snake oil
It could be merely incompetent: predicting sales on products so advanced they never quite become real. Or it could be a scam. I believe it is a scam -- it makes too many specific promises about products and sales that don't become true; but they never become true and MDTL provides no explanation. I believe the predictions were dishonest when made.
Evidence of this is found in MDTL's website. MDTL has a legal duty to update it, but it contains many false and deceptive statements -- for example, that the company is working on supergreen batteries (a project that is apparently shelved), and has a partnership with French phone giant Sagem with specific milestones leading to sales of a fuel cell in 2002 (David Redstone somehow knows the partnership is "moribund") and that MDTL is 'improving' cellscan (which Lifton in an interview admits simply does not work).
Cellscan is worth particular attention, because for most of its history that's what MDTL was about. The "Medis" of "Medis-EL" means medical, and MDTL's logo not coincidentally includes a red cross. Basically, MDTL pushed cellscan as a cancer scam -- boasting about how it will help in treatments and earlier detection, but in fact it doesn't work, as Lifton (MDTL's CEO admits).
- Charles
====== BUT NOW, YEARS LATER, REVENUE = ZERO! ======
moit.gov.il
CellScan is today one of Medis-El´s main products.
Medis-El is currently spending $2.5 million in R&D a year, and their objective is to top $100 million in sales within the next five years. To date, 5 Cell Scans have been sold, and they have the capacity to build 2 units per month.
======= FROM MDTL'S WEBSITE ==
"with respect to the CellScan... we are placing considerable emphasis on the use of tetramers to coat the CellScan grids in order to develop improved blood tests for breast and prostate cancer and TB."
medisel.com
[that implies that cellscan has something that works that could be improved... now 11 years later, no sales]
======== LIFTON ADMITS CELLSCAN DOESN'T WORK!!!! ====
evworld.com
LIFTON, CEO, SPEAKS:
Well you know what happened is that we started with the cell scan in 1992, we started with the cell scan with breast cancer and we worked on that for a number of years with a lot of problems that we faced because there were...at the time there were a lot of uncertainties. It was like solving an equation with three unknowns.
One unknown was whether or not lymphocyte systems actually responded to an antigen, you know the generic concept. The second unknown was whether or not the lymphocyte responded to the antigen that we had and the third was whether the system, the machine, the cell scan could actually read that response. And when something went wrong we didn't know whether it was A, B or C that was wrong.
RL: And that was a very, very difficult process and as it went on and as we were going forward it was clear that it was gonna be a longer process than I had thought originally. And so the choice then was either to throw up your hands or to figure out other things to do to provide reasons to make more investment in the company and that's when we moved into the other fields like the sterling cycle system and the fuel cells and the toroidal engines and the like.
NOTE: "AND THE LIKE"??!! Those things have NOTHING in common except as hi-tech SCAM-fodder. |
