by Thomas Francis, Radar Magazine, November 10 & 11, 2005

###

If you have ever found yourself gasping for air and suddenly been bear-
hugged from behind by a waiter, his fist, placed just below your
sternum, dislodging the food blocking your trachea with one miraculous
thrust, you owe the waiter a large tip, but you owe your life to Dr.
Henry Heimlich. He's the maneuver man, credited for three decades as
the inventor of the simple, anyone-can-do-it technique for saving the
lives of dinner companions who have just begun pointing furiously at
their throats while turning blue.

Like most legends Heimlich, a onetime Manhattan society doctor turned
medical inventor and gadfly, has his detractors. Many of them are
white-coat colleagues openly dismissive of such Heimlich notions as
using the maneuver to save people who are drowning and curing AIDS
patients by injecting them with malaria.

But none of those naysayers has been as determined to knock Heimlich
off his pedestal as the man who first identified himself to me over
the phone, in the summer of 2004, as Holly Martins. Dr. Heimlich, he
told me impatiently, is a scam artist, promoting crackpot theories and
stealing credit for other doctors' inventions. The word Martins used
to describe Heimlich's career was fraud, and he said he had the
evidence to prove it.

Holly Martins is not his real name; it comes from the Joseph Cotten
character in the noir classic The Third Man. It is odd to use a fake
name to expose a fraud, as Martins would concede in later
conversations. But he was convinced it was the only way to elicit the
truth from all the colleagues Henry Heimlich had burned over the
years. For surely they would have left out the most sordid details had
Martins used his real name, which is Peter Heimlich.

"You tell me how I'm supposed to call a doctor and say, 'Hi, I'm the
son of Henry Heimlich, the scourge of your life. Would you tell me the
truth about him?'"

He then went on to reveal who really invented the Heimlich maneuver.
And it wasn't long before my own investigation of Dr. Henry Heimlich
uncovered ongoing unsupervised experiments with AIDS patients in
Africa and China that Peter Lurie, one of the country's leading
medical ethicists, says are absolutely outrageous and could be the
difference between life and death." Dr. Heimlich's methodology proved
so difficult to verify, let alone justify, that his own research
director at the Heimlich Institute in Cincinnati warned him about
criticism from the medical establishment and called for better
cooperation with local medical review boards. Heimlich's Trumpian
response: "You're fired!"

Peter Heimlich and his wife Karen Shulman live in a high-ceilinged
French provincial house outside New Orleans where the sun pours in
like syrup on a sultry midsummer day. On the July morning when I first
visit them, more than a month before the devastation that would be
wrought by hurricane Katrina, they have thrown open the doors to catch
a Louisiana breeze in lieu of air conditioning, tropical storm Cindy
having knocked out the power the night before. Peter, a lean and
whiplike six-foot-four, is padding around barefoot, made restless by
the sudden lack of telephone or internet access to the world. Karen is
the more cautious, analytical half of the couple, not as emotionally
attached to the mission as Peter but every bit as fascinated. They've
spent the last four years obsessed with taking down Peter's father.

For the first 48 years of his life Peter distanced himself from his
father's career and celebrity. A year or two might slip by between
calls from his parents. But in 2001, Peter says, he learned of serious
health problems in his family. He refuses to say what those problems
were, but he insists he was appalled to learn that his father was
refusing to address them.

My father's the great Dr. Lifesaver," Peter says bitterly. "How could
he have let this happen?" When he tried to get the facts, he says, his
father hung up on him and his mother wouldn't respond to his letters.

Peter and Karen began to wonder whether there were other family
secrets worth looking into as well. At first glance Peter Heimlich is
not an obvious choice for sleuthing around in medical archives; his
life has included stints as a musician and as a successful
businessman. But there may well be no one better prepared to solve the
mystery of his father. "I speak Heimlich," he says. "To understand
Henry you have to see behind a kind of curtain, because his methods
are unconventional and his goals seem to be..." He searches for the
right word. "Irrational. I don't think the medical field had ever seen
anyone quite like him. The Henry Heimlich story is so improbable and
confusing and puzzling and challenging. It's like a Zen puzzle."

A small corner study across the hall from Peter and Karen's bedroom is
the nerve center of their campaign. From their computer they control
the website heimlichinstitute.com, which was deliberately named so as
to compete for web traffic with Dr. Heimlich's site,
heimlichinstitute.org. (Dr. Heimlich's lawyers recently succeeded in
forcing Peter to change the website's name. He went with http://medfraud.info
) The site has revealed many Heimlich secrets to anyone with internet
access. Peter works the phone while Karen stands nearby, jotting notes
to remind him to broach an important subject with whoever is on the
line.

Peter had never known his father to have an unconventional mind, to be
a tinkerer who followed creative impulses, so when the term Heimlich
maneuver first entered the lexicon in the late 1970s Peter was
astonished. He was living in California, writing songs and playing in
rock clubs, hoping for a break. From time to time Henry would mail him
an envelope thick with articles touting the Heimlich name and this new
invention. Peter tossed the stories, unread, into a file folder.

Eventually he scrapped his musical ambitions and turned to less
stimulating but more lucrative work, headhunting in Silicon Valley,
then starting up a fabric import business with Karen. Peter says that
his efforts to reach out to family members were rejected (and that he
has the letters to prove it). So when his parents stopped responding
to his questions, he began looking elsewhere for answers. The first
place he turned was the file of articles that Henry had mailed him
over the years. The more Peter read, the murkier it all became. In one
article Henry tells an interviewer that Peter had submitted scripts
for The Twilight Zone, which was false. "It was like, 'Oh my God, he
just made it up!'"

Strangest of all was the frequent appearance of a vaguely familiar
name: Dr. Edward Patrick. Peter had remembered Patrick visiting the
family home in Cincinnati in the early '70s, but Patrick had always
been introduced as an electrical engineering professor, not as an
M.D., much less as Henry's research colleague. At home Henry had often
spoken of his many career ventures, and his failure to mention Patrick
was, to Peter's thinking, conspicuous by its absence." So how to
explain Patrick's presence in all those articles?

"For us, it was like the beginning of Blue Velvet, when the guy finds
the ear and it leads him down this rabbit hole into a nightmare
world," says Peter. He and Karen befriended librarians and hospital
records clerks, mastered the PubMed medical database, and learned how
to navigate public records law. "Karen's joke," says Peter, "is that I
got to know my father through the Freedom of Information Act."

Dr. Patrick explained in painstaking detail how he had first applied
engineering concepts to the problem of choking. He had a harder time
describing what Henry Heimlich had contributed.

I was working at an alternative newsweekly in Cleveland when Holly
Martins first contacted me. That conversation led me to call Dr.
Patrick to get his account of the invention of the Heimlich maneuver.
Patrick explained in painstaking detail how he, as an electrical
engineer, had first applied engineering concepts to the problem of
choking. He had a harder time describing what Henry Heimlich had
contributed, but Patrick compared their partnership to that of the
Wright brothers.

Whoever had the original idea, Heimlich, who declined all requests to
be interviewed for this article, deserves credit for his marketing
skills. He had a way with the media; in the late '70s and early '80s
he attracted widespread coverage of the Heimlich maneuver, while
accusing the Red Cross of risking lives by refusing to recommend it
over the application of back blows, which was then the standard
intervention for choking victims. His point was neatly driven home by
slogans such as back blows are death blows."

"He was able to tailor his message to what reporters wanted to hear,"
says Peter. "The image of the underdog, the maverick, the David vs.
Goliath of medical bureaucracy, was a compelling story."

At the same time Heimlich was gearing up for a showdown at the 1985
American Heart Association conference, at which a panel of experts in
each safety field would decide whether new evidence warranted new
recommendations for approved actions in emergencies. The chairman of
that conference, Dr. Bill Montgomery, knew that Heimlich was prepared
to do battle with the committee on the topic of choking.

"It was this huge publicity campaign. He was something to be reckoned
with, Montgomery recalls. "He threatened to sue us all and write to
the presidents of our universities. It was brazen, terrible, unusual."

Different studies reached different conclusions about the most
effective method for choking intervention: the Heimlich maneuver, back
blows, or chest thrusts, which consist of pushing down on the victim's
sternum, as with CPR. There was a dearth of data. As one panel member,
Dr. James Atkins, summarizes the situation, the committee could "adopt
something that has no evidence, something that has very poor evidence,
or something that has mediocre evidence."

Heimlich's evidence might have been even less persuasive, however, had
he informed the panelists that his own foundation had financed the one
study demonstrating the superiority of the Heimlich maneuver. In fact,
they didn't learn this until 20 years later when I told them.

Heimlich's rivals folded. Dr. Archer Gordon, the advocate of back
blows, was too scared even to show up at the conference. Dr. Charles
Guildner, the champion of the chest thrust theory, didn't back down so
easily, leading Heimlich to make good on his threats: Heimlich accused
Guildner of unethical medical practices and petitioned to have his
license stripped. Says Guildner, "He tried to bury me. The panel ruled
for the Heimlich maneuver.

Ed Patrick, meanwhile, stood by Heimlich throughout the whole
contretemps, defending the maneuver against all comers. So it must
have been a painful shock when, on a September day in 1985, a reporter
told Patrick that Heimlich was claiming sole credit for having
invented it. Patrick, who staged his own celebratory press conference
to coincide with Heimlich's, had been left at the altar. But for
reasons that would become clear only much later, Patrick never
retaliated.

"I would like to get proper credit for what I've done," Patrick told
me. "But I'm not hyper about it."

Patrick's ex-wife Joy tells a different story: "Whenever my kids would
say 'Heimlich maneuver,' he would correct them and say, 'Patrick
maneuver.'"

Peter believes Patrick had good reason for not challenging Henry's
sole claim to the maneuver. "I turned up some of Ed's medical license
applications and other documents," Peter explains. "And they contained
fake dates of birth and dubious job titles and credentials. Ed even
claimed that he did three years of residencies at Jewish Hospital, all
supervised by Henry." But the chief resident at Jewish Hospital at the
time says Patrick was not a working resident there.

At the time, Heimlich's career as a surgeon was drawing to an
ignominious close. There had been at least one incident when he passed
out at the operating table, leaving another surgeon to finish the job.
Heimlich was having trouble obtaining malpractice insurance, Peter
claims, and his personality hadn't endeared him to the rest of the
Jewish Hospital staff. In 1976 he left the hospital.

"I think the maneuver was a life raft for him," says Peter. "It was
his last chance, and he knew it. It wasn't only his need for fame, his
ego needs. He was at a dead end in his career, and the maneuver came
along and offered him a way out. That's why he worked so hard, so
relentlessly to promote it. It's why he took so many risks."

Henry Heimlich, now an alert, active 85-year-old, might have counted
himself among the most fortunate of his generation. The Great
Depression barely intruded upon his comfortable boyhood in the New
York suburb of New Rochelle. Cele Rosenthal, Heimlich's sister,
remembers how effortlessly he sailed into medicine, how he seemed
marked for great accomplishment. "One doctor told my mother that
someone with a gift such as he had came along once every 100 years,
says Rosenthal. "He was always, always praised."

Henry served for a time in Mongolia during World War II before
resuming his medical training. Returning to New York in 1945, he
settled into a small practice on Fifth Avenue; his patients came from
Manhattan's social elite. His circle included Arthur Murray and his
wife Kathryn, who were at the height of their fame, with a chain of
social dancing studios and their own TV show. In 1951 Henry married
their daughter Jane.

The Murrays bought the newlyweds a sprawling house in the leafy
Westchester suburb of Rye, and then bought the house next door for
themselves. Peter remembers his grandfather's dismissive, mocking
attitude toward his father, but he believes Henry learned about
promotion from Arthur Murray. "He wasn't just selling dance lessons,"
says Peter of his grandfather. "He was selling the hope that learning
to dance would make you popular and would introduce lonely people to a
mate."

The Heimlichs moved to Cincinnati in 1969, when Henry got the
appointment at Jewish Hospital. Peter, by now a teenager, cultivated
his interests in music and movies. While his parents were going to the
opera, he was singing in Cincinnati's first punk band. Peter also
began to bristle at his mother's starchiness and his father's
egocentric mealtime monologues. He remembers interrupting one of
Henry's self-aggrandizing tales to say, "Hey, you put on your pants
one leg at a time like everybody else." By Heimlich family standards,
it was an incendiary comment, and Henry flew into a rage.

Dr. Heimlich's first claim to medical fame was a surgical technique
that involved replacing a patient's damaged esophagus with a gastric
tube. In 1955 Heimlich had published a paper in the journal Surgery
describing how he had performed the operation on dogs. A Romanian
physician, Dr. Dan Gavriliu, wrote to Surgery to point out that he'd
been performing the same operation successfully on humans for four
years.

Karen discovered a 1957 article in Surgery written by Heimlich in
which he conceded that Gavriliu was indeed first to perform the
operation on humans. It might have been chalked up to coincidence -
two inventors arriving at an idea within a few years of each other -
except that Heimlich still takes credit for the "Heimlich Operation"
on his website. His listing in Who's Who in America reads, in part,
"Achievements include the development of the Heimlich Operation
(reversed gastric tube esophagoplasty) for replacement of esophagus."

Peter leaked the story to the Cincinnati Enquirer, whose front page
expose in March 2003 quoted Gavriliu as calling Heimlich a "thief." In
the article Heimlich admitted again that Gavriliu had been the first
to perform the procedure and insisted he had given Gavriliu credit,
which he had, though selectively and in most cases well out of the
public eye.

Next, Peter and Karen took aim at a lesser-known invention, the
"Heimlich chest drain valve," which was used on the battlefield in
Vietnam to save soldiers from dying of a collapsed lung caused by a
chest wound. According to Heimlich's press statements the invention
saved tens of thousands of lives, including among the North
Vietnamese, after the American Friends Service Committee shipped
valves to both sides in the war. Henry often tells the story of a trip
to Vietnam during which he received a hero's welcome because of his
valve.

But the Quakers have no record of distributing the valve. Peter
contacted the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker group
that provides aid in foreign conflicts. "They checked deep in the
archives and contacted several staffers from the '60s," says Peter.
"No one had even heard of the Heimlich valve." AFSC spokeswoman Janis
Shields says that if the valves had been shipped to North Vietnam,
there would have been documents. The AFSC's shipments to North Vietnam
consisted primarily of penicillin.

###

By the late 1980s Henry Heimlich's anti-choking maneuver was world
famous, and he was publicly musing over the question, what next? His
first priority was establishing the Heimlich maneuver's use in
drowning rescue, in lieu of CPR. Second, he vowed he could cure AIDS
by treating HIV-positive patients with malaria. He even considered
running for president in order to bring world peace.

The maneuver-for-drowning campaign was based on the premise that water
must be forced out of the lungs. "You can't blow air into water-filled
lungs," according to Heimlich's slogan.

There's just one problem with that thesis. "The idea that inhaled
water fills up the lungs in drowning is totally incorrect," says Rear
Admiral Alan Steinman, who crafted the U.S. Coast Guard's guidelines
for cases of near-drowning. Steinman and three other drowning experts
I consulted all said that an involuntary response, laryngospasm, seals
the lungs at the moment fluid threatens to flow in. Only a very small
amount of water ultimately gets into the lungs after the spasm
relaxes.

Employing the Heimlich maneuver may be not only ineffective but
lethal, according to Dr. James Orlowski, another drowning expert. In
1987 Orlowski published a paper describing a 10-year-old drowning
victim who had suffered complications from the rescuer's use of the
Heimlich maneuver rather than CPR. A boy who might have been saved
slipped into a coma and later died.

Heimlich cites his own list of cases supporting his maneuver's
efficacy against drowning, but the people reporting these cases have
prior associations with Heimlich himself. Former Washington, DC, fire
surgeon Victor Esch, for example, claimed to have saved a man from
drowning at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, in August 1974 by using the
Heimlich maneuver. Esch, who told me he has known Henry Heimlich for
decades, can offer no hospital reports or witnesses. And he has told
several different versions of the same story. During the course of one
interview he told me that the incident happened at Rehoboth Beach,
only to deny it five minutes later and insist that it happened at
another beach.

Despite his lack of independent evidence, Heimlich had credibility
with the public and the media. He could point out that at one time the
choking experts had been skeptical of his maneuver, and since that
turned out well they ought to trust his insight on drowning, too.

By the same tortured logic Heimlich wants to convince the world of the
therapeutic power of malaria. His hopes for using the illness to cure
cancer and Lyme disease had already been scuttled in the early 1990s,
after the Mexican authorities shut down a clinical trial in Mexico
City, according to Heimlich's friend Harry Gibbons. So Heimlich - who
trained as a thoracic surgeon and has no background in immunology -
gambled that "malariotherapy" would solve the AIDS puzzle. To some
researchers, including Dr. Victoria Wells Wulsin, the theory held some
intuitive appeal.

"I was curious about malariotherapy, because infection can be an
immune booster," says Wulsin, an epidemiologist hired by Heimlich in
August 2004 to study the theory's plausibility. "You get sick, and
your body responds with white blood cells. That's what you need to
fight off HIV, right?"

But more than 10 years earlier the Centers for Disease Control had
declared that "No evidence currently exists to indicate that malaria
infection would beneficially affect the course of HIV infection." And
since malaria might be harmful to a patient whose immune system is
already compromised by HIV, the agency added that clinical trials
"cannot be justified." The CDC warning had come in direct response to
Heimlich's first malariotherapy experiments in China - work that, like
the subsequent trials in Africa, is shrouded in mystery and which
continues to raise serious questions about its efficacy and the
apparent disregard of basic ethical standards in medical study.

Last January Dr. James Kublin, who analyzed the connection between
malaria and AIDS in the East African nation of Malawi, published his
findings in the respected British medical journal Lancet. Kublin
reported that malaria infection can actually exacerbate the speed of
HIV's attack on the body.

"Malaria causes immune activation, and immune activation is associated
with, of course, an increase in the number of immune cells," says
Kublin. "But that's a transient increase in CD4 cells. The problem
with that is when you increase the number of CD4 cells you also
increase the number of potential targets for HIV. And those CD4 cells
are then infected by the virus - and then turn out more virus."

"Using malaria as a 'therapy' is really malpractice and probably
should be criminal." says Mark Harrington, who analyzes AIDS research.

"It is clearly deleterious to people with HIV to get malaria. It can
accelerate their mortality," says Mark Harrington, executive director
of Treatment Action Group, which analyzes AIDS research. "Using
malaria as a 'therapy' is really malpractice and probably should be
criminal."

Heimlich's first clinical trial took place at Yishou Hospital in
Guangzhou, China, in 1993. In advance of this experiment, Heimlich
circulated a study protocol that called for two groups of HIV-positive
volunteers to be infected with malaria, which would then be allowed to
go untreated for either two weeks or four weeks. It stipulated that
the volunteers should be treated for malaria only if their
temperatures topped 106 degrees.

For AIDS experts the study's most galling aspect - recorded in the
final published report - was its rule that the HIV-positive volunteers
express a "willingness to not participate in other HIV therapies for
[the] duration of the treatment and follow-up period." This meant the
volunteers would go as long as two years without treatment. Somehow
Heimlich and his colleagues found eight HIV-positive patients to
enroll in the study.

Xiao Ping Chen, the Chinese researcher who oversaw the study on
Heimlich's behalf, claims that the patients all survived and "remain
clinically well" as of the follow-up period's close. But the study
does not cite data for six of the eight patients' past six months, nor
does Chen explain the omission. Heimlich refused to provide me with
Chen's contact information, nor did Chen respond to questions sent to
e-mail addresses cited in his published material.

For the second study Heimlich enlisted the assistance of John Fahey, a
UCLA immunologist, putting him in touch with Chen, with whom Fahey
oversaw a clinical trial that tested malariotherapy on 12 HIV-positive
Chinese patients beginning in 1998. Again, the study took place in
Guangzhou. Again the subjects were injected with malaria, and the
disease was allowed to go untreated, this time for a minimum of 10
malarial fevers, i.e., two to four weeks. The patients were placed in
three groups according to their CD4 cell counts per cubic millimeter
of blood. At one end were those for whom HIV had had only a modest
impact on their immune systems, with CD4 counts of over 500. At the
other were patients whose CD4 counts had fallen below 200, meaning
they had developed full-blown AIDS and would die without a proven
intervention such as antiretroviral therapy.

As would be expected, the malaria produced the "transient" burst of
immune substance predicted by AIDS experts, but as they might have
also predicted, the elevated immune levels didn't last long. The
resulting paper, published in the Chinese Medical Journal, shows that
most of the patients displayed CD4 counts that were too scattered to
draw a conclusion. One patient - the one with the most advanced case
of AIDS - died. The data for the patient who began with the second-
lowest CD4 count simply disappears at the end of the study. Chen cites
a telephone interview with the patient in which he confirmed the
patient's being "clinically well."

But that seems unlikely, given the rule that the patients were
prohibited from getting antiretroviral therapy, not to mention the
possibility that malaria infection hastened the patients' progression
to AIDS. And what happened to the six HIV-positive people whose data
vanished six months after the first study began?

"That's my question," says Kublin, author of the Lancet study. "Did
all of these people survive those two years? I mean, there are two
subjects with CD4s less than 200, and [the researchers] don't have any
data on them. I suspect they died."

More recently Heimlich has sought to bring malariotherapy to another
location where Western medical ethical standards are loosely observed:
Africa, where AIDS kills 2 million people each year. Neither Heimlich
nor his spokesman Bob Kraft would answer my request for information
about Heimlich's studies in Africa. But a number of ancillary
characters who have assisted Heimlich's efforts are less guarded, and
through them a picture emerges, incomplete but still ghoulish.

While researching her report Dr. Wulsin, who has field experience with
AIDS in Africa, says that Heimlich's assistant, Dr. Eric Spletzer,
gave her data that had been gathered from Africa - CD4 counts,
apparently from HIV-positive patients who also had malaria - but would
not disclose the usual contextual information. There was no signature
from the researcher who took the data, and no explanation of how it
was gathered. This struck Wulsin as strange; she needed that
information to make sure the data wasn't biased. When she asked
Spletzer for it, he refused. "I think Eric and Hank [Heimlich] knew
things that, for a variety of reasons, they didn't want to share with
me," says Wulsin, who declines to say more about what those reasons
might be.

Wulsin's report, based on information gathered from inside the
Heimlich Institute, offers the best glimpse into the size and scope of
Heimlich's malaria endeavors. It refers obliquely to "an American
sponsor" (Wulsin says she was never told the sponsor's identity) who
in 2000 collaborated with the Heimlich Institute in conducting a
malariotherapy study in East Africa. In 2003, says the report, this
unnamed sponsor "commenc[ed] infection with malaria among 12-13 HIV-
positive East African patients."

A footnote says that this study "lost" four or five subjects during
the follow-up period, which would reduce the number of patients in the
study to eight.

"There was a firewall," Wulsin says of the problems she faced in
getting information from the institute. "I could see from Heimlich's
point of view why they wanted to protect their sources, but it was
certainly a disagreement that we had. I'm pretty Western, and I said,
'No, I'm not going to place any stock in these results.'"

"We go to an epidemic area where there is a lot of malaria and then we
look for patients that have HIV, too. We find commercial sex workers
or people who play around in that area."

Mekbib Wondewossen is an Ethiopian immigrant who makes his living
renting out cars in the San Francisco area, but in his spare time he
works for Dr. Heimlich, doing everything from "recruiting the patients
to working with the doctors here and there and everywhere,"
Wondewossen says. The two countries he names are Ethiopia and the
small equatorial nation of Gabon, on Africa's west coast.

"The Heimlich Institute is part of the work there - the main people,
actually, in the research," Wondewossen says. "They're the ones who
consult with us on everything. They tell us what to do."

Wondewossen says that the project does not involve syringes full of
malaria parasites. "We never induce the malaria," he says. "We go to
an epidemic area where there is a lot of malaria, and then we look for
patients that have HIV too. We find commercial sex workers or people
who play around in that area." Such people are high-risk for HIV, and
numerous studies show the virus makes its victims more vulnerable to
malaria.

A key to containing malaria is speedy treatment. In the most resource-
poor areas, clinicians who lack the equipment necessary for diagnosing
malaria will engage in presumptive treatment at the first signs of
fever. This, says Wondewossen, runs contrary to Heimlich's interests.
What physicians in Africa usually do "is terminate the malaria quickly
when someone gets sick," he says. "But now we ask them to prolong it,
and when we ask them to do that, the difference is very, very big."

Untreated malaria is horrible and includes periods of 105-degree
fever, excessive sweating followed by chills and uncontrollable
shivering, blinding headaches, vomiting, body aches, anemia, and even
dementia. Heimlich's malariotherapy literature recommends the patient
go two to four weeks without treatment. Delay in treatment, warns the
CDC, is a leading cause of death.

Wondewossen say that the researchers involved in the study are not
doctors. He refuses to name members of the research team, because he
says it would get them into trouble with the local authorities. "The
government over there is a bad government," he says. "They can make
you disappear."

Wondewossen won't reveal the source of funding for this malariotherapy
research. "There are private funders," he says. But as to their
identity?"I can't tell you that, because that's the deal we make with
them, you know?" He scoffs at the question of whether his team got
approval to conduct this research from a local ethics review board.
Bribery on that scale, he says, is much too expensive: "If you want
the government to get involved there, you have to give them a few
million - and then they don't care what you do."

Heimlich claims to believe in the importance of evaluating patients
through every stage of malariotherapy, but without being present for
the onset of malaria his researchers would have a difficult time
tracking the disease's effect on the patient's viral load. That
doesn't deter him from looking to the future. Wulsin's report contains
a forecast for a clinical trial in Africa that would begin by
enrolling 75 patients in 2007, then another 20 to 30 in 2008. These
projections are based, however, on the premise that current trials
will bear out Heimlich's theory.

In particular Heimlich targeted South African gold mines, which employ
a large population of poor, AIDS-ravaged miners who live in prison
camp-like conditions. Wulsin told me that over the last several years
Heimlich has sought to convince South African gold mining companies of
the merits of malariotherapy, in the hope that they would allow him to
conduct clinical trials on the miners, many of whom are HIV-positive.
Wulsin was to have a role in this effort. She says that in 2002 the
gold mines sent doctors to visit Heimlich in Cincinnati to discuss the
prospects for a study, but the talks eventually broke down over
disagreements over who would pay for what. According to Wulsin,
Michele Ashby - then the chief executive of Denver Gold Group, an
international consortium of gold mines - was acting as a broker
between Heimlich and the mines. Wulsin's report notes that Heimlich
spoke at the Mining Investment Forum in 2002, in Denver, where Ashby
introduced him to "12 CEOs who operate in South Africa and other
locations." When I called to ask Ashby about her role in
malariotherapy, she hung up on me.

I think the idea was that here is what you call a captive audience,"
explains Wulsin. "You don't have to hospitalize them." This eliminated
one of the most prohibitive costs, and though Wulsin doesn't mention
it, the subjects' remote location made interference from regulators
less likely.

Wulsin had been lured to the Heimlich Institute with the understanding
that she'd be groomed to take over its presidency from Heimlich
himself. After a few months, however, she began to suspect that this
honor had a string attached: She had to produce a document supporting
further malariotherapy trials. Instead her report proposes significant
upgrades in safeguards, oversight, and accountability before moving
forward. Wulsin even suggests changing the name "malariotherapy" to
"immunotherapy," suggesting that the very treatment itself was
tainted.

In December 2004, the day after issuing a draft of her report (which
has been obtained by Radar), Wulsin was fired.

I requested an interview with Heimlich through his spokesman Robert
Kraft, but I was turned away, ostensibly because the issues I wanted
to discuss were similar to those raised by Peter Heimlich and posted
on his website.

This April, Henry Heimlich came to Chicago, where I now live, to give
a speech before a local organization called the Save a Life
Foundation. I caught him in the hall afterward. When I told him I was
a reporter, his face lit up. I guided him to a table, but before I
could ask him to sit he asked my name.

I told him, and he recoiled. The urbane manner of a moment earlier
vanished. He became petulant, scowling. My first question, the softest
of the group, didn't bring a direct answer. "You're fishing around
with nonsense," he said, obviously aware that I was reporting some of
his son's charges.

I reminded him that in the past he'd said he welcomed criticism. He
was drifting away, so it was my last chance to engage him. I dropped
the name he dreaded most: Peter.

Heimlich's face went ashen, and he mumbled something I couldn't make
out. Then he turned toward to the conference room. Before opening the
door, he turned back. "You should be ashamed of yourself," he said.

Later I would e-mail a list of questions to Kraft, who responded that
Heimlich would not be giving answers.

Janet Heimlich, Henry's daughter and Peter's sister, grudgingly agreed
to an interview. She said Peter had "cut himself off from the family."
Though she hasn't personally looked into the subjects, she wasn't
troubled by malariotherapy. "It's controversial, and he has critics,"
she said, "but he has had critics his whole career. That's just par
for the course. He had critics when he came out with the Heimlich
maneuver for choking."

She added that she had talked to "a lot of people who have strongly
supported my father's work, including malariotherapy."

But when I asked her for the names of qualified experts who could
endorse Heimlich's positions, she declined. "I have not spent time
researching this the way my brother has," she said. "He has handed you
- as well as many other journalists who have bitten - on a silver
platter all these sources who have a huge ax to grind with my dad."

In pure marketing terms, the vaunted Heimlich brand is losing value.
Bill Montgomery, the official who chaired the 1985 conference in which
the Heimlich maneuver was ruled to be the best choking rescue, notes
that by 2000 the AHA national guidelines recognized chest thrusts and
back slapping as appropriate alternatives to be used in sequence with
the Heimlich maneuver. Chest thrusts create more force than the
maneuver, according to recent studies, and may well become the
preferred response in the future.

Peter Heimlich knows that by exposing his father he invites
speculation - and criticism - about his motives. He and his wife Karen
are bracing themselves for it.

"We're both private people by nature," says Peter. "We're not
grandstanders. We're a couple of fabric business owners, and we
uncovered this big rat's nest. We never made any threats. We never
attacked anybody." Still, he knows that armchair psychoanalysts will
have a field day with him. Peter says such speculation misses the
point.

"Do I wish I had a more loving father?" he asks. "I've seen friends
who have loving fathers, and it seemed really strange to me. I'd say,
'Gee that would be nice.' Am I bitter? Not at all. We all get the hand
we're dealt. I think I was much worse before I found out this stuff.
At least I know what's real now."

In the beginning he was angry with his parents, but as the scope of
his father's deception became apparent, it became a battle of wills:
Henry's efforts to extend the Heimlich legacy versus Peter's efforts
to destroy it.

"The last thing I wanted," says Peter, "was to make this my life's
work. It only became my life's work because I had no choice, because
if I had let go I would have had to live with the consequences."

I ask Peter if he hates his father.

"He's a stranger!" Peter exclaims. "Do I love him or do I hate him? I
don't even know who this guy is. Do I hate what he's done? Yes. That's
easy, because it's crazy, it's destructive."

To hear Peter tell it, there's nothing complicated in his Inspector
Javert-style pursuit of his own father.

"Who wouldn't want to know why somebody is keeping a secret?" he asks.
"That's part of the appeal. Why didn't they want me to know this? And
the only answer is they knew that if I found out I'd blow the whistle.

"Which is exactly what I did," he says, allowing himself a triumphant
grin.

@ Radar Magazine, 2005, All Rights Reserved