healthy People 2020 target rate.
The results are troubling, since finding tumors early is the best way to ensure successful treatment, said lead author Sallyann Coleman King, an epidemiologist at the Atlanta-based CDC. The report used the 2010 National Health Interview Survey to determine how close the nation is to achieving the government’s cancer-detection goals.
“Efforts should be made to improve screening rates in all population groups,” the researchers said in a statement.
The report, published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, found 72.4 percent of women are screened for breast cancer, below the 81 percent goal, with only 64.1 percent of Asians getting the mammograms recommended every other year for women ages 50 to 74. Pap smears used to spot cervical cancer were done every three years as recommended for 83 percent of women, short of the 93 percent target. Three of every four Asians and 83.8 percent of Hispanics were screened for cervical cancer, the study found.
More than 577,000 people in the U.S. will die of cancer in 2012, according to the American Cancer Society, making it the second-leading cause of death behind heart disease.
To contact the reporter on this story: Michelle Fay Cortez in Minneapolis at mcortez@bloomberg.net
I beg to differ with your comment.
Hungryleon posted,"Almost no peer reviewed publications by the company, zero peer reviewed independent confirmation of Biocurex claims. These means the science has not been scientifically proven yet. "
This is a guest article by Mannie Barling and Ashley F. Brooks.
The infinite power of corporate America to influence outcomes has now poured over into corrupting the field of food and drug marketing and testing. According to a 2011 study released by JAMA and another conducted in 1996, many medical research articles are written by ghostwriters working for the food and drug manufacturers with profit motives.
The study reported a ghostwriting rate for drug products as 7.9% in JAMA, 7.6% in The Lancet, 7.6% in PLoS Medicine, 15.3% in the New England Journal of Medicine, 14.3% in The Annals of Internal Medicine and 2% in Nature Medicine. Many consider these numbers the tip of the iceberg. For example, Dr. John Ioannidis, an expert on medical bias, has estimated that as much as 90% of the medical research doctors rely on to treat patients is flawed.
In the case of food, there is no clear information on how and who prepares industry articles trumpeting the benefits of their food and safety. But you can be sure those numbers are even higher than drugs because of the lack of adequate regulations to control the content of food articles.
Most scientific reports, abstracts, white papers and peer-reviewed publications are manipulated like play dough to achieve the desired goal of the company paying for the scientific test results and the articles and abstracts written in their support. For example, Mead Johnson will pay between $8 million and $12 million in infant formula and cash to settle false advertising claims set out in articles and other marketing releases.
A medical abstract is a summary paragraph included with each medical study published. It’s supposed to give the reader a quick overview of the study results. The problem is that these abstracts may or may not reflect the actual results of the study. In many cases, especially when expensive drugs are involved, the study abstract may give a summary that is the opposite of the actual results. Most doctors and other medical professionals don’t have time to read entire studies and therefore rely on the abstracts.
Like puppeteers or marionette manipulators, Big Food and Big Pharma control every potential comment made about their products. And there is no room for any criticism from independent scientists or reviewers. Dr. John Ioannidis also wrote, “There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false… Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”
While this is not new, the art of manipulating medical and food information first started with the Rockefeller family more than 100 years ago, and has become an art form used by America’s largest companies. Now, with the complicity of the U.S. government and universities, corporate America is as much in control of the content and flow of information as the Nazi’s were during their reign of terror in Germany.
The current trend first runs rampant in schools like Harvard and Iowa State where the universities and professors have routinely accepted payments from Big Food and Big Pharma to promote their products. For example, three doctors at Harvard accepted more than $4.2 million in unreported income to validate the off-label use of an untested drug for children. Monsanto contributed more than $4 million to Iowa State, Texas A&M and Florida to endow chairs in Monsanto related biotech research goals.
In some instances, the industry has used this control to create such shams as “Smart Choices” labels which deceived parents as to the contents of children’s foods and breakfast cereals. In other cases, the industry has carefully controlled the testing of genetically modified seeds by withholding the seeds from independent scientists while funding their own tests to confirm whatever theories Monsanto needs to foster the sales of its seeds. It is not a pretty picture.
At Harvard, more than 1,800 professors received payments that many in Congress construed as bribes, including bribes to teach medical students to sell Statin drugs. At the same time, Big Food has skillfully made payments to the above universities to fund studies, research and graduate-level research by young scientists.
The two industries perpetuate a shroud of industrial bribery and deception which they euphemistically call “editorial assistance”, while others prefer to call it a more friendly term, “publication planning”.
Publication planning is the process by which pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies produce and release articles in magazines and journals to promote sales. Ghostwriters are hired to create these materials in a marketing industry specializing in covert projects and public deception, much like the CIA.
As one example, DesignWrite boasts about their ghostwriting prowess on their website, stating that, for more than 12 years, it “… planned, created, and/or managed hundreds of advisory boards, a thousand abstracts and posters, 500 clinical papers, over 10,000 speakers’ bureau programs, over 200 satellite symposia, 60 international programs, dozens of websites, and a broad array of ancillary printed and electronic materials.” To our knowledge, DreamWrite is a marketing company not a research lab.
In addition to “full-length review articles”, DesignWrite offers marketing plans that include mini-reviews, case reports, editorials, letters and commentaries. It also helps companies decide what data to present, recruits “authors,” chooses journals, creates abstracts and posters for medical meetings.
Big Pharma sees these marketing tools as an efficient “means of placing important information about the therapeutic profile of an agent into the hands of influential physicians ….” DesignWrite then assists in submitting the paper to respected journals. The deception is that the papers are knowingly not truthful.
Do you wonder if you have ever bought a product that DesignWrite was responsible for marketing by its ghostwriting and untruthful clinical papers?
In the case of one author, DreamWrite’s deceitful conduct in preparing studies and articles for the prescription drug Vioxx resulted in a heart attack. After his doctor read all of the abstracts, pamphlets and clinical tests before prescribing the drug to his patients, the author’s doctor felt Vioxx was safe to prescribe for him. After about three months on Vioxx, this author suffered a heart attack.
After Vioxx was pulled from the market by the FDA and following an extensive investigation, the Justice Department prosecuted Scott S. Reuben, MD for falsifying clinical test results so that Merck could obtain FDA approval of Vioxx. This approval was then piggy-backed by Pfizer, who did no testing, to obtain approval of Celebrex by the FDA.
Vioxx, Bextra and Celebrex became blockbuster drugs (sales in excess of a billion dollars) as a result of this deception. Why was Merck permitted by the FDA to control the testing of their own drug? And, why was Pfizer permitted to piggy-back the approval of Celebrex on the false tests of Vioxx? Because, the FDA supports the industry instead of protecting the general public.
As usual, it took litigation over the drugs, Premarin and Prempro, that harmed tens of thousands of women (300,000 women in Florida alone) to obtain confidential documents that exposed the truth about industry marketing practices. Why does it always take expensive litigation or a whistleblower to get any truth out of an American corporation? The two industries’ mantras are delay, use deep pockets to exhaust their opponents and continue to lie until getting caught. Doesn’t this sound much like our government’s policy on war and other important issues too?
Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman is the director of PharmedOut, a Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Georgetown University Medical Center who serves as director of the university-based project founded with public money from the Attorney General’s Consumer and Prescriber Grant program. She found that DirectWrite had been paid to ghostwrite the various articles, pamphlets, scientific abstracts sent to doctors and journal as well as writing the supplements, bound publications, white papers, slide kits, and symposium materials for such products as Premarin and Vioxx.
In her report, Dr. Fugh-Berman examined unsealed documents in litigation against Wyeth Laboratories to investigate the use of medical writing companies to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals. She chronicled how more than 14,000 women became victims of breast cancer as a result of Premarin family of products in her 1,500 page study”HRT”. It is a damning report.
These documents were not made public until PLoS Medicine and The New York Times intervened in the Wyeth litigation. The following are some of the salient points contained in her study:
* Between 1997 and 2003, DesignWrite’s output for Wyeth on the Premarin family of products included “over 50 peer-reviewed publications, more than 50 scientific abstracts and posters, journal supplements, internal white papers, slide kits, and symposia…”. None of them were true.
* The practice of paying doctors and scientists to sign articles written by ghostwriters is so widespread that it is considered normal by many – an atmosphere of systemic deception.
* Dozens of ghostwritten reviews and commentaries published in medical journals and supplements were used to promote unproven benefits and downplay harms caused by these drugs.
* These marketing articles are not peer-reviewed. Nonetheless they are spread around the medical profession as gospel. Because there is no peer review, doctors are not afraid of being caught signing articles in exchange for money.
* The false truths advanced by these deceitful marketing tools have resulted in decades of carefully orchestrated deceptions adopted by an unknowing public.
* DesignWrite was assigned to write 20 secondary review articles in 1997 for $20,000 each, a price that later rose to $25,000 each. By 2011, they must cost much more.
* DreamWrite charged $4,000 for writing abstracts, $10,000 for editing manuscripts and $2,000 for editing abstracts to include deceptive materials provided by Wyeth.
[color=red]
* “Wyeth paid $413,140.60 for a supplement that was mailed to 128,000 physicians and Gynecology Editions of Women’s Health in Primary Care. Wyeth bought 1,500 additional copies for distribution to its sales force and distributed the supplement to media and ‘select thought leaders’, including well-positioned doctors [who could influence their peers].”[/color]
* When one author submitted a manuscript directly to a journal, DesignWrite was paid to influence the author into changing the article to a deceptive draft prepared by DreamWrite instead.
* Authors were considered interchangeable. If one author did not want to sign off on an article, another would be paid to do it.
* Ghostwriters also respond to editor and reviewer’s questions and comments to avoid direct contact with the paid-for author, who may have told the truth about the product’s failings when confronted.
* Ghostwriters defended their articles by attacking reviewers in contrary posts and letters.
* Ghostwritten articles were used to attack competing drugs and the efficacy of competing generics.
On June 15, 2011, outgoing Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, said to Congress, “… all governments lie to each other.” What he should have said is that “all governments and big business lie to each other – and to their citizens and consumers.” Companies like DreamWrite are just capitalizing on the two industries’ predisposition to lie to promote sales.
On June 20, 2011, St. Louis Rams linebacker David Vobora was awarded $5.4 million by a federal judge in his lawsuit against a supplement maker after he was suspended by the NFL for four games in 2009 for using a contaminated product intentionally misrepresented by its manufacturer. I wonder who wrote the fraudulent sales material.
Another example is that it is illegal for pharmaceutical companies to promote a marketed drug for off-label uses, which are defined as uses other than those uses approved by the FDA. Nonetheless, the drug industry actively employs companies like DreamWrite to promote off-label uses ignoring the law.
Review articles in medical journals are crucial vehicles for encouraging off-label uses and promoting unproven benefits. Many prescription drugs would not be successful or become blockbuster drugs (a drug that has sold more than $1 billion) if it were not for off-label sales. The manufacturers know the FDA will do nothing to stop their lies unless or until a significant number of Americans die. So how many Americans must die before the FDA or USDA act to protect citizens?
According to Dr. Fugh-Berman, “DesignWrite helped to produce numerous ghostwritten reviews and commentaries, including articles designed to promote the off-label use of Prempro for preventing Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, age-related macular degeneration, and wrinkles.” Prempro has not been proved to affect any of these illnesses, but has been proven to cause breast cancer. It is amazing the lengths to which”editorial assistance” is used to sell food and drugs – even when the manufacturer and ghostwriter know the real truth.
Sadly, articles published in medical journals, newsletters and magazines are not considered as promotional marketing tools by the FDA. According to critics, “Peer-reviewed publications offer pharma companies shelter from often-stormy regulatory waters. FDA views published articles as protected commercial speech so [it] doesn’t regulate their content.”
This is clearly an FDA loophole created to benefit food and drug companies. This policy is certainly not intended to protect the general public.
The purpose of creating ghostwritten reviews and commentaries is to: (1) Mitigate perceived risks associated with the promoted drug; (2) Push unproven, but profitable, off-label uses; (3) Attack their client’s competitors; (4) Defend benefits despite the lack of studies and testing to support their client’s claims; and (5) Increase sales even when the product is ineffective or potentially harmful to patients.
DreamWrite was paid to manufacture lies and untruthful marketing materials on behalf of their clients at a substantial profit. While Wyeth’s attitude can be summed up in the words of one of its employees, Gerald Burr, who when faced with a problem with an uncooperative author, wrote, “You can’t just put another name on the article, but you can plagiarize the way we did when we wrote papers in college.” For many of their employees, the lying started early.
According to Dr. Fugh-Berman:
Ghostwriting has also been documented in the promotion of Paxil (paroxetine), “Fen-phen” (fenfluramine and phentermine), Neurontin (gabapentin), Vioxx (rofecoxib), and Zoloft (sertraline).
Big Food and Big Agra employ a bevy of ghostwriters to put out untruthful information about genetically engineered seeds, genetically modified foods, the conditions of factory farms, the effects of MSG and other addictive chemical ingredients to promote the sales of their food products. They will never admit how many.
The evidence is overwhelming that Americans can no longer believe the information provided by Big Food, Big Agra and Big Pharma companies. Americans need to do more than just rely upon media ads, the information on food labels, the advice of the many bought-and-paid-for nutritionists, doctors and other paid-for spokespersons and do their own research to protect their families from the dire consequences of these foods and additives. As a result of false information contained in ghostwritten articles, both authors nearly died.
Be careful. Be watchful. And be vigilant to protect you and your family.
Mannie Barling and Ashley F. Brooks, R.N., are the authors of award winning books – Arthritis, Inflammation, Gout, Crohn’s, IBD and IBS – How to Eliminate Pain and Extend your Life (Books and Authors 2010 Best Books in the Health, Diet & Reference Categories) and Mannie’s Diet and Enzyme Formula – A Change of Lifestyle Diet Designed for Everyone (Blogger News Net 2010 Best Health And Nutrition Book Award winner) available at HowToEliminatePain.com, Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and other booksellers around the world.
It’s Not Your Fault – Weight Gain, Obesity and Food Addiction is now available at HowtoEliminatePain.com, Amazon and booksellers everywhere. The authors latest book, The Food Revolution Papers – A Primer on What’s in Your Food, is due in bookstores on October 1, 2011.
Mannie Barling and Ashley F. Brooks are the co-hosts of Surviving the 21st Century with Simon Barrett on Blogger News Network on Saturdays at 10:00 A.M. PST/1:00 PM EST and The Food Revolution Papers, on Thursday mornings at 9:00 AM PST, 12:00 noon PST, found at http://www.bloggernews.net or Blog Talk Radio.
Let Others Know About This Post
Question for you Hungryleon. Do you find any published papers in your search for,
the PSA test or the CA125 or CEA or for the PAP or the Mammogram or Golds's favorite DRE ?
If they are published then the science works right? If they work only 30% of the time then they work but would you rely on the test?
Well my friend, all of those work but only to an extent. In fact a flip of a coin is proven to work 50% of the time.
I do believe that your peer reviewed publications are a bit over rated. Further I might add that many home remedies work very well but are not listed in your favorite peer review.
So who says the science Works you ask...
Goldseeker said it.
.
I have done extensive research into the technology that RECAF uses and it WORKS. It will be a huge seller and IMO, look for some data to be presented at the July 24th conference in a presentation by the lead developer of the RECAF test at Abbott. Dr. Moro will go down in history as one of the leading developers of cancer detection and treatment.
The personalization aspect of the test is huge. Any developing cancer will cause your RECAF level to dramatically increase. It detects the level of cancer cell division so any change in your normal level is a RED ALERT. Researchers are developing treatments that use the same technology so it does not really matter where the cancer is.
"I have never stated that RECAF could not be used for therapeutics."
"It works like nothing else out there" "I know the test can detect cancer cells."
"I in fact agree that studies show it does detect if cancer is present in the body."
"The test works and was proven at the ISOBM."
"I think that RECAF may get approval to monitor existing cancer "
"BTW, I have always stated that the RECAF test does indeed work."
Interesting article on ovarian cancer
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110913103115.htm
Hugryleon,
I have been a member on this Biocurex board for a long time. After reading your post, a few questions came to mind. Since I am very concerned about your paper, and want to make sure it is as accurate as humanly possible, please find the following corrections and or comments. By the way, isn't English a prerequisite to the class you are referencing?
Hungary stated the following,
"I still cannot
the PRs is been proven
ISBMO
*Recaf and ovarian cancer was published
Biocurex does not believe on its own data "
You may want to correct your spelling in the above items.
I also believe that classes just changed via quarters and or semesters? Don't you think your assignment might be a bit late to turn in?
I hope that you do find all of the required information about Biocurex such that you get better than a D on your project.
Interesting Treatment my Mother is getting ready to start. This sounds like a similar function that Recaf is capable of performing.
How Erbitux Works:
About Targeted Therapy
Targeted therapy is the result of about 100 years of research dedicated to understanding the differences between cancer cells and normal cells. To date, cancer treatment has focused primarily on killing rapidly dividing cells because one feature of cancer cells is that they divide rapidly. Unfortunately, some of our normal cells divide rapidly too, causing multiple side effects.
Targeted therapy is about identifying other features of cancer cells. Scientists look for specific differences in the cancer cells and the normal cells. This information is used to create a targeted therapy to attack the cancer cells without damaging the normal cells, thus leading to fewer side effects. Each type of targeted therapy works a little bit differently but all interfere with the ability of the cancer cell to grow, divide, repair and/or communicate with other cells. Modern targeted therapy types include the use of monoclonal antibodies and anti-angiogenesis drugs, both of which are described in greater depth here.
The different types of targeted therapies are defined in three broad categories. Some targeted therapies focus on the internal components and function of the cancer cell. The targeted therapies use small molecules that can get into the cell and disrupt the function of the cells, causing them to die. There are several types of targeted therapy that focus on the inner parts of the cells. Other targeted therapies target receptors that are on the outside of the cell. Therapies that target receptors are also known as monoclonal antibodies. Anti-angiogenesis drugs target the blood vessels that supply oxygen to the cells, ultimately causing the cells to starve.
Researchers agree that targeted therapies are not a replacement for traditional therapies. Targeted therapies involve production of components such as monoclonal antibodies or anti-angiogenesis drugs may best be used in the short term, combination with traditional therapies. More research is needed to identify which cancers may be best treated with targeted therapies such as monoclonal antibodies or anti-angiogenesis drugs and to identify additional targets for more types of cancer.
Using Monoclonal Antibodies as Targeted Therapy
Monoclonal antibodies are a relatively new type of "targeted" cancer therapy. Antibodies are part of the immune system. Normally, the body creates antibodies in response to an antigen (such as a protein in a germ) entering the body. The antibodies attach to the antigen in order to mark the antigen for destruction by the body's immune system. In the laboratory, scientists analyze specific antigens on the surface of cancer cells (target) to determine a protein to match the antigen. Then, using protein from animals and humans, scientists work to create a special antibody that will attach to the target antigen. An antibody will attach to a matching antigen like a key fits a lock. This technology allows treatment to target specific cells, causing less toxicity to healthy cells. Monoclonal antibody therapy can be done only for cancers in which antigens (and the respective antibodies) have been identified.
Erbitux is a targeted therapy that targets and binds to the epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFR) on the surface of the cell. EGFR is found on the surface of many normal and cancer cells. By binding to these receptors, Erbitux blocks an important pathway that promotes cell division this results in inhibition of cell growth and apoptosis (cell suicide).
Note: We strongly encourage you to talk with your health care professional about your specific medical condition and treatments. The information contained in this website is meant to be helpful and educational, but is not a substitute for medical advice.
An interesting thought...
Cure For Cancer Worth $50 Trillion Just To Americans
The economic pay-off of medical research will be enormous when cures for cancer are developed. A couple of academic researchers claim that a cure for cancer would have an economic value of $50 trillion for Americans alone. Add in the value of the cure to other industrialized societies that the total value of the cure likely exceeds $100 trillion.
A new study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Political Economy, calculates the prospective gains that could be obtained from further progress against major diseases. Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel, two University of Chicago researchers, estimate that even modest advancements against major diseases would have a significant impact – a 1 percent reduction in mortality from cancer has a value to Americans of nearly $500 billion. A cure for cancer would be worth about $50 trillion.
"We distinguish two types of health improvements – those that extend life and those that raise the quality of life," explain the authors. "As the population grows, as incomes grow, and as the baby-boom generation approaches the primary ages of disease-related death, the social value of improvements in health will continue to rise."
Many critiques of rising medical expenditures focus on life-extending procedures for persons near death. By breaking down net gains by age and gender, Murphy and Topel show that the value of increased longevity far exceeds rising medical expenditures overall. Gains in life expectancy over the last century were worth about $1.2 million per person to the current population, with the largest gains at birth and young age.
"An analysis of the value of health improvements is a first step toward evaluating the social returns to medical research and health-augmenting innovations," write the authors. "Improvements in life expectancy raise willingness to pay for further health improvements by increasing the value of remaining life."
Murphy and Topel also chart individual values resulting from the permanent reduction in mortality in several major diseases – including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. Overall, reductions in mortality from 1970 to 2000 had an economic value to the U.S. population of $3.2 trillion per year.
In 2005 the US economy produced $12.4 trillon worth of goods and services. So the value of a cancer cure equals over 4 years of US economic output.
The enormous economic value of curative treatments for cancer and similar magnitude economic value for cures for other major killers such as stroke and heart disease mean we can get huge the future returns on investment in public spending for basic biomedical research. This means increased biomedical research funding by governments is pretty easy to justify when viewed in economic terms. Yet in order to fund a war, pork, and other wastes the Bush Administration has sought to cut biomedical research spending in inflation-adjusted terms and even proposed a freeze in nominal dollar terms (which means that real research spending goes down by the rate at which inflation goes up).
The numbers bandied about above understate the coming return on decades of basic biomedical research. Rejuvenation therapies will lengthen working careers and brain rejuvenation will boost productivity for most years worked. Minds which have both youthful vigor and the knowledge and skills accumulated from decades of work will achieve much greater feats and operate at much higher levels of productivity.
Because the rate of advance of research can not be forecasted accurately I think there's a tendency on the part of policy makers and the public to underestimate the future return on biomedical research and in other forms of research as well. Our accumulating body of knowledge is going to reach a critical mass at some point in the next 50 years where the vast majority of diseases become curable and replacement or rejuvenation of worn aged body parts becomes commonplace. We ought try much harder to make that day come sooner.
Randall Parker, 2006 April 26 10:11 PM Policy Medical
Cancer costs projected to reach at least $158 billion in 2020; New NIH study projects survivorship and costs of cancer care based on changes in the US population and cancer trends
Based on growth and aging of the U.S. population, medical expenditures for cancer in the year 2020 are projected to reach at least $158 billion (in 2010 dollars) – an increase of 27 percent over 2010, according to a National Institutes of Health analysis. If newly developed tools for cancer diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up continue to be more expensive, medical expenditures for cancer could reach as high as $207 billion, said the researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the NIH. The analysis appears online, Jan. 12, 2011, in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The projections were based on the most recent data available on cancer incidence, survival, and costs of care. In 2010, medical costs associated with cancer were projected to reach $124.6 billion, with the highest costs associated with breast cancer ($16.5 billion), followed by colorectal cancer ($14 billion), lymphoma ($12 billion), lung cancer ($12 billion) and prostate cancer ($12 billion).
If cancer incidence and survival rates and costs remain stable and the U.S. population ages at the rate predicted by the U.S. Census Bureau, direct cancer care expenditures would reach $158 billion in 2020, the report said.
However, the researchers also did additional analyses to account for changes in cancer incidence and survival rates and for the likelihood that cancer care costs will increase as new technologies and treatments are developed. Assuming a 2 percent annual increase in medical costs in the initial and final phases of care – which would mirror recent trends – the projected 2020 costs increased to $173 billion. Estimating a 5 percent annual increase in these costs raised the projection to $207 billion. These figures do not include other types of costs, such as lost productivity, which add to the overall financial burden of cancer.
“Rising health care costs pose a challenge for policy makers charged with allocating future resources on cancer research, treatment, and prevention,” said study author Angela Mariotto, Ph.D., from NCI’s Surveillance Research Program. “Because it is difficult to anticipate future developments of cancer control technologies and their impact on the burden of cancer, we evaluated a variety of possible scenarios.”
To project national cancer expenditures, the researchers combined cancer prevalence, which is the current number of people living with cancer, with average annual costs of care by age (less than 65 or 65 and older). According to their prevalence estimates, there were 13.8 million cancer survivors alive in 2010, 58 percent of whom were age 65 or older. If cancer incidence and survival rates remain stable, the number of cancer survivors in 2020 will increase by 31 percent, to about 18.1 million. Because of the aging of the U.S. population, the researchers expect the largest increase in cancer survivors over the next 10 years to be among Americans age 65 and older.
“The rising costs of cancer care illustrate how important it is for us to advance the science of cancer prevention and treatment to ensure that we’re using the most effective approaches,” said Robert Croyle, Ph.D., director, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, NCI. “This is especially important for elderly cancer patients with other complex health problems.”
To develop their cost projections, the authors used average medical costs for the different phases of cancer care: the first year after diagnosis, the last year of life, and the time in between. For all types of cancer, per-person costs of care were highest in the final year of life. Per-person costs associated with the first year after a cancer diagnosis were more varied, with cancers of the brain, pancreas, ovaries, esophagus and stomach having the highest initial costs and melanoma, prostate and breast cancers having the lowest initial-year costs.
These new projections are higher than previously published estimates of direct cancer expenditures, largely because the researchers used the most recent data available – including Medicare claims data through 2006, which include payments for newer, more expensive, targeted therapies which attack specific cancer cells and often have fewer side effects than other types of cancer treatments. In addition, by analyzing costs according to phase of care, which revealed the higher costs of care associated with the first year of treatment and last year of life (for those who die from their disease), the researchers were able to generate more precise estimates of the cost of care.
The researchers used 2005 incidence and mortality data from NCI’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program to estimate cancer prevalence for 2010 and 2020. Population estimates for the United States was obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Interim Projections for 2006 to 2020. Medical cost estimates were obtained using the SEER-Medicare database which links SEER data to Medicare claims data from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
http://www.cancer.gov/newscenter/pressreleases/2011/CostCancer2020
More information about these cost projections is available at: http://costprojections.cancer.gov
Gold, you seem to have changed your mind again. On one board you posted one thing and yet on this board you posted another?
http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Business_%26_Finance/Investments/Stocks_%28A_to_Z%29/Stocks_R/threadview?bn=131664&tid=55334&mid=55340
I educated myself about universal cancer markers. They really have very little commercial value because they do not indicate where a cancer is located nor are they specific to cancer. There are lots of false positives.
I have done extensive research into the technology that RECAF uses and it WORKS. It will be a huge seller and IMO, look for some data to be presented at the July 24th conference in a presentation by the lead developer of the RECAF test at Abbott. Dr. Moro will go down in history as one of the leading developers of cancer detection and treatment.
The personalization aspect of the test is huge. Any developing cancer will cause your RECAF level to dramatically increase. It detects the level of cancer cell division so any change in your normal level is a RED ALERT. Researchers are developing treatments that use the same technology so it does not really matter where the cancer is.
"I have never stated that RECAF could not be used for therapeutics."
"It works like nothing else out there" "I know the test can detect cancer cells."
"I in fact agree that studies show it does detect if cancer is present in the body."
"The test works and was proven at the ISOBM."
"I think that RECAF may get approval to monitor existing cancer "
"BTW, I have always stated that the RECAF test does indeed work."
Gold, That is not what was said. To the contrary,
I think I'm a pretty good judge of character, and this work appears to be that of decent, fair-minded, people who think they have something that may be useful.
Now, How about the vast amounts of links that have to do with Receptors for AFP?
You missed a bunch of them didn't you Gold !!!!
Gold, Here are just a few of the subjects dealing with the Receptor for AFP. May be this will assist you in your Quest to perform DD or EXTENSIVE RESEARCH on RECAF?
gold stated,"There is lots of information about AFP or Alpha fetoprotein but very little information about the receptor Alpha fetoprotein"
See links below:
http://www.biocurex.com/media/Tsuboi_Taketa.pdf
http://www.bioportfolio.com/resources/pmarticle/117953/Review-Of-The-Putative-Cell-surface-Receptors-For-Alpha-fetoprotein-Identification-Of.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15708120
http://www.hytest.fi/product/alpha-fetoprotein-receptor,-antibody
http://www.hytest.fi/product/alpha-fetoprotein-receptor,-antibody
http://www.jci.org/articles/view/116021
http://www.pathguy.com/recaf_review.pdf
http://www.novusbio.com/Alpha-1-Fetoprotein-Receptor-Antibody-5E1_NB110-2533.html
http://www.millipore.com/catalogue/item/mab4086
http://www.wjgnet.com/1007-9327/8/469.pdf
http://www.pnas.org/content/74/6/2269.abstract
http://chem.hamilton.edu/~gshields/publications/NewbyDLA2005.pdf
http://www.constabpharma.com/aimpila_asco_handout.pdf
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/88/17/1239.full.pdf
http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v76/v76-17.pdf
https://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=papers+written+on+the+Receptor+for+alpha&oq=papers+written+on+the+Receptor+for+alpha&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=1703l14187l0l15890l40l40l0l25l25l0l235l2266l4.8.3l15l0#hl=en&sa=X&ei=5yUGT_aiBsbf0QHrodmBAg&ved=0CCEQvwUoAQ&q=papers+written+on+the+Receptor+for+alpha+fetoprotein&spell=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=73ef3b6b92d39152&biw=1119&bih=780
Gold, I disagree.
You stated," I read everything available on the receptor alpha fetoprotein. Unfortunately, the bulk of that information was authored by Moro because no one else was really interested in it."
EXTENSIVE RESEARCH?
I often find that many of the posts from the same poster on the BOCX board conflict with one another?
I was always taught if you tell the truth each time every time, the story doesn't change.
When they conflict, I ask questions so that the other BOCX board members can make an informed decision as to which posts are on the up and up and those that may not be...
Oh. I read your first ever post dated September 15, 2011 stating," Having owned this stock for over five years" Which would have been somewhere in 2011-5 = the year 2006....
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=67115898
Or now is it that you actually started purchasing shares a few years earlier than that in not 2006 but in 2004?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70558550
So Gold, What then was the EXTENSIVE RESEARCH?
Also you had stated that you depressed that there was another marker similar to Recaf but then you were relieved because you found the other test was actually less than worthless?
Now I am confused about your posts. You wished that someone had been posting the facts...Then you claimed to do not only research...But EXTENSIVE RESEARCH on the technolgy stating AND IT WORKS, IT WILL BE A HUGE SELLER, IT WORKS LIKE NOTHING ELSE OUT THERE, THE TEST WORKS AS PROVEN....
Your DISCLAIMER states," I only post facts and my opinions."
I certainly wish someone had been posting the facts about universal cancer markers before I invested in Moro's hype
I did in fact do my much needed research on the other universal cancer markers that Moro claimed did not exist.
Remember when he stated that RECAF was the only cancer marker that could detect multiple cancers. Well that was a bold faced lie.
You Gold have also said that Universal markers that pick up on multiple cancers will never sell and yet most all markers currently being used do indeed pick up on multiple cancers?
This raises a lot of questions to me Gold about your extensive research ?????
Dakota,
I have done extensive research into the technology that RECAF uses and it WORKS. It will be a huge seller and IMO, look for some data to be presented at the July 24th conference in a presentation by the lead developer of the RECAF test at Abbott. Dr. Moro will go down in history as one of the leading developers of cancer detection and treatment.
The personalization aspect of the test is huge. Any developing cancer will cause your RECAF level to dramatically increase. It detects the level of cancer cell division so any change in your normal level is a RED ALERT. Researchers are developing treatments that use the same technology so it does not really matter where the cancer is.
"I have never stated that RECAF could not be used for therapeutics."
"It works like nothing else out there" "I know the test can detect cancer cells."
"I in fact agree that studies show it does detect if cancer is present in the body."
"The test works and was proven at the ISOBM."
"I think that RECAF may get approval to monitor existing cancer "
"BTW, I have always stated that the RECAF test does indeed work."
Vamm, I am very curious?
At what price di you purchase BIOCUREX stock? your posts seem to contradict eachother?
You stated:
I have ownned this stock since it traded well north of eighty cents per share.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=67421018
You also stated:"It troubles me that i bought in so late at 3.27
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=67504867
this stock would not be trading around two CENTS, down from a high north of three and a half DOLLARS in it's infancy.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=67644298
you also stated: My shares have gone from over $4.00 a share to less than $0.02.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70524651
Gold stated, "I certainly wish someone had been posting the facts about universal cancer markers before I invested in Moro's hype"
There was Gold !!
Dakota,
I have done extensive research into the technology that RECAF uses and it WORKS. It will be a huge seller and IMO, look for some data to be presented at the July 24th conference in a presentation by the lead developer of the RECAF test at Abbott. Dr. Moro will go down in history as one of the leading developers of cancer detection and treatment.
The personalization aspect of the test is huge. Any developing cancer will cause your RECAF level to dramatically increase. It detects the level of cancer cell division so any change in your normal level is a RED ALERT. Researchers are developing treatments that use the same technology so it does not really matter where the cancer is.
"I have never stated that RECAF could not be used for therapeutics."
"It works like nothing else out there" "I know the test can detect cancer cells."
"I in fact agree that studies show it does detect if cancer is present in the body."
"The test works and was proven at the ISOBM."
"I think that RECAF may get approval to monitor existing cancer "
"BTW, I have always stated that the RECAF test does indeed work."
Gold maybe you should be more focussed on the blood clot detection via your other alias.
http://search.messages.yahoo.com/search?.mbintl=finance&q=vestor_guy&action=Search&r=Huiz75WdCYfD_KCA2Dc-&within=author&within=tm
The cancer detection test is now on its way to success. You will be sad that you sold at 45 cents.
Hugo says it can...
Caracas, Venezuela (CNN) -- A day after officials announced the cancer diagnosis of Argentina's president, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez wondered Wednesday if the United States could be infecting the region's leaders with the illness.
Five current or former Latin American presidents have battled cancer in the past few years, including Chavez himself, who claims to have beaten an unspecified cancer.
Chavez prefaced his remarks at a military event in Caracas by saying, "I don't want to make any reckless accusations," but the Venezuelan president said he was concerned by something he finds "very, very, very strange."
"Would it be strange if (the United States) had developed a technology to induce cancer, and for no one to know it?" he asked.
Chavez cited the revelation this year that the United States, between 1946 and 1948, had carried out human experiments in Guatemala where subjects were exposed to sexually transmitted diseases.
That was 50 years ago, Chavez said, and he posited: Will it be discovered 50 years from now that the United States was infecting presidents with cancer?"I don't know. I'm just putting the thought out there," Chavez said.
Victoria Nuland, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, told reporters Thursday that Chavez's assertion was "horrific and reprehensible."
The Venezuelan president, who has a firm anti-U.S. stance, frequently hurls accusations at his political enemies, domestic and foreign. He has repeatedly said the United States is trying to destabilize his government.
Documentary: Alleged cyberplot points to Venezuela and Iran
A spokesman for Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner said Tuesday that doctors had diagnosed her with thyroid cancer. She is scheduled to undergo surgery next week.
Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2010.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff overcame cancer while she was a candidate for the office, and former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is undergoing treatment for throat cancer.
Chavez said his ally Fidel Castro had repeatedly warned him to beware of what he eats, as foods are potential vehicles for an illness.
Chavez gets tests in Cuba
The Venezuelan leader questioned the timing of the diagnoses -- Rousseff during her campaign, and Chavez himself right before an election year.
"I repeat: I am not accusing anyone. I am just using my freedom to reflect and give commentary on very strange occurrences that are hard to explain," he said.
So if as you say you have been out of BOCX since 2008 we could say that you have been following a stock for 3 years that you have no financial interest in? That is very impressive !
Wow, what other stocks besides RXPC (Via Vestor_guy) do you just hang out and communicate with the other shareholders?
http://search.messages.yahoo.com/search?.mbintl=finance&q=vestor_guy&action=Search&r=Huiz75WdCYfD_KCA2Dc-&within=author&within=tm
By the way did you catch the bolded items in the post this morning concerning the topic you brought up?
"using multiple fictitious names," posted hundreds of messages on Yahoo Finance message boards.
Within a couple of months of becoming an amateur stock-market analyst, he was in the middle of a network of people who spent every waking hour chatting about and trading stocks on the Internet.
"He'd go into these chat rooms and use 20 fictitious names and post messages. . . . "
"He'd buy, lie and sell high
Jonathan Lebed was seeking to manipulate the market," said Walker.
The Internet had taught him how hazy the line was between perception and reality.
After he had picked and bought his stock, he would write a single message about it and stick it up in as many places on Yahoo Finance as he could between 5 and 8 in the morning,
Yahoo would no longer accept messages from his AOL screen names. So he was forced to create four more screen names and start over again.
Over time, he learned that some messages had more effect on the stock market than others. "I definitely refined it," he said of his Internet persona.
Sorry Gold, You have been in and out of this stock so many times that it is difficult to know when your on the buy side or the short side.
No Gold, I am sure that was all of your money. My portion was used for cancer research.
By the way this is one of your old posts. "Lebed came via Onyx"
Gold here is your answer.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70357092
I still have this picture in my head of a teenager having his Mommy drop him off at Biocurex's office and waiting in the parking lot for him so he could go in and get an interview with Grown men running a business.
Do you actually mean that Little Johnny called and asked Whittenberg a few questions on the phone? You consider that an interview.
You also keep saying they? And yet you also state that Dr. Moro did not talk with little Johnny?
Gold, Please read exactly what you wrote.
Lebed was hired by a PR company employed by Moro.
You are stating that Dr. Moro hired a PR company. Dr. Moro obviously did not hire the little kid named Lebed.
Now you state that the Public Relations company hired Lebed but you want to crucify Dr. Moro?
I praise Dr. Moro if he did indeed say as you stated,"this guy is a liability...get rid of him..."
If I were Biocurex I would have written him to cease and desist also.
There is a paragraph that is included in all of Biocurex news. Apparently the little teenybopper exploited the news for his own benefit and disregarded legal terms of the news article.
The Company has not authorized the release of this information in any form that contravenes the Communication Act and will not be responsible for unsolicited massive distribution of this material by e-mail or facsimile by unauthorized parties.
n Sept. 20, 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission settled its case against a 15-year-old high-school student named Jonathan Lebed. The S.E.C.'s news release explained that Jonathan -- the first minor ever to face proceedings for stock-market fraud -- had used the Internet to promote stocks from his bedroom in the northern New Jersey suburb of Cedar Grovea. Armed only with accounts at A.O.L. and E*Trade, the kid had bought stock and then, "using multiple fictitious names," posted hundreds of messages on Yahoo Finance message boards recommending that stock to others. He had done this 11 times between September 1999 and February 2000, the S.E.C. said, each time triggering chaos in the stock market. The average daily trading volume of the small companies he dealt in was about 60,000 shares; on the days he posted his messages, volume soared to more than a million shares. More to the point, he had made money. Between September 1999 and February 2000, his smallest one-day gain was $12,000. His biggest was $74,000. Now the kid had agreed to hand over his illicit gains, plus interest, which came to $285,000.
When I first read the newspaper reports last fall, I didn't understand them. It wasn't just that I didn't understand what the kid had done wrong; I didn't understand what he had done. And if the initial articles about Jonathan Lebed raised questions -- what did it mean to use a fictitious name on the Internet, where every name is fictitious, and who were these people who traded stocks naively based on what they read on the Internet? -- they were trivial next to the questions raised a few days later when a reporter asked Jonathan Lebed's lawyer if the S.E.C. had taken all of the profits. They hadn't. There had been many more than the 11 trades described in the S.E.C's press release, the lawyer said. The kid's take from six months of trading had been nearly $800,000. Initially the S.E.C. had demanded he give it all up, but then backed off when the kid put up a fight. As a result, Jonathan Lebed was still sitting on half a million dollars.
At length, I phoned the Philadelphia office of the S.E.C., where I reached one of the investigators who had brought Jonathan Lebed to book. I was maybe the 50th journalist he'd spoken with that day, and apparently a lot of the others had had trouble grasping the finer points of securities law. At any rate, by the time I asked him to explain to me what, exactly, was wrong with broadcasting one's private opinion of a stock on the Internet, he was in no mood.
"Tell me about the kid."
"He's a little jerk."
"How so?"
"He is exactly what you or I hope our kids never turn out to be."
"Have you met him?"
"No. I don't need to."
edar Grove is one of those Essex County suburbs defined by the fact that it is not Newark. Its real-estate prices rise with the hills. The houses at the bottom of each hill are barely middle class; the houses at the top might fairly be described as opulent. The Lebeds' house sits about a third of the way up one of the hills.
When I arrived one afternoon not long ago, the first person to the door was Greg Lebed, Jonathan's 54-year-old father. Black hair sprouted in many directions from the top of his head and joined together somewhere in the middle of his back. The curl of his lip seemed designed to shout abuse from a bleacher seat. He had become famous, briefly, when he ordered the world's media off his front lawn and said, "I'm proud of my son." Later, elaborating on "60 Minutes," he said, "It's not like he was out stealing the hubcaps off cars or peddling drugs to the neighbors."
He led me to the family dining room, and without the slightest help from me, worked himself into a lather. He got out a photocopy of front-page stories from The Daily News. One side had a snapshot of Bill and Hillary Clinton beside the headline "Insufficient Evidence' in Whitewater Case: CLINTONS CLEARED"; the other side had a picture of Jonathan Lebed beside the headline "Teen Stock Whiz Nailed." Over it all was scrawled in Greg's furious hand, "U.S. Justice at Work."
"Look at that!" he shouted. "This is what goes on in this country!"
Then, just as suddenly as he had erupted, he went dormant. "Don't bother with me," he said. "I get upset." He offered me a seat at the dining-room table. Connie Lebed, Jonathan's 45-year-old mother, now entered. She had a look on her face that as much as said: "I assume Greg has already started yelling about something. Don't mind him; I certainly don't."
Greg said testily, "It was that goddamn computer what was the problem."
"My problem with the S.E.C.," said Connie, ignoring her husband, "was that they never called. One day we get this package from Federal Express with the whatdyacallit, the subpoenas inside. If only they had called me first." She will say this six times before the end of the day, with one of those marvelous harmonicalike wails that convey a sense of grievance maybe better than any noise on the planet. If only they'da caaaawwwwlled me.
"The wife brought that goddamn computer into this house in the first place," Greg said, hurling a thumb at Connie. "Ever since that computer came into the house, this family was ruined."
Connie absorbed the full frontal attack with an uncomprehending blink, and then said to me, as if her husband had never spoken: "My husband has a lot of anger. He gets worked up easily. He's already had one heart attack."
She neither expects nor receives the faintest reply from him. They obey the conventions of the stage. When one of them steps forward into the spotlight to narrate, the other recedes and freezes like a statue. Ten minutes into the conversation, Jonathan slouched in. Even that verb does not capture the mixture of sullenness and truculence with which he entered the room. He was long and thin and dressed in the prison costume of the American suburban teenager: pants too big, sneakers gaping, a pirate hoop dangling from one ear. He looked away when he shook my hand and said "Nice to meet you" in a way that made it clear that he couldn't be less pleased. Then he sat down and said nothing while his parents returned to their split-screen narration.
At first glance, it was impossible to link Jonathan in the flesh to Jonathan on the Web. I have a file of his Internet postings, and they're all pretty bombastic. Two days before the FedEx package arrived bearing the S.E.C.'s subpoenas, for instance, he logged onto the Internet and posted 200 separate times the following plug for a company called Firetector (ticker symbol FTEC):
"Subj: THE MOST UNDERVALUED STOCK EVER
"Date: 2/03/00 3:43pm Pacific Standard Time
"From: LebedTG1
"FTEC is starting to break out! Next week, this thing will EXPLODE. . . .
"Currently FTEC is trading for just $2 1/2! I am expecting to see FTEC at $20 VERY SOON.
"Let me explain why. . . .
"Revenues for the year should very conservatively be around $20 million. The average company in the industry trades with a price/sales ratio of 3.45. With 1.57 million shares outstanding, this will value FTEC at . . . $44.
"It is very possible that FTEC will see $44, but since I would like to remain very conservative . . . my short-term target price on FTEC is still $20!
"The FTEC offices are extremely busy. . . . I am hearing that a number of HUGE deals are being worked on. Once we get some news from FTEC and the word gets out about the company . . . it will take-off to MUCH HIGHER LEVELS!
"I see little risk when purchasing FTEC at these DIRT-CHEAP PRICES. FTEC is making TREMENDOUS PROFITS and is trading UNDER BOOK VALUE!!!"
And so on. The author of that and dozens more like it now sat dully at the end of the family's dining-room table and watched his parents take potshots at each other and their government. There wasn't an exclamation point in him.
not long after his 11th birthday, Jonathan opened an account with America Online. He went onto the Internet, at least at first, to meet other pro-wrestling fans. He built a Web site dedicated to the greater glory of Stone Cold Steve Austin. But about the same time, by watching his father, he became interested in the stock market. In his 30-plus years working for Amtrak, Greg Lebed had worked his way up to middle manager. Along the way, he accumulated maybe $12,000 of blue-chip stocks. Like half of America, he came to watch the market's daily upward leaps and jerks with keen interest.
Jonathan saved him the trouble. When he came home from school, he turned on CNBC and watched the stock-market ticker stream across the bottom of the screen, searching it for the symbols inside his father's portfolio. "Jonathan would sit there for hours staring at them," Connie said, as if Jonathan is miles away.
"I just liked to watch the numbers go across the screen," Jonathan said.
"Why?"
"I don't know," he said. "I just wondered, like, what they meant."
At first, the numbers meant a chance to talk to his father. He would call his father at work whenever he saw one of his stocks cross the bottom of the television screen. This went on for about six months before Jonathan declared his own interest in owning stocks. On Sept. 29, 1996, Jonathan's 12th birthday, a savings bond his parents gave him at birth came due. He took the $8,000 and got his father to invest it for him in the stock market. The first stock he bought was America Online, at $25 a share -- in spite of a lot of adverse commentary about the company on CNBC.
"He said that it was a stupid company and that it would go to 2 cents," Jonathan chimed in, pointing at his father, who obeyed what now appeared to be the family rule and sat frozen at the back of some mental stage. AOL rose five points in a couple of weeks, and Jonathan had his father sell it. From this he learned that a) you could make money quickly in the stock market, b) his dad didn't know what he was talking about and c) it paid him to exercise his own judgment on these matters. All three lessons were reinforced dramatically by what happened next.
What happened next was that CNBC -- which Jonathan now rose at 5 every morning to watch -- announced a stock-picking contest for students. Jonathan had wanted to join the contest on his own but was told that he needed to be on a team, and so he went and asked two friends to join him. Thousands of students from across the country set out to speculate their way to victory. Each afternoon CNBC announced the top five teams of the day.
To get your name read out loud on television, you obviously opted for highly volatile stocks that stood a chance of doing well in the short term. Jonathan's team, dubbing itself the Triple Threat, had a portfolio that rose 51 percent the first day, which put them in first place. They remained in the Top 3 for the next three months, until in the last two weeks of the contest they collapsed. Even a fourth-place finish was good enough to fetch a camera crew from CNBC, which came and filmed the team in Cedar Grove. The Triple Threat was featured in The Verona-Cedar Grove Times and celebrated on television by the Cedar Grove Township Council.
"From then, everyone at work started asking me if Jonathan had any stock tips for them," said Greg.
"They still ask me," said Connie.
y the Spring of 1998, Jonathan was 13, and his ambitions were growing. He had glimpsed the essential truth of the market: that even people who called themselves professionals are often incapable of independent thought and that most people, though obsessed with money, have little ability to make decisions about it. He knew what he was doing, or thought he did. He had learned to find everything he wanted to know about a company on the Internet; what he couldn't find, he ran down in the flesh. It became part of Connie Lebed's life to drive her son to various corporate headquarters to make sure they existed. He also persuaded her to open an account with Ameritrade. "He'd done so well with the stock contest, I figured, Let's see what he can do," Connie said.
What he did was turn his $8,000 savings bond into $28,000 inside of 18 months. During the same period, he created his own Web site devoted to companies with small market capitalization -- penny stocks. The Web site came to be known as Stock-dogs.com. ("You know, like racing dogs.") Stock-dogs.com plugged the stocks of companies Jonathan found interesting or that people Jonathan met on the Internet found interesting. At its peak, Stock-dogs.com had maybe 1,500 visitors a day. Even so, the officers of what seemed to Jonathan to be serious companies wrote to him to sell him on their companies. Within a couple of months of becoming an amateur stock-market analyst, he was in the middle of a network of people who spent every waking hour chatting about and trading stocks on the Internet. The mere memory of this clearly upset Greg.
"He was just a little kid," he said. "These people who got in touch with him could have been anybody."
"How do you know?" said Jonathan. "You've never even been on the Internet."
"Suppose some hacker comes in and steals his money!" Greg said. "Next day, you type in, and you got nothing left."
Jonathan snorted. "That can't happen." He turned to me. "Whenever he sees something on TV about the Internet, he gets mad and disconnects my computer phone line."
"Oh, yeah," Connie said, brightening as if realizing for the first time that she lived in the same house as the other two. "I used to hear the garage door opening at 3 in the morning. Then Jonathan's little feet running back up the stairs."
"I haven't ever even turned a computer on!" Greg said. "And I never will!"
"He just doesn't understand how a lot of this works," explained Jonathan patiently. "And so he overreacts sometimes."
Greg and Connie were born in New Jersey, but from the moment the Internet struck, they might as well have just arrived from Taiwan. When the Internet landed on them, it redistributed the prestige and authority that goes with a general understanding of the ways of the world away from the grown-ups and to the child. The grown-ups now depended on the child to translate for them. Technology had turned them into a family of immigrants.
"I know, I know," Greg said, turning to me. "I'm supposed to know how it works. It's the future. But that's his future, not mine!"
"Anyway," Connie said, drifting back in again. "That's when the S.E.C. called us the first time."
The first time?
Jonathan was 14 when Connie agreed to take him to meet with the S.E.C. in its Manhattan offices. When he heard the news, Greg, of course, hit the roof and hopped on the high-speed train to triple bypass. "He'd already had one heart attack," Connie explained and started to go into the heart problems all over again, inspiring Greg to mutter something about how he wasn't the person who brought the computer into the house and so it wasn't his responsibility to deal with this little nuisance.
At any rate, Connie asked Harold Burk, her boss at Hoffmann-La Roche, the drug company where she worked as a secretary, to go with her and Jonathan. Together, they made their way to a long conference table in a big room at 7 World Trade Center. On one side of the table, five lawyers and an examiner from the S.E.C.; on the other, a 14-year-old boy, his mother and a bewildered friend.
This is how it began:
S.E.C.: Does Jonathan's father know he's here today?
Mrs. Lebed: Yes.
S.E.C.: And he approves of having you here?
Mrs Lebed: Right, he doesn't want to go.
S.E.C.: He's aware you're here.
Mrs. Lebed: With Harold.
S.E.C.: And that Mr. Burk is here.
Mrs Lebed: He did not want to -- this whole thing has upset my husband a lot. He had a heart attack about a year ago, and he gets very, very upset about things. So he really did not want anything to do with it, and I just felt like -- Harold said he would help me.
The S.E.C. seemed to have figured out quickly that they are racing into some strange mental cul-de-sac. They turned their attention to Jonathan or, more specifically, his brokerage statements.
S.E.C.: Where did you learn your technique for day trading?
Jonathan: Just on TV, Internet.
S.E.C.: What TV shows?
Jonathan: CNBC mostly -- basically CNBC is what I watch all the time
S.E.C.: Do you generally make money on your day trading?
Jonathan: I usually don't day trade; I just try to -- since I was home these days and I was very bored, I wanted something to do, so I was just trading constantly. I don't think I was making money. . . .
S.E.C.: Just looking at your April statement, it looks like the majority of your trading is day trading.
Jonathan: I was home a lot that time.
Mrs. Lebed: They were on spring vacation that week.
Having established and then ignored the boy's chief motive for trading stocks -- a desire to escape the tedium of existence -- the authorities then sought to discover his approach to attracting attention on the Internet.
S.E.C.: On the first page [referring to a hard copy of Jonathan's Web site, Stock-dogs.com] where it says, "Our 6- to 12-month outlook, $8," what does that mean? The stock is selling less than 3 but you think it's going to go to 8.
Jonathan: That's our outlook for the price to go based on their earnings potential and a good value ratio. . . .
S.E.C.: Are you aware that there are laws that regulate company projections?
Jonathan: No.
Eventually, the S.E.C. people crept up on the reason they had noticed Jonathan in the first place. They had been hot on the trail of a grown-up named Ira Monas, one of Jonathan Lebed's many Internet correspondents. Monas, eventually jailed on unrelated charges, had been employed in "investor relations" by a number of small companies. In that role, he had fed Jonathan Lebed information about the companies, some of which turned out to be false and some of which Jonathan had unwittingly posted on Stock-dogs.com.
The S.E.C. asked if Monas had paid Jonathan to do this and thus help to inflate the price of his company's stocks. Jonathan said no, he had done it for free because he thought the information was sound. The S.E.C. then expressed its doubt that Jonathan was being forthright about his relationship with Monas. One of the small companies Monas had been hired to plug was a cigar retail outlet called Havana Republic. As a publicity stunt, Monas announced that the company -- in which Jonathan came to own 100,000 shares -- would hold a "smoke-out" in Midtown Manhattan.
The S.E.C. now knew that Jonathan Lebed had attended the smoke-out. To the people across the table from Jonathan, this suggested that his relationship with a known criminal was deeper than he admitted.
S.E.C.: So you decided to go to the smoke-out?
Jonathan: Yes.
S.E.C.: How did you go about that?
Jonathan: We walked down the street and took a bus.
S.E.C.: Who is "we."
Jonathan: Me and my friend Chuck.
S.E.C.: O.K.
Jonathan: We took a bus to New York.
S.E.C.: You cut school to do this?
Jonathan: It was after school. Then we got picked up at Port Authority, so then my mother and Harold came and picked us up and we went to the smoke-out.
S.E.C.: Why were you picked up at the Port Authority?
Jonathan: Because people like under 18 across the country, from California. . . .
Mrs. Lebed: They pick up minors there at Port Authority.
S.E.C.: So the cops were curious about why you were there?
Jonathan: Yes.
S.E.C.: And they called your mother?
Jonathan: Yes.
S.E.C.: And she came.
Jonathan: Yes.
S.E.C.: You went to the smoke-out.
Jonathan: Yes.
S.E.C.: Did you see Ira there?
Jonathan: Yes.
S.E.C.: Did you introduce yourself to Ira?
Jonathan: No.
Here, you can almost here the little sucking sound on the S.E.C.'s side of the table as the conviction goes out of this line of questioning.
S.E.C.: Why not?
Jonathan: Because I'm not sure if he knew my age, or anything like that, so I didn't talk to anyone there at all.
This mad interrogation began at 10 in the morning and ended at 6 in the evening. When it was done, the S.E.C. declined to offer legal advice. Instead, it said, "The Internet is a grown-up medium for grown-up-type activities." Connie Lebed and Harold Burk, both clearly unnerved, apologized profusely on Jonathan's behalf and explained that he was just a naive child who had sought attention in the wrong place. Whatever Jonathan thought, he kept to himself.
hen I came home that day, I closed the Ameritrade account," Connie told me.
"Then how did Jonathan continue to trade?" I asked.
Greg then blurted out, "The kid never did something wrong,"
"Don't ask me!" Connie said. "I got nothing to do with it."
"All right," Greg said, "here's what happened. When Little Miss Nervous over here closes the Ameritrade account, I open an account for him in my name with that other place, E*Trade."
I turned to Jonathan, who wore his expression of airy indifference.
"But weren't you scared to trade again?"
"No."
"This thing with the S.E.C. didn't even make you a little nervous?"
"No."
"No?"
"Why should it?"
oon after he agreed to defend Jonathan Lebed, Kevin Marino, his lawyer, discovered he had a problem. No matter how he tried, he was unable to get Jonathan Lebed to say what he really thought. "In a conversation with Jonathan, I was supplying way too many of the ideas," Marino says. "You can't get them out of him." Finally, he asked Jonathan and his parents each to write a few paragraphs describing their feelings about how the S.E.C. was treating Jonathan. Connie Lebed's statement took the form of a wailing lament of the pain inflicted by the callous government regulators on the family. ("I am also upset as you know that I was not called.") Greg Lebed's statement was an angry screed directed at both the government and the media.
Jonathan's statement -- a four-page e-mail message dashed off the night that Marino asked for it -- was so different in both tone and substance from his parents' that it inspired wonder that it could have been written by even the most casual acquaintance of the other two.
It began:
"I was going over some old press releases about different companies. The best performing stock in 1999 on the Nasdaq was Qualcomm (QCOM). QCOM was up around 2000% for the year. On December 29th of last year, even after QCOM's run from 25 to 500, Paine Webber analyst Walter Piecky came out and issued a buy rating on QCOM with a target price of 1,000. QCOM finished the day up 156 to 662. There was nothing fundamentally that would make QCOM worth 1,000. There is no way that a company with sales under $4 billion, should be worth hundreds of billions. . . . QCOM has now fallen from 800 to under 300. It is no longer the hot play with all of the attention. Many people were able to successfully time QCOM and make a lot of money. The ones who had bad timing on QCOM, lost a lot of money.
"People who trade stocks, trade based on what they feel will move and they can trade for profit. Nobody makes investment decisions based on reading financial filings. Whether a company is making millions or losing millions, it has no impact on the price of the stock. Whether it is analysts, brokers, advisors, Internet traders, or the companies, everybody is manipulating the market. If it wasn't for everybody manipulating the market, there wouldn't be a stock market at all. . . ."
As it happens, those last two sentences stand for something like the opposite of the founding principle of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. To a very great extent, the world's financial markets are premised on a black-and-white mental snapshot of the American investor that was taken back in 1929. The S.E.C. was created in 1934, and the big question in 1934 was, How do you reassure the public that the stock market is not rigged? From mid-1929 to mid-1932, the value of the stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange had fallen 83 percent, from $90 billion to about $16 billion. Capitalism, with reason, was not feeling terribly secure.
To the greater public in 1934, the numbers on the stock-market ticker no longer seemed to represent anything "real," but rather the result of manipulation by financial pros. So, how to make the market seem "real"? The answer was to make new stringent laws against stock-market manipulation -- aimed not at ordinary Americans, who were assumed to be the potential victims of any manipulation and the ones who needed to be persuaded that it was not some elaborate web of perceptions, but at the Wall Street elite. The American financial elite acquired its own police force, whose job it was to make sure their machinations did not ever again unnerve the great sweaty rabble. That's not how the S.E.C. put it, of course. The catch phrase used by the policy-making elites when describing the S.E.C.'s mission was "to restore public confidence in the securities markets." But it amounted to the same thing. Keep up appearances, so that the public did not become too cautious. It occurred to no one that the public might one day be as sophisticated in these matters as financial professional.s
nyone who paid attention to the money culture could see its foundation had long lay exposed, and it was just a matter of time before the termites got to it. From the moment the Internet went boom back in 1996, Web sites popped up in the middle of nowhere -- Jackson, Mo.; Carmel, Calif. -- and began to give away precisely what Wall Street sold for a living: earning forecasts, stock recommendations, market color. By the summer of 1998, Xerox or AT&T or some such opaque American corporation would announce earnings of 22 cents a share, and even though all of Wall Street had predicted a mere 20 cents and the company had exceeded all expectations, the stock would collapse. The amateur Web sites had been saying 23 cents.
Eventually, the Bloomberg News Service commissioned a study to explore the phenomenon of what were now being called "whisper numbers." The study showed the whisper numbers, the numbers put out by the amateur Web sites, were mistaken, on average, by 21 percent. The professional Wall Street forecasts were mistaken, on average, by 44 percent. The reason the amateurs now held the balance of power in the market was that they were, on average, more than twice as accurate as the pros -- this in spite of the fact that the entire financial system was rigged in favor of the pros. The big companies spoon-fed their scoops directly to the pros; the amateurs were flying by radar.
Even a 14-year-old boy could see how it all worked, why some guy working for free out of his basement in Jackson, Mo., was more reliable than the most highly paid analyst on Wall Street. The companies that financial pros were paid to analyze were also the financial pros' biggest customers. Xerox and AT&T and the rest needed to put the right spin on their quarterly earnings. The goal at the end of every quarter was for the newspapers and the cable television shows and the rest to announce that they had "exceeded analysts' expectations." The easiest way to exceed analysts' expectations was to have the analysts lower them. And that's just what they did, and had been doing for years. The guy in Carmel, Calif., confessed to Bloomberg that all he had to do to be more accurate on the earnings estimates than Wall Street analysts was to raise all of them 10 percent.
A year later, when the Internet bubble burst, the hollowness of the pros only became clearer. The most famous analysts on Wall Street, who just a few weeks before had done whatever they could to cadge an appearance on CNBC or a quote in The Wall Street Journal to promote their favorite dot-com, went into hiding. Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker, who made $15 million in 1999 while telling people to buy Priceline when it was at $165 a share and Healtheon/WebMD when it reached $105 a share, went silent as they collapsed toward zero.
Financial professionals had entered some weird new head space. They simply took it for granted that a "financial market" was a collection of people doing their best to get onto CNBC and CNNfn and into the Heard on the Street column of The Wall Street Journal and the Lex column of The Financial Times, where they could advance their narrow self-interests.
To anyone who wandered into the money culture after, say, January 1996, it would have seemed absurd to take anything said by putative financial experts at face value. There was no reason to get worked up about it. The stock market was not an abstraction whose integrity needed to be preserved for the sake of democracy. It was a game people played to make money. Who cared if anything anyone said or believed was "real"? Capitalism could now afford for money to be viewed as no different from anything else you might buy or sell.
Or, as Jonathan Lebed wrote to his lawyer:
"Every morning I watch Shop at Home, a show on cable television that sells such products as baseball cards, coins and electronics. Don West, the host of the show, always says things like, 'This is one of the best deals in the history of Shop at Home! This is a no-brainer folks! This is absolutely unbelievable, congratulations to everybody who got in on this! Folks, you got to get in on the line, this is a gift, I just can't believe this!' There is absolutely nothing wrong with him making quotes such as those. As long as he isn't lying about the condition of a baseball card or lying about how large a television is, he isn't committing any kind of a crime. The same thing applies to people who discuss stocks."
ight from the start, the S.E.C. treated the publicity surrounding the case of Jonathan Lebed at least as seriously as the case itself. Maybe even more seriously. The Philadelphia office had brought the case, and so when the producer from "60 Minutes" called to say he wanted to do a big segment about the world's first teenage stock market manipulator, he called the Philadelphia office. "Normally we call the top and get bumped down to some flack," says Trevor Nelson, the "60 Minutes" producer in question. "This time I left a message at the S.E.C's Philadelphia office, and Arthur Levitt's office called me right back." Levitt, being the S.E.C. chairman, flew right up from Washington to be on the show.
To the S.E.C., it wasn't enough that Jonathan Lebed hand over his winnings: he had to be vilified; people had to be made to understand that what he had done was a crime, with real victims. "The S.E.C. kept saying that they were going to give us the name of one of the kid's victims so we could interview him," Nelson says. "But they never did."
I waited a couple of months for things to cool off before heading down to Washington to see Arthur Levitt. He was just then finishing up being the longest-serving chairman of the S.E.C. and was taking a victory lap in the media for a job well done. He was now 69, but as a youth, back in the 1950's and 1960's, he had made a lot of money on Wall Street. At the age of 62, he landed his job at the S.E.C. -- in part, because he had raised a lot of money on the street for Bill Clinton -- where he set himself up to defend the interests of the ordinary investor. He had declared war on the financial elite and pushed through rules that stripped it of its natural market advantages. His single bravest act was Regulation FD, which required corporations to release significant information about themselves to everyone at once rather than through the Wall Street analysts.
Having first determined I was the sort of journalist likely to see the world exactly as he did, he set out to explain to me the new forces corrupting the financial markets. "The Internet has speeded up everything," he said, "and we're seeing more people in the markets who shouldn't be there. A lot of these new investors don't have the experience or the resources or a professional trader. These are the ones who bought that [expletive] that Lebed was pushing."
"Do you think he is a sign of a bigger problem?"
"Yes, I do. And I find his case very disturbing . . . more serious than the guy who holds up the candy store. . . . I think there's a considerable risk of an anti-business backlash in this country. The era of the 25-year-old billionaire represents a kind of symbol which is different from the Horatio Alger symbol. The 25-year-old billionaire looks lucky, feels lucky. And investors who lose money buying stock in the company of the 25-year-old billionaire. . . . "
He trailed off, leaving me to finish the thought.
"You think it's a moral issue."
"I do."
"You think Jonathan Lebed is a bad kid?"
"Yes, I do."
"Can you explain to me what he did?"
He looked at me long and hard. I could see that this must be his meaningful stare. His eyes were light blue bottomless pits. "He'd go into these chat rooms and use 20 fictitious names and post messages. . . . "
"By fictitious names, do you mean e-mail addresses?"
"I don't know the details."
Don't know the details? He'd been all over the airwaves decrying the behavior of Jonathan Lebed.
"Put it this way," he said. "He'd buy, lie and sell high." The chairman's voice had deepened unnaturally. He hadn't spoken the line; he had acted it. It was exactly the same line he had spoken on "60 Minutes" when his interviewer, Steve Kroft, asked him to explain Jonathan Lebed's crime. He must have caught me gaping in wonder because, once again, he looked at me long and hard. I glanced away.
"What do you think?" he asked.
Well, I had my opinions. In the first place, I had been surprised to learn that it was legal for, say, an author to write phony glowing reviews of his book on Amazon but illegal for him to plug a stock on Yahoo just because he happened to own it. I thought it was -- to put it kindly -- misleading to tell reporters that Jonathan Lebed had used "20 fictitious names" when he had used four AOL e-mail addresses and posted exactly the same message under each of them so that no one who read them could possibly mistake him for more than one person. I further thought that without quite realizing what had happened to them, the people at the S.E.C. were now lighting out after the very people -- the average American with a bit of money to play with -- whom they were meant to protect.
Finally, I thought that by talking to me or any other journalist about Jonathan Lebed when he didn't really understand himself what Jonathan Lebed had done, the chairman of the S.E.C. displayed a disturbing faith in the media to buy whatever he was selling.
But when he asked me what I thought, all I said was, "I think it's more complicated than you think."
"Richard -- call Richard!" Levitt was shouting out the door of his vast office. "Tell Richard to come in here!"
Richard was Richard Walker, the S.E.C.'s director of enforcement. He entered with a smile, but mislaid it before he even sat down. His mind went from a standing start to deeply distressed inside of 10 seconds. "This kid was making predictions about the prices of stocks," he said testily. "He had no basis for making these predictions." Before I could tell him that sounds a lot like what happens every day on Wall Street, he said, "And don't tell me that's standard practice on Wall Street," so I didn't. But it is. It is still O.K. for the analysts to lowball their estimates of corporate earnings and plug the stocks of the companies they take public so that they remain in the good graces of those companies. The S.E.C. would protest that the analysts don't actually own the stocks they plug, but that is a distinction without a difference: they profit mightily and directly from its rise.
"Jonathan Lebed was seeking to manipulate the market," said Walker.
But that only begs the question. If Wall Street analysts and fund managers and corporate C.E.O.'s who appear on CNBC and CNNfn to plug stocks are not guilty of seeking to manipulate the market, what on earth does it mean to manipulate the market?
"It's when you promote a stock for the purpose of artificially raising its price."
But when a Wall Street analyst can send the price of a stock of a company that is losing billions of dollars up 50 points in a day, what does it mean to "artificially raise" the price of a stock? The law sounded perfectly circular. Actually, this point had been well made in a recent article in Business Crimes Bulletin by a pair of securities law experts, Lawrence S. Bader and Daniel B. Kosove. "The casebooks are filled with opinions that describe manipulation as causing an 'artificial' price," the experts wrote. "Unfortunately, the casebooks are short on opinions defining the word 'artificial' in this context. . . . By using the word 'artificial,' the courts have avoided coming to grips with the problem of defining 'manipulation'; they have simply substituted one undefined term for another."
Walker recited, "The price of a stock is artificially raised when subjected to something other than ordinary market forces."
But what are "ordinary market forces"?
An ordinary market force, it turned out, is one that does not cause the stock to rise artificially. In short, an ordinary market force is whatever the S.E.C. says it is, or what it can persuade the courts it is. And the S.E.C. does not view teenagers' broadcasting their opinions as "an ordinary market force." It can't. If it did, it would be compelled to face the deep complexity of the modern market -- and all of the strange new creatures who have become, with the help of the Internet, ordinary market forces. When the Internet collided with the stock market, Jonathan Lebed became a market force. Adolescence became a market force.
I finally came clean with a thought: the S.E.C. let Jonathan Lebed walk away with 500 grand in his pocket because it feared that if it didn't, it would wind up in court and it would lose. And if the law ever declared formally that Jonathan Lebed didn't break it, the S.E.C. would be faced with an impossible situation: millions of small investors plugging their portfolios with abandon, becoming in essence professional financial analysts, generating embarrassing little explosions of unreality in every corner of the capital markets. No central authority could sustain the illusion that stock prices were somehow "real" or that the market wasn't, for most people, a site of not terribly productive leisure activity. The red dog would be off his leash.
I might as well have strolled into the office of the drug czar and lit up a joint.
"The kid himself said he set out to manipulate the market," Walker virtually shrieked. But, of course, that is not all the kid said. The kid said everybody in the market was out to manipulate the market.
"Then why did you let him keep 500 grand of his profits?" I asked.
"We determined that those profits were different from the profits he made on the 11 trades we defined as illegal," he said.
This, I already knew, was a pleasant fiction. The amount Jonathan Lebed handed over to the government was determined by haggling between Kevin Marino and the S.E.C.'s Philadelphia office. The S.E.C. initially demanded the $800,000 Jonathan had made, plus interest. Marino had countered with 125 grand. They haggled a bit and then settled at 285.
"Can you explain how you distinguished the illegal trades from the legal ones?"
"I'm not going to go through the case point by point."
"Why not?"
"It wouldn't be appropriate."
At which point, Arthur Levitt, who had been trying to stare into my eyes as intently as a man can stare, said in his deep voice, "This kid has no basis for making these predictions."
"But how do you know that?"
And the chairman of the S.E.C., the embodiment of investor confidence, the keeper of the notion that the numbers gyrating at the bottom of the CNBC screen are "real," drew himself up and said, "I worked on Wall Street."
Well. What do you say to that? He had indeed worked on Wall Street -- in 1968.
"So did I," I said.
"I worked there longer than you."
Walker leapt back in. "This kid's father said he was going to rip the [expletive] computer out of the wall."
I realized that it was my turn to stare. I stared at Richard Walker. "Have you met Jonathan Lebed's father?" I said.
"No I haven't," he said curtly. "But look, we talked to this kid two years ago, when he was 14 years old. If I'm a kid and I'm pulled in by some scary government agency, I'd back off."
That's the trouble with 14-year-old boys -- from the point of view of the social order. They haven't yet learned the more sophisticated forms of dishonesty. It can take years of slogging to learn how to feign respect for hollow authority.
Still! That a 14-year-old boy, operating essentially in a vacuum, would walk away from a severe grilling by six hostile bureaucrats and jump right back into the market -- how did that happen? It occurred to me, as it had occurred to Jonathan's lawyer, that I had taken entirely the wrong approach to getting the answer. The whole point of Jonathan Lebed was that he had invented himself on the Internet. The Internet had taught him how hazy the line was between perception and reality. When people could see him, they treated him as they would treat a 14-year-old boy. When all they saw were his thoughts on financial matters, they treated him as if he were a serious trader. On the Internet, where no one could see who he was, he became who he was. I left the S.E.C. and went back to my hotel and sent him an e-mail message, asking him the same question I asked the first time we met: why hadn't he been scared off?
Straight away he wrote back:
"It was about 2-3 months from when the S.E.C. called me in for the first time until I started trading again. The reason I didn't trade for those 2-3 months is because I had all of my money tied up in a stock. I sold it at the end of the year to take a tax loss, which allowed me to start trading again. I wasn't frightened by them because it was clear that they were focused on whether or not I was being paid to profile stocks when the fact is I was not. I was never told by them that I was doing something wrong and I was never told by them not to do something."
y September 1999, Jonathan Lebed was playing at the top of his game. He had figured out the advantage, after he had bought shares in a small company, in publicizing his many interests. "I came up with it myself," he said of the idea. "It was obvious from the newspapers and CNBC. Of course stocks respond to publicity!"
After he had picked and bought his stock, he would write a single message about it and stick it up in as many places on Yahoo Finance as he could between 5 and 8 in the morning, when he left home for school. There were no explicit rules on Yahoo Finance, but there were constraints. The first was that Yahoo limited the number of messages he could post using one e-mail address. He would click onto Yahoo and open an account with one of his four AOL screen names; a few minutes later, Yahoo, mysteriously, would tell him that his messages could no longer be delivered. Eventually, he figured out that they must have some limit that they weren't telling people about. He got around it by grabbing another of his four AOL screen names and creating another Yahoo account. By rotating his four AOL screen names, he found he could get his message onto maybe 200 Yahoo message boards before school.
He also found that when he went to do it the next time, with a different stock, Yahoo would no longer accept messages from his AOL screen names. So he was forced to create four more screen names and start over again. Yahoo never told him he shouldn't do this. "The account would be just, like, deleted," he said. "Yahoo never had a policy; it's just what I figured out." The S.E.C. accused Jonathan of trying to seem like more than one person when he promoted his stocks, but when you see how and why he did what he did, that is clearly false. (For instance, he ignored the feature on Yahoo that enables users to employ up to seven different "fictitious names" for each e-mail address.) It's more true to say that he was trying to simulate an appearance on CNBC.
Over time, he learned that some messages had more effect on the stock market than others. "I definitely refined it," he said of his Internet persona. "In the beginning, I would write, like, very professionally. But then I started putting stuff in caps and using exclamation points and making it sound more exciting. That worked better. When it's more exciting, it draws people's attention to it compared to when you write like, dull or something." The trick was to find a stock that he could get excited about. He sifted the Internet chat rooms and the shopping mall with three things in mind: 1) "It had to be in the area of the stock market that is likely to become a popular play"; 2) "it had to be undervalued compared to similar companies"; and 3) "it had to be undiscovered -- not that many people talking about it on the message boards."
ver a couple of months, I drifted in and out of Jonathan Lebed's life and became used to its staccato rhythms. His defining trait was that the strangest things happened to him, and he just thought of them as perfectly normal -- and there was no one around to clarify matters. The threat of being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney in Newark and sent away to a juvenile detention center still hung over him, but he didn't give any of it a second thought. He had his parents, his 12-year-old sister Dana and a crowd of friends at Cedar Grove High School, most of whom owned pieces of Internet businesses and all of whom speculated in the stock market. "There are three groups of kids in our school," one of them explained to me. "There's the jocks, there's the druggies and there's us -- the more business oriented. The jocks and the druggies respect what we do. At first, a lot of the kids are, like, What are you doing? But once kids see money, they get excited."
The first time I heard this version of the social structure of Cedar Grove High, I hadn't taken it seriously. But then one day I went out with Jonathan and one of his friends, Keith Graham, into a neighboring suburb to do what they liked to do most when they weren't doing business, shoot pool. We parked the car and set out down an unprosperous street in search of the pool hall.
"Remember West Coast Video?" Keith said drolly.
I looked up. We were walking past a derelict building with "West Coast Video" stenciled on its plate glass.
Jonathan chuckled knowingly. "We owned, like, half the company."
I looked at him. He seemed perfectly serious. He began to tick off the reasons for his investment. "First, they were about to open an Internet subsidiary; second, they were going to sell DVD's when no other video chain. . . . "
I stopped him before he really got going. "Who owned half the company?"
"Me and a few others. Keith, Michael, Tom, Dan."
"Some teachers, too," Keith said.
"Yeah, the teachers heard about it," Jonathan said. He must have seen me looking strangely at him because he added: "It wasn't that big a deal. We probably didn't have a controlling interest in the company, but we had a fairly good percentage of the stock."
"Teachers?" I said. "The teachers followed you into this sort of thing."
"Sometimes," Jonathan said.
"All the time," Keith said. Keith is a year older than Jonathan and tends to be a more straightforward narrator of events. Jonathan will habitually dramatize or understate some case and emit a strange frequency, like a boy not quite sure how hard to blow into his new tuba, and Keith will invariably correct him. "As soon as people at school found out what Jonathan was in, everybody got in. Like right way. It was, like, if Jonathan's in on it, it must be good." And then the two boys moved on to some other subject, bored with the memory of having led some teachers in the acquisition of shares of West Coast Video. We entered the pool hall and took a table, where we were joined by another friend, John. Keith had paged him.
My role in Jonathan Lebed's life suddenly became clear: to express sufficient wonder at whatever he has been up to that he is compelled to elaborate.
"I don't understand," I said. "How would other kids find out what Jonathan was in?"
"It's high school," said Keith, in a tone reserved for people over 35. "Four hundred kids. People talk."
"How would the teachers find out?"
Now Keith gave me a look that told me that I'm the most prominent citizen of a new nation called Stupid. "They would ask us!" he said.
"But why?"
"They saw we were making money," Keith said.
"Yeah," said Jonathan, who, odd as it sounds, exhibits none of his friend's knowingness. He just knows. "I feel, like, that most of my classes, my grades would depend not on my performance but on how the stocks were doing."
"Not really," Keith said.
"O.K.," Jonathan said. "Maybe not that. But, like, I didn't think it mattered if I was late for class."
Keith considered that. "That's true," he said.
"I mean," Jonathan said, "they were making like thousands of dollars off the trades, more than their salaries even. . . . "
"Look," I said, "I know this is a stupid question. But was there any teacher who, say, disapproved of what you were doing?"
The three boys considered this, plainly for the first time in their lives.
"The librarian," Jonathan finally said.
"Yeah," John said. "But that's only because the computers were in the library, and she didn't like us using them."
"You traded stocks from the library?"
"Fifth-period study hall was in the library," Keith said. "Fifth-period study hall was like a little Wall Street. But sometimes the librarian would say the computers were for study purposes only. None of the other teachers cared."
"They were trading," Jonathan said.
The mood had shifted. We shot pool and pretended that there was no more boring place to be than this world we live in. "Even though we owned like a million shares," Jonathan said, picking up the new mood. "It wasn't that big a deal. West Coast Video was trading at like 30 cents a share when we got in."
Keith looked up from the cue ball. "When you got in," he said. "Everyone else got in at 65 cents; then it collapsed. Most of the people lost money on that one."
"Hmmm," Jonathan said, with real satisfaction. "That's when I got out."
Suddenly I realized that the S.E.C. was right: there were victims to be found from Jonathan Lebed's life on the Internet. They were right here in New Jersey. I turned to Keith. "You're Jonathan's victim."
"Yeah, Keith," Jonathan said, laughing. "You're my victim."
"Nah," Keith said. "In the stock market, you go in knowing you can lose. We were just doing what Jon was doing, but not doing as good a job at it."
Michael Lewis, a contributing writer for the magazine, is making a television series about the Internet for the BBC.
It was very interesting how informed you were about Lebed. You in fact were the only one on the board who really knew who he was. I assume he is a friend of yours?
That brings big question marks up when discussing this issue. I may have to go back and dig up your posts from that era.
If I remember Lebed posted in about the same quantity and style as you do. Didn't he also do some jail time?
Gold stated,"Half, I specifically asked if Lebed was lying"
Gold, so your saying that Lebed wouldn't lie? That is laughable!
Gold also stated,"It was true that Lebed was not working directly for BioCurex"
So if he was not working for Biocurex then he was obviously working for himself.
Further, you used to call Biocurex frequently, do your past conversations represent a phone interview similar to what you are claiming Whittenberg had with Lebed?
And what is your opinion of Jonathon whatever at Lebed? Is he a pretty outstanding citizen with a good reputation?
I can't confirm or deny your assertions but I can see what you wrote here.
Wittenberg talked with some dude who says I'll get your small company noticed. Instead of an up and up businessman Lebed turns out to be a fly by night bullshitter. The situation gets out of hand and dr. Moro says to Whittenberg...this guy is a liability...get rid of him...
So now Goldseeker contacts dr. Moro instead of Whittenberg And says Did you have an interview with slime ball Lebed? The answer is no I did not. And now Gold wants to call dr. Moro a Liar.
Gold, maybe you should learn to ask the right questions....
Sounds to me that Whittenberg spoke with Lebed...you asked dr. Moro if he had an interview with Lebed. The correct answer is no.
Now gold writes that Whittenberg gave an interview ...then changes singular Whittenberg to plural Them
Sure sounds to me that your dispute is with Whittenberg but instead you blame dr. Moro who never had an interview with Lebed.
Wow Gold I think that's called shooting the messenger.
I could say since you were a shareholder at the time of this issue that you also had an interview with Lebed?
You were part owner of the company...yes?
From Golds post:
and the interview Wittenberg gave
an absolute lie about them giving an interview with Lebed
Moro said to deny the connection and to get rid of Lebed, "he's a liability".
Gold, Many companies have investors relation departments and no they are not paid to lie to people. They are available to answer honest questions about a company. However they are not going to tell anyone about the inner workings of the company management or about the next company they are thinking of acquiring or when and where their next contracts are going to be signed.
Here are just a few other companies with investor relations. Do you also want to spew on them?
http://www.pfizer.com/investors/shareholder_services/shareholder_services.jsp
http://www.merck.com/investors/contact-investor-relations/home.html
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=64256&p=irol-irhome
Further, The filings of a company Do NOT provide THE ONLY INFORMATION Needed to make an investment decision.
This is repeated over and over....Dr. moro, can Recaf be used to show these big drug makers which patients will benefit from their drugs? I don't need the answer but a phone call to them explaining how Recaf would benefit their tests would seem to be worth the effort. If I remember correctly, Recaf counts are lower as the cancer minimizes. I know from close experience that CEA and CA125 can actually increases initially before they begins to lower during chemo treatments. Surely Recaf can show some response to a cancer drug's benefit...Or lack their of if the treatment is not benefiting the patient.
The world’s biggest cancer-drug maker wants deals to fit its focus on medicines sold alongside diagnostic tools that show which patients will benefit from the drugs, Schwan said. Roche will continue to seek products and technologies ranging in price from 100 million Swiss francs to 300 million francs ($320 million) as well as being open to a larger purchase like Ventana, Schwan said.
Roche is betting its tailored therapies will help it to grow even as governments cut spending on drugs. The company aims to introduce two medicines paired with diagnostic tests next year: Zelboraf for malignant melanoma, already sold in the U.S. and Switzerland and targeted for broader sale, and pertuzumab, a breast-cancer treatment which will be used alongside Roche’s older treatment Herceptin.
Drugs and Diagnostics
A third new medicine developed as a targeted treatment, vismodegib for basal cell carcinoma, won’t have a companion test because almost all patients with the disease respond to the therapy. Vismodegib was filed to regulators this year, and may reach the market in 2012, Schwan said.
“We see the synergies between pharma and diagnostics coming to life,” he said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-22/roche-ceo-is-open-to-3-billion-takeover-would-seize-right-opportunity.html