Episode
Before the MRF: Prof Fu Wei-Nong and the Shanghai Cases
- Podcast
- More Morgellons
- Published
- Mar 25, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2896
- Processing state
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Summary
Crystal is taking you all the way back. Before the foundation, before the name, before the RadioShack microscope origin story that never made sense anyway. Back to May 2001 — a home ISP page, a plea from a man named Wei-Nong Fu in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, asking the internet for help with his wife’s mystery illness. Sounds desperate. Sounds innocent. Except Fu is an electromagnetic field simulation engineer at ANSOFT Corporation, the company whose software models how EM fields behave inside complex structures. Including, theoretically, biological ones. Nowadays, he just happens to be an expert in implantable biosensors, back in China working as a professor. But in 2001, he recommends a specific microscope — the Bradford BVPM — to diagnose what he says is an unknown pathogen. That microscope was built by Robert W. Bradford, a man with no science degree who was later convicted of conspiracy, mail fraud, and whose unregulated drugs literally killed a patient. Bradford manufactured a Lyme epidemic to sell his product. His microscope is the diagnostic foundation of the earliest documented cases. And Fu’s Shanghai case studies? Linked on the Morgellons Research Foundation website within weeks of its registration. The Shanghai Cases weren’t discovered by the stay at home mom who ran the MRF. They were baked into the infrastructure at launch. We trace the geographic cluster — Canonsburg, Pennsylvania (population: about 9,000, also home to ANSYS, the company that acquired ANSOFT for $832 million), Bethel Park right next door, the MRF registered in the same tiny corridor. We look at Mary Lato’s actual records versus the origin story. No licensure. No employment history. Research-grade fluorescence micrographs on the website that were absolutely not produced by a toy radioshack…