Episode 1: Raison D'Être

SERUM Episode 1: Raison D’Etre

Grant Hill:
There’s a man in the middle of Oklahoma with a secret.

Lots of people have secrets, but he says this one could change the world. Save millions of lives. And – I’m not the only one who wants to hear it…so he won’t tell me over the phone…because it’s been chased by others before me…desperate, dying people. Celebrities. Con men. Cult leaders. Federal agents and foreign government officials.

If I want to know this secret – he tells me – I’m going to have to get in the car and drive.

So that’s what I do.

MUSIC

Drive 1500 miles from my home near Philadelphia.

And the whole time, I know I’m being followed…followed by the colossal, data-sucking tech companies that make all the apps on my phone. By the toll booths pinging my license plate as I cross state lines. And by whatever aircrafts enforce the speed limit along America’s loneliest highways…if you really believe those warning signs.

All those long hours in the car, I’m torn between wanting to believe that this secret is really worth the drive – and hoping that I’m not in way over my head.

By the time I reach this farm town to meet him, somebody I’ve only talked to for a few minutes over the phone – I’m pretty on edge. What IS this secret I’m about to hear – and who the hell is this stranger?

Road noise

GH: Is this him in the pickup truck?

MUSIC

Still, I’m trying to sound casual.

GH: Hey Tommy

Tommy Farnsworth: How you doing?

GH: How are you, it’s great to meet you.

TF: You too.

GH: I appreciate it. So what should we do?

TF: Let’s go drive around for a minute.

He takes us three-and-a-half long miles north – the small town disappears in the rearview mirror. We make our way up an old dirt road toward the Great Salt Plains Lake Dam in Northern Oklahoma. Out here, there’s barely any cell signal. No toll booths or airplane cops, either.

Only Tommy is watching me now, through the corner of his eye as he drives.

TF: Well we can go walk up and look at the lake and that spillway.

GH: Yea, that’d be great.

Car door slams.

We park and he leads me up a set of stairs, high above the lake. All the way to the top of the dam…the water rushing down. I start to think that this could be a set-up. And then I realize – so does Tommy. That’s the whole reason we’re up here, out of sight, our voices drowned out by the noise of the dam.

SOUND WATER

TF: I’ve been nervous about you coming, to talk to you. Yes. But you know what? When I died 33 years ago, I learned that our death was marked before we were born. And so I’m not worried. Let them come.

===

From The Pulse at WHYY in Philadelphia, and Local Trance Media,

This is Serum. I’m Grant Hill.

MUSIC

About two years before I met Tommy in Oklahoma, I got in another stranger’s car. This time in Philadelphia.

It was September 2019. I had just learned I landed an internship with WHYY, the local NPR station, and I was drunk.

I splurged on a case of cheap beer to celebrate with a buddy of mine. And by the time we ran out, it was late.

I was in no shape to walk the mile back to my brother’s apartment, where I was staying that night, so I called a cab using a ride-hailing app.

It was supposed to be a seven-minute trip. It took nearly 43. Because this is the man who picked me up.

Clyde Ashley Sherman: (mumbling) “They talk in quads and trillions…”

GH: That is Clyde Ashley Sherman. His friends call him Sherman. He was the number one Lyft driver in all of Philadelphia, at least that’s what he told me. Like a lot of cab drivers, Sherman liked to talk. He quickly asked me what I did. I told him I was a journalist and left out the internship part. That was all I was able to say. From then on, it was the Sherman Show. See, for Sherman, the Lyft gig was only temporary. He was really in the entertainment industry, he said. Sherman claimed he used to work in Hollywood as Jamie Foxx’s assistant. A job he had been fired from at least three times. Back in LA, Sherman said he was a regular on movie sets and often hobnobbed with celebrities. On breaks, he would sometimes play chess with Tom Cruise.

The fun ended after a family member got sick. Sherman had to come to Philly and trade in those brushes with stardom for, well, conversations with random drunk guys like me. But he hadn’t completely given up on the industry – he was waiting on a big business deal to go through overseas with an international media company he was involved with. It was gonna be huge news, he told me, and he’d give me the scoop when it was all sorted.

I thanked him as we approached my destination – right on time.

But as Sherman slowed to a stop, he cocked his head toward the back seat, raised his eyes, and said he had an even bigger story for me if I wanted to hear it. But, he warned, it was old testament kinda stuff.

That’s when I pulled out my phone and started to record.

CAS: (mumbling)

GH: And he told me this story, his reason for living…

CAS: I knew my reason for living, my raison d’être per se…

GH: It was to fulfill a promise…to a scientist..

CAS: is to get this medicine cause the scientist sort of made me promise // he said God told me you’re going to be the one to bring the medicine to the world, not me.

GH: The scientist Sherman made this promise to was a brilliant Black doctor from Tulsa, Oklahoma named Gary Davis. According to Sherman, in the early 1990s, Davis discovered a cure for AIDS.

MUSIC

GH: As Sherman told it, the whole thing came to Gary Davis in a dream… a dream where the doctor saw himself drawing blood from a goat.

The doctor had watched HIV ravage his community – and he apparently believed this was a sign from God: that goat’s blood could eliminate the virus. Davis didn’t know exactly how but now thanks to this dream, he knew it could. The vehicle for this cure would be a serum – one he would give away to the world.

But Dr. Davis said it was all useless without Sherman’s help. My Lyft driver, Sherman, was key to getting the cure for AIDS off the ground and in the hands of those who needed it most.

CAS: But I think I’m supposed to, I’m doing that talk, God use ordinary people to do extraordinary things. And God will find someone who will know exactly what to do with me. And all I want to do is just share this information. I don’t care who gets the glory, then I can cut back because I still want to make medicine.

GH: To be honest, I started thinking Sherman was messing with me after he mentioned the whole Tom Cruise chess game thing. But this settled it. I was being taken for a ride – in more ways than one.

GH: Interesting, very interesting

CAS: My name is Clyde Sherman. You’ll be able to connect then.

GH: I tried to find excuses to politely exit the car.

GH: Clyde, I got your name, I got your story. And I appreciate you speaking with me.

GH: But Sherman just kept talking….

CAS: The last thing I’ll tell you is…

GH: Sherman told me more about the doctor’s dream, more about his time working on the medicine, more about the lucky few who were still alive today because of that work – and the millions who were not because of how it all went wrong.

Sherman railed against the FDA for never giving this treatment a fair shot – and he especially focused his ire on some obscure DC bureaucrat I had never heard of then. His name: Anthony Fauci.

CAS: You know how what I’m saying is totally true, and I’m gonna scare you a little bit…

MUSIC

GH: Gary Davis had died – never having the chance to get this treatment off the ground.

So, as Sherman put it, the FDA’s decision, along with other health officials in Washington, had left those looking for a cure beholden to big corporations getting rich from mere treatments.

Sherman muttering in the car

I waited for a pause – a moment for Sherman to catch his breath when finally: I had my chance.

He seemed to have finished his story. I opened the door and thanked him for the ride.

CAS: Just say Clyde Sherman. Google my number, it’s the same number for the last 15 years.

GH: Will do, Clyde.

CAS: My email is there. I’m on LinkedIn.

GH: Thank you so much, I appreciate it.

CAS: It’d be great, you could do an article. And you could prove it to the world.

GH: Absolutely man, absolutely.

GH: Sherman left me with one more warning…: If I was actually interested in pursuing the story of the Goat Doctor, I should tread lightly and watch my back.

CAS: But they gonna test you, they’re gonna come after you.

GH: I’m sure, I’m sure. Clyde, thank you so much. I appreciate you talking to me.

CAS: Brant, LAUGHS, Grant, you’re a reporter or a journalist right?

GH: Yea. Perfect, thanks Clyde. I’ll look you up. Thanks man.

CAS: (In the distance) Look up Dr. Davis first, cause then you’ll be okay.

GH: Will do, thanks man. Appreciate it!

GH: I finally headed up to my brother’s apartment. It was late. I was pretty tired and definitely still a little drunk.

I was confident Sherman was flat-out lying. Either to me or to himself.

I didn’t know which. But it didn’t really matter, because, by the time I reached the door of the apartment, I was already checking out Sherman’s Instagram account.

At first, it was just about exactly what I had expected. Videos of him rambling inside supermarkets. Some old family photos and bad memes.

But I scrolled down and then I discovered something different. Post after post of Sherman arm in arm with just about every popular figure you could imagine from the last 30 years.

Donald Trump. Barack Obama. Lebron James. Chris Rock. Magic Johnson. And there he was… Jaime Foxx.

Well, okay, I thought, uh, maybe Sherman was just a world-class photobomber or something.

I scrolled more and stumbled on something a lot weirder….

Of course, Sherman was in this photo, too, with his trademark smile, looking much younger than he did in the Lyft. But next to him was this other guy. A face I didn’t recognize: a short Black man, bald, with glasses. Both he and Sherman donned white lab gowns. And in between them: vials filled with a milky liquid.

Hm. Well, I certainly wasn’t going to call it a night after that. I kept scrolling…until I hit another photo – this one of two guys sitting on opposite sides of a chessboard.

The game had just begun – only two pawns were played. On one end of the board, the player controlling the black pieces wore a cool half-smile and stuck out his thumb and pinkie doing one of those surf’s up gestures. It was Tom Cruise.

On the other side, there was Sherman grinning directly at the camera, directly at me, like he was three moves ahead.

MUSIC

GH: Alright, by then, I’d seen enough. The celebrity photos…The mysterious laboratory paraphernalia… I had to know more about what the hell Sherman was talking about and if any of it could be true.

So I spent the next few days relistening to my conversation with Sherman in his car. On some level I knew the whole AIDS cure thing was typical bad conspiracy theory stuff – neighborhood doctor stumbles upon forbidden knowledge that could save millions only to have it all suppressed for profit – but on the other hand, I couldn’t shake just how many small details kept checking out from Sherman’s story.

I searched around and found that – yes, he had actual film credits for his work with Jaime Foxx.

And – he also really had been voted the number one Lyft driver in all of Philadelphia.

CAS: So i got an email saying I got recognized as driver of the year….so I’m at a banquet right?

GH: This is from Sherman’s youtube channel, where you can relive thousands of moments from his life..anything from a dinner at Applebees to his dad’s funeral… and also… this:

RAP SONG: April third, 2007. God’s miraculous work returned to heaven. And just to say to who this song is dedicated, a very brilliant man, Dr. Gary Davis, a true warrior and the founder of the cure of the AIDS virus…”

GH: Sherman posted this video in 2012. It’s called “The Adventures of Clyde Sherman and Dr. Gary R. Davis remaking the AIDS Treatment.”

It’s 23-minutes long and plays like a highlight reel pulled together from old camcorder footage and photographs and songs, apparently, about the duo’s epic journey.

RAP SONG CONTINUES

GH: The video begins with a snippet of grainy footage of two people seated inside a large white room. The first person seen clearly is a blonde White woman. She takes off her coat and swings it around the back of her chair like she’s ready to get to work. The camera pans and reveals the profile of a bald Black man. He looks excited too, as he air drums along to Elton John’s Are You Ready For Love. It’s him. The same guy from Sherman’s Instagram post. Dr. Gary Davis.

AMBI: YOUTUBE AUDIO Davis singing “Are you ready for love?”

GH: So this Goat Doctor was definitely real – animate, at least. But how real was his scientific work? His alleged discovery of a cure derived from goat’s blood?

When it came to that question, Sherman’s video wasn’t much help. Aside from some scientific-looking scribbles on a whiteboard, and a few names mentioned in the credits, it was basically just a slideshow of Gary Davis in a lab, or in meetings, or playing the piano.

SOUND: Davis singing an original song from the video.

GH: None of it looked legit at all. There’s no explanation as to what’s going on in the footage or the photos. There’s no data on what they were working on, nor any testimonials from the individuals involved. I mean, Sherman appears twice in a speedo, and the last quarter of the video is just more photos of him and celebrities. But, luckily, I didn’t have to rely solely on Sherman’s cinematography.

A deeper dive into Gary Davis surfaced a smattering of decades-old news coverage from all over the country that highlighted the doctor’s work.

NEWS ANCHOR: Time now for part two of our special report on what some believe to be a miracle cure for AIDS developed by a Tulsa doctor…. Yea here again is Fox 23’s Jana Clarke…

GH: From local TV news stations in Tulsa and Houston to big national platforms like the BBC and the Washington Post. Gary Davis was no stranger to attention.

NEWS CLIPS

GH: The reports offered some additional details about the doctor’s life: how he attended Dartmouth Medical School, then briefly worked at the National Naval Medical Center in Maryland, and finally opened his own practice back in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was a respected physician.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere the doctor’s life takes a turn: The dream. The goats. The obsession.

According to those old news stories, Davis spent years developing this goat serum as a cure, only to have the FDA ultimately reject his request to conduct human trials.

Archive news clip:

Reporter: The FDA had no comment about Dr. Davis’ findings. However, other AIDS experts are skeptical of Dr. Davis’ work. Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Health:

Fauci: Not only is there not any basis for this to work, but there is evidence to the contrary that it won’t work because this type of approach has been tried before, and in an even more sophisticated way.

GH: So there was skepticism from experts, but I wasn’t able to find any hard evidence either way – . No links to peer-reviewed studies or anything like that.

What I did find was a lot of incredible rumors. Deep within no-name internet forums and random youtube channels – I found videos and chats about Davis – recent ones, too. Talk that the government had sunk Davis’ serum – and had wanted him dead. That he’d been murdered.

voices:

They killed him – this is heartbreaking. I bet they killed him. Gary Davis was recently poisoned at an airport. If this man really didn’t have the cure for AIDS then, why was he poisoned….

GH: It just all seemed so over the top – who would want to kill this doctor especially one working on a cure for Aids – and did the treatment even work?

It made me wonder if there was any real evidence about the serum out there. Did Sherman know anything more? Maybe he had some long-lost paperwork tucked away in some filing cabinet or, hell, in the glove compartment of his car, that could crack this whole thing wide open or put it all to bed. I wanted to talk to him again – this time sober.

AMBI: RINGING RINGING

GH: That’s if I could get a hold of him….

CAS voicemail: Thanks for calling you’ve reached Sherman…

GH: I started messaging Sherman just three days after our first conversation in his car. But he was kind of a weird texter. He would respond to long messages of mine with just “Lol.” At one point he called me a nimrod. It was suddenly hard to get him to engage. Eventually, he asked me again if I really wanted to do this. How I was messing with powerful people and I should know that. I said yes. But he seemed a little freaked out now. Different.

PHONE RINGING

GH: Hey Clyde? Clyde?

TV blaring in the background

CAS: Hey man, finally.

GH: Hey what’s up, you’re a hard man to reach.

CAS: Nah man, I just fell asleep, I should be working but I had to go to the doctor, I had to get my car repaired… FADE OUT

GH: Well, maybe not that different.

GH: I’m just happy that we were able to figure it out finally.

 

CAS: Cool.

GH: I hope you’re not, uh, I don’t know, you seemed a little sketched out with me. And I hope you’re not sketched out with me.

CAS: Ah, it’s not that, it’s just that at the core of all this is a very special little spiritual thing that like when you said, you know, I won’t be able to do it. // That’s why some of the this you need some harsh documents, credibility, data. You were asking for documents and I have no documents.

GH: Sherman didn’t have any studies to prove that the serum worked, but he told me I didn’t need that. He said he knew people who had taken it, and were still alive because of it. I should just talk to them. I told him I’d look into it. But for the time being, I was interested in hearing just how Sherman got involved with The Goat Doctor in the first place. It was a simple question. The answer was anything but…

CAS: In the beginning, when he did a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff that he did when I didn’t know him.

GH: It was sometime in the early 2000s. Sherman couldn’t remember the exact date or year. He was still living in LA, hanging with celebrities, when he heard that a doctor was coming to town, looking for investors – to get in on a cure for AIDS. Sherman was hooked. He requested a meeting with this doctor – Gary Davis – and even sent a limo to the airport to win his favor.

CAS: And yea, he was impressed. And I think they had a good time.

GH: Sherman says he tagged along as Davis shopped the serum around to different investors, like big-time Hollywood studio executives and sports stars like John Salley, a four-time NBA champion.

 

The FDA rejection had left the serum all but dead in the water and Davis needed deep pockets to resuscitate it.

CAS: I was kind of fascinated by the scientist who talked to God and who had a treatment for AIDS so, but he was unsuccessful.

GH: Nobody was willing to invest. From here, the story gets pretty wild. Sherman tells me someone had made a call. And suddenly the Nation of Islam got involved. Wanted Davis to have a super-secret meeting with Louis Farrakhan.

CAS: They were all scared of the government, saying the government doesn’t want this out, and they were gonna kill us. He was more like scaring us, he definitely scared me.

GH: Supposedly, Sherman, Dr. Davis, and the rest of their camp met up with representatives of the Nation of Islam at Magic Johnson’s T.G.I. Friday’s in LA.

CAS: So we got in, we got a big circular booth right off the bar and these two guys, like 6 foot and 6 foot 1, three-quarter suit, Muslim guys, bow tie, staying in like scooting down like two pillars, like two big rot weilers. They try to get us to go underground and meet the nation, meet Farrakahn to let the Muslims have to protect us. Because they were convinced that United States government was going to kill us.

GH: Did you think they were? Did you think the US government was out to get you as well? Or you just had no idea at this point?

CAS: It was controversial stuff.

GH: Sherman tells me that after listening to their pitch, Davis told the Nation of Islam no thank you. Then, one by one, everyone awkwardly scooted out of the booth at the TGI Fridays, passed the jacked bodyguards, and called it a day. Davis returned home to Tulsa soon after.

But Sherman remained interested in the work and started helping Davis with monotonous stuff like filing patents and submitting additional information to the FDA.

CAS: The FDA, the ID number BB 7075. Everything had to have that on it. We submitted for consideration to do human trials in the United States. And then the FDA sent a letter back to him. Saying NO

GH: Frustrated, Sherman says Davis sought alternatives.

CAS: I get a phone call. October 2003 and it’s the scientist and he’s in France. And he says Sherman, I have an investor.

GH: So Sherman hopped on a flight. But soon, this connection to European investors turned out to be…problematic.

CAS: He was some guy wanted by the FBI and he was over there hiding and no one knew that.

GH: Then Davis had another dream from God. He wanted to go to Africa.

CAS: He said Sherman, God came to me again. I said “Wow what did he say now?” He said Sherman, God told me I have to take you to where the face of AIDS lives and breathes. So we got to go to Africa.

GH: Africa seemed promising. And Sherman says eventually the doctor got to do human trials there. But Sherman couldn’t stick around to see it through. He had a life to go back to in the US.

CAS: Dr. Davis went along with the medicine and did human trials in Ghana and I returned back to the United States…Christmas Eve 2003.

GH: And that was that. The Adventures of Clyde Ashley Sherman and Dr. Gary R. Davis were over. Just three years later, the doctor would be dead.

But for Sherman, the whole thing never really ended. His reason for living – to get this serum out into the world – to eradicate a disease that continues to kill hundreds of thousands each year – it’s still unfinished.

Sherman insists the FDA shut down Davis’ trials in the US for no reason. As our conversation wraps up, Sherman tells me to find out why. If I were to succeed – he’d talk to me again. Maybe drop a few more bread crumbs.

CAS: I mean, the number bb 7075 was assigned to Dr. Davis, so they can’t give that number to anyone else.

GH: So I did what Sherman asked. I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request with the FDA seeking any and all information pertaining to IND number BB7075.

But something like this request can take months – years even. I felt stuck

I found videos of Sherman online – from 2014, he was still trying to get the serum out there

SOUND: this is Edward,a guy who met with Dr. Davis, was in the trenches with doc… [fade]

GH: In one, he’s lobbying for the Serum in Washington DC

SOUND: I’m here at the Ghanaian embassy in DC….

– with a bunch of people who had traveled there by private jet…

SOUND: technically, everybody is saying I may be in Ghana at the end of the month, trying to see where we are with the medicine Dr. Davis left there, frozen…

GH: But – he wouldn’t talk to me about any of that. Not until I heard back from the FDA.

So, I figured out a different next step. Find someone who could at least corroborate Sherman’s story and go from there.

But who?

Should I ring up Paramount Pictures and ask if anyone there remembers meeting with The Goat Doctor and this guy Sherman at some point 20 years ago? Maybe email the Nation of Islam?

Eventually, I tried my luck with a six-foot eleven vegan and animal rights activist nicknamed the “Spider,” who was the first NBA player to earn a championship ring in three different decades. That’s right: John Salley.

JS: Hey, hold on one second.

GH: He said yes, he had met Gary Davis…

JS: He came to me, to my fraternity brother.

GH: Was this fraternity brother Clyde Ashley Sherman?

JS: Yes.

GH: At the time, John had just begun hosting a show on BET. And guess who his co-worker was? A boisterous fellow Omega Psi Phi member by the name of Clyde Ashley Sherman.

JS: Sherman had told me about this guy. They had come and said, “Hey, this guy is an ex-military guy. He had a dream. And out of this dream, he figured out how to cure the AIDS virus.” // I think he’s amazing. // I just remember he was bubbly. He was nice. He’s not one of those doctors that made you feel like you’re an idiot because you didn’t know anything. And a lot of doctors do that. You know?

GH: Davis presented a compelling pitch and the topic hit close to home for John.

JS: See, my whole deal is one of my best friends died in ‘95 from

HIV, supposedly. And it was ravaging through our neighborhood. And I thought, you know, if he could really help people and we can really get it done. You know, hey, here we go.

GH: And – John had somebody specific in mind he wanted to get this Serum to…

JS: I wanted to introduce them to Magic Johnson

MUSIC

GH: But John was afraid of what bad actors might do to Davis if they found out about it.

JS: I said he needs security. I get in touch with the Nation of Islam because I don’t trust…LAUGHS I rushed to get his information over to the Minister. And to get, and I don’t even know, if we totally got all the way to Minister Farrakhan. I know, it got to his security. We did have a whole bunch of people securing him at that time.

GH: Yeah, actually, Sherman is how I learned about Dr. Davis too. But he told me about this meeting that they had with the Nation of Islam at actually Magic Johnson’s TGI Fridays, at one point, I don’t know if you remember that or heard anything about that or not?

JS: I would think that that would be correct.

GH: John wasn’t there at the meeting and didn’t say whether Davis had rebuffed the offer for security as Sherman told me.

JS: I just decided, hey, let’s get some protection around him if this is real. And, you know, I wanted to get it to Magic Johnson right away. Because I didn’t know what Magic was under how. I don’t know if he was trusting… obviously, whatever he’s doing, made him a billion dollars and kept him alive so LAUGHS.

GH: As far as you know, did Dr. Davis ever have any meetings with Magic Johnson?

JS: Um, I don’t know. It wasn’t by me though.

GH: John said he was hands-off with Davis. He made some connections, tried to help him out while he was in LA, but that was about it.

JS: Then the next thing I hear he dies from a heart attack? I was like, oh my god, I told you …Let me go back, the reason I knew the way he was going about it as he was trying to get as much noise about it as possible was if, if you have a cure, that word is a dangerous word in America. If you have something that may stop the he may stop disease or may reverse the effects of disease, it’s 20 years for you to go through testing and about a billion dollars for you to be on the market. He never was going to have that money to do that. Because the money is not in the cure, it’s the medicine. And it took until I met him to realize that that’s why he was trying to make as much noise and the public sector as possible as opposed to the private sector.

GH: When you met him was he worried about his safety?

JS: No, cuz he was military. And those guy think they’re invincible. LAUGHS. I was worried about it.

GH: John Salley told me lots of things. He didn’t trust big pharma or its regulators. And he found Davis’ sudden death suspicious. But he didn’t offer up any real evidence of foul play beside his own intuition. He also said he didn’t know anybody who took the serum, who actually got their hands on it. So far, several people had called the serum “a cure” but – had anybody actually been cured by it? Who even took this stuff? That’s who I wanted to talk to.

So I returned to those newspapers, TV reports, and the comment section chatter. Looked for more names of people who maybe used the serum. And there were some that kept popping up.

VOX POP: Precious Thomas…Rocky Thomas….Precious….Rocky…

Were they still around? And if so, where? Finally…

Phone ringing. Hello? Rocky? Rocky’s voice…

Next time on Serum: I find three people who were way more desperate to discover the truth about the doctor than I could ever be …

Rocky Thomas: I made sure I got what I needed, and she got what she needed. And we walked out of Children’s Hospital.

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