An international congress hosted by Artsen Collectief (Netherlands Doctors' Collective) was convened on October 25 and 26, 2005, in Driebergen, Netherlands, and was attended by both an international panel of invited speakers and a sold-out audience.
A sculpted Hippocrates opened the congress with irony and urgency. Wearing "funny glasses" to mock modern tech dependence, he challenged the audience to embrace high-tech hygiene -- a call to remove pollution from our bodies, environments, and information streams. His timeless message echoed through the room:
"Let food be your medicine" and "First, do no harm."
Among the many consequential and informative talks presented at this meeting, the one that I thought stood out as most significant was the rather data-intensive presentation from Kevin McKernan, titled DNA contamination in the mRNA vaccines, decentralizing Peer Review. Both Kevin and the conference organizers have kindly authorized the distribution of a video record of that talk, as well as PDF copies of the slides that he presented (see links above and below).
Kevin McKernan has over 30 years of experience in the genomics field starting his career as the Team Leader for Research and Development at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research. Kevin's team designed novel magnetic bead chemistry for the DNA purification of plasmid DNA for the Human Genome Project.
In 2000 he founded Agencourt Bioscience Corporation which became the largest commercial DNA sequencing company in the US and an NHGRI funded Genome Center.
In 2004 he founded Agencourt Personal Genomics to bring the SOLiD sequencer to market. Both companies were acquired by Beckman Coulter and Applied Biosystems respectively in 2005 and 2006.
He worked for Applied Biosystems commercializing the SOLiD sequencer for Cancer sequencing and in 2011 founded Medicinal Genomics to sequence the Cannabis genome and investigate the use of Cannabinoids in Cancer. Medicinal Genomics was acquired by Courtagen Life Science, which focused on the sequencing of Epilepsy, mitochondrial disease, and Autism patients.
In 2016 Medicinal Genomics commercialized various PCR and DNA sequencing assays for the Cannabis safety testing market.
In 2023, McKernan's lab discovered DNA contamination (adulteration) in the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines and has been exploring the impact of the Endocannabinoid system in vaccine injury. Medicinal Genomics has also been exploring the use of Bitcoin to decentralize Peer Review and crowd fund scientific investigation of important but controversial public health matters.
Kevin has over 60,000 citations and a dozen patents in the genomics field and helps organize the annual CannMed conference focused on decentralized medicine.
So, without further ado, here is a video record of this amazing presentation.
By Kevin McKernan
For those that want to follow along with higher resolution slide images, you can find a high resolution PDF copy of the slides at the link below: