Robespierre guillotined thousands whose interpretation of revolutionary philosophy did not exactly conform with his, even though his were paranoid and megalomaniacal delusions, and one would have to be deluded, paranoid, and megalomaniacal to accept  his.  Vladimir Lenin was a Robespierre clone, his victims running into the millions. Josef Stalin took it a step further; anyone suspected of having more knowledge or expertise, on any subject, might find themselves at the wrong end of an N.K.V.D bullet, or carted off to the Gulag.

Two weeks before Hitler invaded, Stalin purged his army corps of everyone above major, and as “Field Marshal’  proceeded to make one colossal military blunder after the other, resulting in catastrophic human and materiel losses, which almost cost him the war. Stalin was paranoid, to the degree that he constantly blamed others for his own abysmal failures, in virtually every aspect of Soviet life, even the crop failures that were of his own doing, often referring to his victims as “wreakers’’ and sending multitudes to the Gulag, to show trials, or to a fatal encounter with the N.K.V.D.  Later, Soviet dissidents were incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals, and pumped full of Haldol, to rid them of their political dissensions.

At the Yale medical school from 1969 until 1985, I spearheaded paradigm shifts for the prevention and treatment of infectious disorders and cancer, which would have transformed the institution into a medical Mecca.  Rather than seizing the moment, senior members of the department of psychiatry, aided by and assisted by members of the infectious disorders and oncology departments, concealed the innovations.

On the one occasion that psychiatry resident’s succeeded in pressuring the departmental chairman into allowing me to deliver a lecture, this doyen of medical corruption canceled the talk at the last moment, substituting one entitled,” “Whither Penis Envy.”

 Instead of the availability of immunostimulation reaching physicians, and ultimately patients, Yale’s best corrupted the innovation, by resurrecting zombie science.

When I finally threw in the towel, I requested permission to continue use of the medical library. Nyet! Were it not for a succession of computer savvy office assistant, including one with a command of dos, and first Current Contents, then Medline, and finally Pubmed, Yale would have won, by protecting its lavish research funding, while perpetuating the myth of doing cutting edge research on AIDS, and many other infectious disorders.