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© @ 2 multiple sclerosis and lupus, can be fatal. They occur when the immune system loses its ability to distinguish what is "self" from what is foreign. Under normal circumstances, your immune system ignores the constituents of your own body; immunologists call this "tolerance." But if tolerance is broken, the immune system turns relentlessly self- destructive, attacking the body it is supposed to defend. Adjuvants can break tolerance. In 1956, Dr. Jules Freund, the Hungarian born scientist who gave his name to the adjuvant he created, warned that animals injected with Freund's developed terrible conditions: allergic aspermatogenesis (stoppage of sperm production), experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (the animal version of multiple sclerosis) and allergic neuritis (inflammation of nerves that can lead to paralysis), allergic uveitis (an inflammation in the eye that can cause blindness). There was no reversing any of these conditions. Scientists are still unsure why oil adjuvants do this. One theory is that oils have the ability to hyperactivate the immune system. "The cause is probably that when injecting these molecules, you create a chaos in the immune system," says Dr. Johnny C. Lorentzen, and immunologist with the Karolinska Institute, which awards the annual Nobel Prize for Medicine. He says these oils induce "an extremely powerful response," so powerful, in fact, that the immune system goes haywire and starts attacking things it would otherwise leave alone. Another possibility, which has not been explored very much, is that this harmful phenomenon actually has something to do with one of the greatest distinguishing characteristics of the immune system—its specificity. Over eons in time, this extraordinarily elegant and powerful system has evolved to respond very precisely to what it deems potentially harmful to the body. Our bodies contain all sorts of oily molecules. It could be that when an oil is injected, the immune system actually responds to it with a high degree of precision - just as it responds to everything else - but because the adjuvant resembles too closely those oils found in the body, the immune system begins attacking those too. In immunology this is called a "cross reaction." Neither proposition - chaos or specificity - has been proven so far. But however oils do their damage, it is well known that they do. Army scientists have been as aware as anyone else of the harm that injecting oils can do. The problem for military personnel is that these scientists leaned this lesson by injecting oils into troops in experiments that in some cases they did not agree to participate in. The central question in this book is whether such an experiment has been done again with the new anthrax vaccine and squalene. Round One Despite their dangers, oil adjuvants have come to exert an irresistible, almost magical allure on researchers. If they could truly stimulate the immune system safely, oil additives could help defend mankind from diseases like malaria and HIV. For germs such as these, no one dared make a classic vaccine - the kind made from the germ itself - for fear of accidentally infecting someone with an incurable, if not fatal infection. By splicing off just little bit of such a germ - not enough to make anyone sick - and combining that shard with an adjuvant, scientists hoped to protect people from lethal microbes. If they could do it for HIV, they reasoned, they could do it for any germ in creation. This siren song was