The project began in early 2015, reading and becoming familiar with an obscure niche of chemistry. I’m no chemist, but focusing on a tiny segment of that enormous field ultimately made me as knowledgeable as any in one particular area of “black arts.”

Then followed actual chemistry; the photo at the bottom of the Heretical main page is me about this time. In the photo you can see the hotplate/stirrer and a test tube rack just to the right of it. The balance I was using is out of shot, sited on the more stable window ledge. The rest of the gear is general test equipment and the remnants of the preceding project, which didn’t work out.

After about a year of reading and chemistry came the first formulation. The first formulation actually tested was HF2 and this used Melissa officinalis, which I thought was a good bet to start with. The “HF” comes from “Hopefully Final” because of course there were failures.

I can’t recall at what stage came the plan of actually doing a trial, to conduct what I subsequently learned is called a “rogue trial.” I have done a number of very difficult things in my life, and I’m getting on, so the overriding object was to reach some kind of zenith of my unorthodox career by making some tangible progress in an extremely difficult field. Notwithstanding numerous tribulations I have endured, I would like my time on this earth to have not been in vain.

Several decades ago I looked into this, so I had the advantage that I was aware of work that everyone else seemed to have forgotten. Plus I found Tinnell’s 1981 patent and his claim of a ‘Retardant Effect,’ which has also apparently been neglected or discounted. With the knowledge I had however, I knew the effect was feasible.

The only other trial I did was the ibogaine study and I had two main co-workers for that (CS & RH) but both declined co-authorship. Back then, if I remember correctly, I sent a print of the paper to the journal in triplicate and it was rejected but with a suggestion that I re-submit in a few months. Which I did. In retrospect I suspect the editor was wanting to see whether I would succumb to the temptation to “jig the results” in the interim. The ibogaine paper is the one which has garnered most of my citations to date.[1]

Now the situation is very different, and I’m appalled. I was shocked while browsing a science forum to learn that someone had seven papers in process of publication, then further shocked to find that this is not uncommon. My understanding, and in fact my experience, is that a paper is a succinct summary of three years’ work. What does it speak to the depth and import of their work to have seven papers on the go at once?

We seem to have arrived upon a ‘scientific industrial complex.’ Journals require payment for publication of an Open Access paper (which people can read without payment) – researchers, or their institutions, literally have to pay to give their work away. I learnt of the existence of ‘predatory publishers,’ journal websites which claim academic credibility but which exist only to collect Article Processing Fees. It is a matter for debate as to how much the term ‘predatory publisher’ describes the entire industry, because what you are mainly paying for in publication is indexing and archiving in Medline or PubMed. I describe the original decline in this article under the heading ‘How Robert Maxwell ruined academic publishing.’

Many publishers have adopted the DEI lunacy (which is utterly unsound scientifically) and waive fees for ‘low-income countries.’ This has the effect of filling the literature with more third-rate material. There is a multitude of papers of the form:

‘Prevalence of [insert: disease or disease combination] among [insert: pregnant women/men who have sex with men/other] in [insert: obscure third-world nation]’

But this is only an amplification of the current situation. The original purpose of medical journals was to improve human health, and this was certainly the founding principle of the long-standing ones. Yet when I scan recent papers, practically all I see is the study of disease, with little of value to actually alleviate it. In effect, merely collecting statistics on human suffering. I doubt that 1% of the medical papers published contribute anything significant to human health. I did discover a notable exception however.[2]

I can imagine thousands of smug scientists basking in lay admiration at cocktail parties, but the hard truth is that most have become too timid and conformist to tackle the tough problems in medicine. The bulk of their work appears to me to be mediocre; dressing inadequate sample sizes in impressive-looking statistics is not science but flim-flam.

There now exists a minefield of new rules which makes it practically impossible for an independent researcher such as I to get his work published. There is no “diversity” here! Following multiple attempts, I can envisage me in a year’s time still trying to hawk my paper round the journals. Recent events have made it clear that we have been betrayed by government, the media, the Church, the scientific establishment and the medical profession, every one. So this paper with my preliminary results is being published here, for general benefit.

I’m often reminded of the film Brazil (1985) with its portrayal of a dystopian bureaucracy which is so incompetent and corrupt that the only way to get anything done is to work outside the system. (I would be Harry Tuttle, the underground heating engineer played by Robert De Niro, in this analogy. Here’s the relevant hilarious scene.)

The later formulations, following from the ones described in ‘Simple Solutions,’ are very complex, and looking back on it now, I’m rather amazed at how far I got. There is potential for a second paper but I’m wary of divulging their specifications. They are likely to have significant commercial value and I would welcome approaches on their commercial realisation. HB3A was well received, while HB4 was so potent that it should probably only be administered to acute cases in a clinical setting. HB5 was the last and perhaps the best of all the preparations, weighing efficacy and tolerance.

Finally I shall add, to reinforce the closing words of my paper, that my suspicion is that topical administration even of HA1 or HB2A during a primary episode of HSV infection could significantly alter the future course of disease. This remains to be proved.