Release Form For Past Medical Records - The Rockefeller University: Fill & Download for Free

Early LifeZuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, into a comfortable, well-educated family. He was raised in the nearby village of Dobbs Ferry.Zuckerberg’s father, Edward Zuckerberg, ran a dental practice attached to the family's home. His mother, Karen, worked as a psychiatrist before the birth of the couple's four children — Mark, Randi, Donna and Arielle.Zuckerberg developed an interest in computers at an early age; when he was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messaging program he named "Zucknet." His father used the program in his dental office, so that the receptionist could inform him of a new patient without yelling across the room. The family also used Zucknet to communicate within the house.Together with his friends, he also created computer games just for fun. "I had a bunch of friends who were artists," he said. "They'd come over, draw stuff, and I'd build a game out of it."Mark Zuckerberg’s EducationTo keep up with Zuckerberg's burgeoning interest in computers, his parents hired private computer tutor David Newman to come to the house once a week and work with Zuckerberg. Newman later told reporters that it was hard to stay ahead of the prodigy, who began taking graduate courses at nearby Mercy College around this same time.Zuckerberg later studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. There he showed talent in fencing, becoming the captain of the school's team. He also excelled in literature, earning a diploma in classics.Yet Zuckerberg remained fascinated by computers and continued to work on developing new programs. While still in high school, he created an early version of the music software Pandora, which he called Synapse.Several companies—including AOL and Microsoft—expressed an interest in buying the software, and hiring the teenager before graduation. He declined the offers.Mark Zuckerberg's College ExperienceAfter graduating from Exeter in 2002, Zuckerberg enrolled at Harvard University. After his sophomore year, Zuckerberg dropped out of college to devote himself to his new company, Facebook, full time.By his sophomore year at the Ivy League institution, he had developed a reputation as the go-to software developer on campus. It was at that time that he built a program called CourseMatch, which helped students choose their classes based on the course selections of other users.He also invented Facemash, which compared the pictures of two students on campus and allowed users to vote on which one was more attractive. The program became wildly popular, but was later shut down by the school administration after it was deemed inappropriate.Based on the buzz of his previous projects, three of his fellow students—Divya Narendra, and twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—sought him out to work on an idea for a social networking site they called Harvard Connection. This site was designed to use information from Harvard's student networks in order to create a dating site for the Harvard elite.Zuckerberg agreed to help with the project, but soon dropped out to work on his own social networking site, The Facebook.Mark Zuckerberg and Founding FacebookZuckerberg and his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin created The Facebook, a site that allowed users to create their own profiles, upload photos, and communicate with other users. The group ran the site out of a dorm room at Harvard University until June 2004.That year Zuckerberg dropped out of college and moved the company to Palo Alto, California. By the end of 2004, Facebook had 1 million users.In 2005, Zuckerberg's enterprise received a huge boost from the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Accel invested $12.7 million into the network, which at the time was open only to Ivy League students.Zuckerberg's company then granted access to other colleges, high school and international schools, pushing the site's membership to more than 5.5 million users by December 2005. The site began attracting the interest of other companies that wanted to advertise with the popular social hub.Not wanting to sell out, Zuckerberg turned down offers from companies such as Yahoo! and MTV Networks. Instead, he focused on expanding the site, opening up his project to outside developers and adding more features.‘Harvard Connection’ and Legal HurdlesZuckerberg seemed to be going nowhere but up. However, in 2006, the business mogul faced his first big hurdle: the creators of Harvard Connection claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea, and insisted the software developer needed to pay for their business losses.Zuckerberg maintained that the ideas were based on two very different types of social networks. After lawyers searched Zuckerberg's records, incriminating instant messages revealed that Zuckerberg may have intentionally stolen the intellectual property of Harvard Connection and offered Facebook users' private information to his friends.Zuckerberg later apologized for the incriminating messages, saying he regretted them. "If you're going to go on to build a service that is influential and that a lot of people rely on, then you need to be mature, right?" he said in an interview with The New Yorker. "I think I've grown and learned a lot."Although an initial settlement of $65 million was reached between the two parties, the legal dispute over the matter continued well into 2011, after Narendra and the Winklevosses claimed they were misled in regards to the value of their stock.'The Social Network' MovieIn 2010, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s movie The Social Network was released. The critically acclaimed film received eight Academy Award nominations.Sorkin’s screenplay was based on the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, by writer Ben Mezrich. Mezrich was heavily criticized for his re-telling of Zuckerberg's story, which used invented scenes, re-imagined dialogue and fictional characters.Zuckerberg objected strongly to the film's narrative, and later told a reporter at The New Yorker that many of the details in the film were inaccurate. For example, Zuckerberg had been dating his longtime girlfriend since 2003. He also said he was never interested in joining any of the final clubs."It's interesting what stuff they focused on getting right; like, every single shirt and fleece that I had in that movie is actually a shirt or fleece that I own," Zuckerberg told a reporter at a startup conference in 2010. "So there's all this stuff that they got wrong and a bunch of random details that they got right."Yet Zuckerberg and Facebook continued to succeed, in spite of the criticism. Time magazine named him Person of the Year in 2010, and Vanity Fair placed him at the top of their New Establishment list.Facebook IPOIn May 2012, Facebook had its initial public offering, which raised $16 billion, making it the biggest Internet IPO in history.After the initial success of the IPO, the Facebook stock price dropped somewhat in the early days of trading, though Zuckerberg is expected to weather any ups and downs in his company's market performance.In 2013, Facebook made the Fortune 500 list for the first time—making Zuckerberg, at the age of 28, the youngest CEO on the list.Fake News and Cambridge Analytica ScandalZuckerberg was criticized for the proliferation of fake news posts on his site leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In early 2018, he announced a personal challenge to develop improved methods for defending Facebook users from abuse and interference by nation-states. (Previous personal challenges began in New Year's 2009 and have included only eating meat he killed himself and learning to speak Mandarin.)"We won't prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools," he wrote on his Facebook page. "If we're successful this year then we'll end 2018 on a much better trajectory."Zuckerberg came under fire again a few months later when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, had used private information from approximately 87 million Facebook profiles without the social network alerting its owners. The resulting outcry seemed to shake investors' confidence in Facebook, its shares dropping by 15 percent after the news became public.Following a few days' silence, Zuckerberg surfaced on various outlets to explain how the company was taking steps to limit third-party developers' access to user information, and said he would be happy to testify before Congress.On Sunday, March 25, Facebook took out full-page ads in seven British and three American newspapers, penned in the form of a personal apology from Zuckerberg. He promised the company would investigate all of its apps, and remind users which ones they can shut off. "I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time," he wrote. "I promise to do better for you."Amid increasing calls for his resignation from investor groups, Zuckerberg traveled to Capitol Hill and met with lawmakers ahead of his two-day testimony, scheduled for April 10 and 11. The first day of hearings, with the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees, was considered a tame affair, with some senators seemingly struggling to understand the business model that powered the social media giant.The follow-up hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee proved far testier, as its members grilled the Facebook CEO over privacy concerns. During the day's testimony, Zuckerberg revealed that his personal information was among the data harvested by Cambridge Analytica, and suggested that legal regulation of Facebook and other social media companies was "inevitable."Personal WealthThe negative PR around the 2016 election and Cambridge Analytica scandal seemingly did little to slow the company's progress: Facebook saw its stock close at a record $203.23 on July 6, 2018. The surge bumped Zuckerberg past Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett to become the world's third-richest person, behind fellow tech titans Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.Any gains were wiped out when Facebook shares dropped a staggering 19 percent on July 26, following an earnings report that revealed a failure to meet revenue expectations and slowing user growth. Nearly $16 billion of Zuckerberg's personal fortune was erased in one day.The stock rebounded, and Zuckerberg remains one of the world's wealthiest people. In 2019, Forbes ranked Zuckerberg at No. 8 on its ‘Billionaires’ list—behind Microsoft founder Bill Gates (No. 2) and ahead of Google co-founders Larry Page (No. 10) and Sergey Brin (No. 14). The magazine estimated his net worth to be about $62.3 billion at the time.LibraIn June 2019, Facebook announced it was getting into the cryptocurrency business with the planned launch of Libra in 2020. Along with developing the blockchain technology to power its financial infrastructure, Facebook established a Switzerland-based oversight entity called the Libra Association, comprised of tech giants like Spotify and venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz.The news again put Zuckerberg in the crosshairs of Congress, which summoned the CEO to testify before the House Financial Service Committee in October. Despite providing assurances that Facebook would withdraw from the Libra Association if the project failed to garner approval from regulators, Zuckerberg faced pointed questioning from skeptical lawmakers who cited the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and other past transgressions.Mark Zuckerberg’s WifeZuckerberg has been married to Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American medical student he met at Harvard, since 2012. The longtime couple tied the knot one day after Facebook’s IPO.About 100 people gathered at the couple's Palo Alto, California home for the ceremony. The guests thought they were there to celebrate Chan's graduation from medical school, but instead they witnessed Zuckerberg and Chan exchange vows.Mark Zuckerberg’s DaughtersZuckerberg has two daughters, Max, born on November 30, 2015, and August, born on August 28, 2017.The couple announced they were expecting both of their children on Facebook. When Zuckerberg welcomed Max, he announced he would be taking two months of paternity leave to spend with his family.Mark Zuckerberg’s Donations and Philanthropic CausesSince amassing his sizeable fortune, Zuckerberg has used his millions to fund a variety of philanthropic causes. The most notable examples came in September 2010, when he donated $100 million to save the failing Newark Public Schools system in New Jersey.Then, in December 2010, Zuckerberg signed the "Giving Pledge", promising to donate at least 50 percent of his wealth to charity over the course of his lifetime. Other Giving Pledge members include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Lucas. After his donation, Zuckerberg called on other young, wealthy entrepreneurs to follow suit."With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts," he said.In November 2015, Zuckerberg and his wife also pledged in an open letter to their daughter that they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charity."We are committed to doing our small part to help create this world for all children," the couple wrote in the open letter that was posted on Zuckerberg's Facebook page. "We will give 99% of our Facebook shares — currently about $45 billion — during our lives to join many others in improving this world for the next generation."In September 2016, Zuckerberg and Chan announced that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the company into which they put their Facebook shares, would invest at least $3 billion into scientific research over the next decade to help “cure, prevent and manage all diseases in our children's lifetime." Renowned neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of The Rockefeller University, was named the president of science at CZI.They also announced the founding of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a San Francisco-based independent research center that will bring together engineers, computer scientists, biologists, chemists and others in the scientific community. A partnership between Stanford University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley, Biohub will receive initial funding of $600 million over 10 years.source: Mark Zuckerberg

MK-ULTRA was a secret program, but only until 1974. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an account of MK-ULTRA on December 22, 1974, in the New York Times. Then-President Gerald Ford established the Rockefeller Commission to investigate CIA activities, including MK-ULTRA, in the United States. This was followed by investigations from the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee), and the House Select Intelligence Committee (the Nedzi Committee, which was replaced five months later by the Pike Committee.)[1]Early volunteers for Dr. Sidney Gottlieb’s behavior-control program, like Harvard University professor Timothy Leary, took the hallucinogenic drug LSD and found the experience quite pleasurable. Several of these researchers told their friends about LSD, though not all the specifics of the CIA-sponsored program. These included counterculture figures like author Ken Kesey, poet Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead.Some of the people Gottlieb hired to find people on whom to experiment included George Hunter White, a former agent with the then-Narcotics Bureau. He had led the Bureau’s campaign against jazz in New York City, spying on musicians and entrapping them. White was an alcoholic who also used all the substances he confiscated from the people he arrested. He also had a widely known hatred of Blacks, particularly Black musicians whom he felt flaunted their money.Gottlieb hired White to run a safehouse in New York City. He would lure victims off the street, then ply them with LSD. CIA officers would watch the effects the drug took through a two-way mirror. White was later moved to San Francisco under an operation known as Midnight Climax. Here, White would get prostitutes to take their men back to a CIA safehouse, where the men would be plied with liquor and LSD. White would be in an adjoining apartment, sitting on a portable toilet, watching people have sex while under the influence of the drug, while he drank martinis.[2]White and his cohorts would prep the prostitutes to ask the men questions. They were told to ask the men about their work and their associates. This was to see if them men would divulge secrets while on LSD. What CIA learned was that, while high on LSD, men talked about sex—just sex.There were, however, far more horrific experiments being conducted in hospitals, private clinics and prisons, all under the guise of “cures” for various medical ailments. Much of the staff and all of the patients involved did not know the true nature of these so-called clinical trials. Inmates, for example, volunteered to reduce their sentences. Notorious crime figure Whitey Bulger was in such a program, a supposed experiment to find a cure for schizophrenia. Of course, these guinea pig prisoners were simply being used to ascertain the drug’s long-term effects.Bulger described his horrific experiences, saying it was only years later that he learned the true nature of the program and who had run it. He told friends that he was going to Atlanta, where he had been incarcerated, to find the doctor who headed the experiment and kill him. (The doctor later died from natural causes.)If MK-ULTRA reminds one of the inhuman experiments conducted by the Nazis on Jews and prisoners of war during World War II, there is good reason for it. Former Nazi doctors and scientists were involved in the program.The only reason word eventually got out that CIA was funding MK-ULTRA was due to an internal search for the Agency’s “family jewels”—a 1973 directive from James Schlesinger, newly appointed as Director of Central Intelligence by President Richard Nixon. DCI Schlesinger asked employees to report activities that had “flap potential”; that is, operations that might potentially embarrass the Agency. The order was issued over a year in advance of Hersh’s story and the three hearings on possible CIA misconduct.The effort uncovered several programs, most of whose records were destroyed. But what remained was eventually released through FOIA requests by former State Department officer John Marks. Further information on MK-ULTRA was obtained through Marks’s collaboration with former Executive Assistant to the (CIA) Director Victor Marchetti. While these revelations brought some aspects of MK-ULTRA to light—despite the refusal of most of the principal character to talk—the true depth of the program will never be known.While MK-ULTRA and similar classified programs comprising the Family Jewels were long defunct by 1973, I believe they are best understood when viewed with the logic of the Cold War. They served as archetypes for future programs that existed under the exigencies of the ideological and existential threats that prevailed until the collapse of the Soviet Union.In some instance, these programs violated legal and moral norms. Some of them, like the Iran-Contra Scandal, were exposed when secrecy failed, but others remain in the shadows to this day.What is disturbing for most people is that the means justified the ends. Extralegal domestic surveillance during the Vietnam era found its echoes in the war on terror and its accumulation of metadata on millions of Americans. The abusive interrogation of a suspected CIA mole in the 1960s was repeated in post-9/11 extraordinary rendition practices.CIA has remained duty-bound to its charter and the law. Even its excesses can reasonably be explained within legal interpretations of directives issued by the president, as well as by the tenor of the times. The truth is that, while there was soul-searching for the root cause of the hatred toward the U.S., there was little sympathy for the attackers of 9/11 and their confederates.The idea of a whistleblower, especially among CIA officers, was not as preponderant as you believe. While there was a time in the 1970s when a spate of former officers disenchanted with CIA wrote books critical of the Agency, even this small group—save for Philip Agee—would not reveal all they knew or provide specific details that would jeopardize ongoing operations, methods and sources.The legacy of MK-ULTRA is the fear it still inspires. Conspiracy theories live where there is an historical measure of truth that undermines the government’s story. This explains, in part, why many people erroneously refer to MK-ULTRA in the present tense rather than the past.CIA holds itself accountable for its past; this is not an excuse for previous or future excesses. The Agency is required to operate within the constraints of the law, and accepts this. A vigilant public and their elected representatives will continue to see that it does.[1] “The Family Jewels Then and Now”[2] The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'

A year ago, I answered a similar question, “How did Project MKUltra maintain its secrecy so effectively for twenty years? Across 80 reported institutions, how was there not even one whistle-blower? What eventually compelled the government to go public in 1975?” I’ll post that answer here as I feel it suffices.MK-ULTRA was a secret program, but only until 1974. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an account of MK-ULTRA on December 22, 1974, in the New York Times. Then-President Gerald Ford established the Rockefeller Commission to investigate CIA activities, including MK-ULTRA, in the United States. This was followed by investigations from the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee), and the House Select Intelligence Committee (the Nedzi Committee, which was replaced five months later by the Pike Committee.)[1]Early volunteers for Dr. Sidney Gottlieb’s behavior-control program, like Harvard University professor Timothy Leary, took the hallucinogenic drug LSD and found the experience quite pleasurable. Several of these researchers told their friends about LSD, though not all the specifics of the CIA-sponsored program. These included counterculture figures like author Ken Kesey, poet Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead.Some of the people Gottlieb hired to find people on whom to experiment included George Hunter White, a former agent with the then-Narcotics Bureau. He had led the Bureau’s campaign against jazz in New York City, spying on musicians and entrapping them. White was an alcoholic who also used all the substances he confiscated from the people he arrested. He also had a widely known hatred of Blacks, particularly Black musicians whom he felt flaunted their money.Gottlieb hired White to run a safehouse in New York City. He would lure victims off the street, then ply them with LSD. CIA officers would watch the effects the drug took through a two-way mirror. White was later moved to San Francisco under an operation known as Midnight Climax. Here, White would get prostitutes to take their men back to a CIA safehouse, where the men would be plied with liquor and LSD. White would be in an adjoining apartment, sitting on a portable toilet, watching people have sex while under the influence of the drug, while he drank martinis.[2]White and his cohorts would prep the prostitutes to ask the men questions. They were told to ask the men about their work and their associates. This was to see if them men would divulge secrets while on LSD. What CIA learned was that, while high on LSD, men talked about sex—just sex.There were, however, far more horrific experiments being conducted in hospitals, private clinics and prisons, all under the guise of “cures” for various medical ailments. Much of the staff and all of the patients involved did not know the true nature of these so-called clinical trials. Inmates, for example, volunteered to reduce their sentences. Notorious crime figure Whitey Bulger was in such a program, a supposed experiment to find a cure for schizophrenia. Of course, these guinea pig prisoners were simply being used to ascertain the drug’s long-term effects.Bulger described his horrific experiences, saying it was only years later that he learned the true nature of the program and who had run it. He told friends that he was going to Atlanta, where he had been incarcerated, to find the doctor who headed the experiment and kill him. (The doctor later died from natural causes.)If MK-ULTRA reminds one of the inhuman experiments conducted by the Nazis on Jews and prisoners of war during World War II, there is good reason for it. Former Nazi doctors and scientists were involved in the program.The only reason word eventually got out that CIA was funding MK-ULTRA was due to an internal search for the Agency’s “family jewels”—a 1973 directive from James Schlesinger, newly appointed as Director of Central Intelligence by President Richard Nixon. DCI Schlesinger asked employees to report activities that had “flap potential”; that is, operations that might potentially embarrass the Agency. The order was issued over a year in advance of Hersh’s story and the three hearings on possible CIA misconduct.The effort uncovered several programs, most of whose records were destroyed. But what remained was eventually released through FOIA requests by former State Department officer John Marks. Further information on MK-ULTRA was obtained through Marks’s collaboration with former Executive Assistant to the (CIA) Director Victor Marchetti. While these revelations brought some aspects of MK-ULTRA to light—despite the refusal of most of the principal character to talk—the true depth of the program will never be known.While MK-ULTRA and similar classified programs comprising the Family Jewels were long defunct by 1973, I believe they are best understood when viewed with the logic of the Cold War. They served as archetypes for future programs that existed under the exigencies of the ideological and existential threats that prevailed until the collapse of the Soviet Union.In some instance, these programs violated legal and moral norms. Some of them, like the Iran-Contra Scandal, were exposed when secrecy failed, but others remain in the shadows to this day.What is disturbing for most people is that the means justified the ends. Extralegal domestic surveillance during the Vietnam era found its echoes in the war on terror and its accumulation of metadata on millions of Americans. The abusive interrogation of a suspected CIA mole in the 1960s was repeated in post-9/11 extraordinary rendition practices.CIA has remained duty-bound to its charter and the law. Even its excesses can reasonably be explained within legal interpretations of directives issued by the president, as well as by the tenor of the times. The truth is that, while there was soul-searching for the root cause of the hatred toward the U.S., there was little sympathy for the attackers of 9/11 and their confederates.The idea of a whistleblower, especially among CIA officers, was not as preponderant as you believe. While there was a time in the 1970s when a spate of former officers disenchanted with CIA wrote books critical of the Agency, even this small group—save for Philip Agee—would not reveal all they knew or provide specific details that would jeopardize ongoing operations, methods and sources.The legacy of MK-ULTRA is the fear it still inspires. Conspiracy theories live where there is an historical measure of truth that undermines the government’s story. This explains, in part, why many people erroneously refer to MK-ULTRA in the present tense rather than the past.CIA holds itself accountable for its past; this is not an excuse for previous or future excesses. The Agency is required to operate within the constraints of the law, and accepts this. A vigilant public and their elected representatives will continue to see that it does.[1] “The Family Jewels Then and Now”[2] The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'