Dean's World

Harvey pointed me to this ongoing discussion since I have covered the area as a journalist for some general and some scientific media ever since the initial review article by Peter Duesberg in Cancer Research in 1987, and I share Harvey's bemused pleasure that Dean should flout the usual screams of rage and insults that attend opening up a discussion on the topic in public. Well done Dean, it takes some character to stand up for open debate in this area, which has been closed off as much as possible by the propaganda of the powerful in this field, who insist that it is "dangerous" to "risk lives" by questioning the status quo.

Given the fact that so many lives have been prematurely terminated by officially endorsed medication over the years -- and no, contrary to the current myth enthusiastically inflated by the fellow traveling media, protease inhibitors do not enable you to spring out of bed and climb the nearest mountain, they in fact give you liver disease and escalate your chances of dying four times (eg playwright Larry Kramer, who had to have a liver trannsplant two years ago) - it is difficult to see why lives wouldn't be saved by questioning the current regime, even if its paradigm was correct.

In fact, however, the spurious logic of this drivelling point should be obvious to any thinking person. If the theory is wrong, then questioning it would be the best way to begin saving lives, would it not? What is most troubling and revealing is that top scientists go along with this propaganda. What it suggests is that they are not very good at reasoning, or that they are worrying about their own hide and not that of patients.

To see it here is unsurprising, however, and I am glad to see it only popped up once and was ignored. But you should remember that it has been said countless times in this scientific arena and it is a sad indication of what is really happening. For what is really happening is that political means have been used to prevent a paradigm review. What cannot be underestimated is the degree with which politics have been used to prevent a review, and to suppress it, and to silence the only scientist with the wit, the integrity and the publicspiritedness to say what he thought about this stupidity. Duesberg has been stripped of all his public funds, which used to be effectively unlimited, because he was the golden boy of his field until he started to upset this bandwagon. Read Harvey's unique book for the gory details. Any young and idealistic science graduate is going to get a real education.

You might balk at the word "stupidity" for a paradigm which is globally endorsed by every institution in science and in government, but again, this only indicates the extent to which things have been distorted by the determined ruthlessness of the leading actors in this long drama. The fact is that every single claim of this HIV theory contradicts known science, reason and even common sense. There is not a single good scientific reason to think that it causes anything at all, as a matter of fact, and endless reasons to think it does not. It is not in the nature of retroviruses to do anything much at all, except use the dividing cell to reproduce, so they are hardly going to kill their host. We have some 96,000 of the things in our bodies and not one has ever shown any tendency to harm anything or anyone, except for one which was a lab artefact, which caused cancer in chickens, which sparked the War on cancer millions that were spent on chasing retroviruses as a possible cause of cancer, to no avail whatsoever. Yes I know about Gallo and his HTLV-1 for which he receives royalties for tests of every blood sample donated in the US, but it is nonsense. If it causes leukemia, so do tomatoes.

Reading your postings is both a pleasant and a depressing experience, because it is delightful to see a group of partially informed skeptics tackling the possibility that a very widely established piece of conventional wisdom may be an error. But it is depressing to see how ineffective the exploration of the facts becomes when the premise is that it is even possible that the wisdom is right. The unfortunate thing is that when something is rooted in our world view one tends to adapt all incoming information to that framework. In fact one cottons on to the information that agrees with the premise and tends to turn a blind eye to the information that won't fit in. Gievn a crappy study, in the same vein we will fit it to the wisdom rather than question it. What is horrifying is how self righteous we can feel when defending the conventional wisdom, as if it somehow proved we were better people to march in step ithout questioning!

In the case of AIDS the situation is muddied to a blinding extent by the unhappy fact that all the research is premised on the idea that HIV is the cause of AIDS, so there is no control for that specific issue and it is usually inextricable from the results. Beyond that a lot of the research is simply badly designed and doesn't hold up for that reason. That includes some of the biggest studies which were announced with great fanfare as finally proving Duesberg was wrong. They are later withdrawn, with no fanfare. I used in the course of my work to call up Duesberg and challenge him with the latest Science or Nature study and find that he could easily point out flaws which defeated its conclusions. Sometimes the falws were big enough to drive a truck through. I then began to see how biased peer reviewers could b, witting or not.

This was only one of the disenchanting indications that scientists are too often incompetent, and through biased in their defense against a paradigm attack, which is not such an original point after all, since the history of science teaches us that there are innumerable stories of Nobel prize winners who are initiallly given a very hard time and blocked from publishing their novel ideas. When I called up the principal scientists who back this HIV theory in the beginning I found that they immediately went to ad hominem attacks on Duesberg, rather than respect his arguments. Then there were the political manoevrings against him in Washington, detailed like the rest of this shabby story in Harvey's book.

The fact is that there is nothing in this theory at all and it has been used to relabel other health threats and diseases all over the globe in a shameful escalation of spending and misapplied medications which kill the patients. The only mystery is how and why the ordinary person goes along with this garbage, which is obviously inconsistent to any reader of the newspapers who asks any simple questions at all, let alone the supposedly educated and cynical journalist, the supposedly intelligent and professional scientists and journal editors, and the supposedly worldly politicans and officials, who also go along with this stuff. I asked on of the few truly independent scientists I know last night why he thought it all went down with highly competent people so easily and he said to me quite simply that "they do not care". They do not care if it is right or wrong enough to bother to read any review of it, and under that is the fact that it is the foundation of their work and their career and their remuneration and their prizes.

The naive in this discussion ask as usual how it could possibly be that a heretic in science can lose his funding without being wrong. The answer is that the peers who vet his applications at the NIH are his colleagues in the field, the very men and women who live off the paradigm he is undermining. They are not going to endorse some research which might tip over their apple cart. There is a helll of a lot of competition for funds, especially these days. Los your peers and you lose your funds and you lose your lab - better be a mathematician or a theoretical physicist who only needs a pen and paper! That is why many reformers suggest that the first thing we should revise in science is the system of peer review, and introduce a few peers from some other field when someone is proposing a radical idea which might if successful shift the paradigm.

I dont know what wrinkle Harvey and Dean are going to emphasize tomorrow and I don't much care, except out of curiosity. For anyone who reads ANY of Duesberg's major papers on the topic, but in particular that one in Journal of Biosciences which is mentioned above, will see that the darn theory hasnt got a leg to stand on, and that it contradicts everything we know even as laymen about the way illness works. For example, this would be the first ailment in the history of the world where the presence of antibodies and no agent (virus) meant illness to come, let alone a death sentence. Imagine - someone tells you Gee you have no cold virus in your body any more, just antibodies, look out for the cold you are going to get! You are going to believe him/her? The level of absurdity of this is mind boggling.

And to make just one specific point about the posts above, which contain a good deal of misleading "facts" and research, Hank you are right to think that the transmission of HIV is negligible between heterosexual partners. The study of hemophiliac "unbalanced" partners showed that it took 500-1000 copulations to supposedly transfer. Clearly transmission rates are so low that for it to spread this way in Africa the amount of copulations going on would have to be tens or even hundreds of thousands of copulations/partners per person. I forget the exact figures but they are in Duesberg's Journal of Bioscience article, which contains everything you need to forget that this thing even deserves debating.

Dear Catch 22,
Sorry if I came off as telling you what to think. Of course you have to think for yourself. That is exactly what I admire about you and many posters here -- I think all of them. That is exactly what you do. I say Thank God for that. Without people like yourself this stuff could go on forever unchecked.

But forgive me for having made up my mind on the topic and speaking with adamant conviction. I have been at it a long time, you see. More than 17 years, in fact. Time enough to become very sure, partly because I have seen no change in that time in any of it. No new evidence to persuade me that the HIV theory might be true after all. Just the same old same old - predictions which dont pan out, studies which turn out to be bad, and so on. I dont know whether you will believe me, but the things Duesberg wrote in his first articles 17 years ago stand up today in virtually every respect!

I couldn't believe my eyes and ears in the beginning, when I first explored this issue. It was an education for me. You should read some of my interviews with Gallo to see what I mean. The unscientific and downright nasty behavior was almost incredible to me. And over the years, having seen how people such as yourself who should be able to hear the debate on both sides and make up your own mind were blocked off by the media who gave no space to Duesberg, or disparaged him mightily, shortchanged his quotes and ideas, and acted like lickspittles rolling over for the established guys (even though Duesberg was more established than they were!), and how the scientists themselves acted to stifle the criticism of their theory, I have become liable to state my conclusions with so much decisiveness that I unwittingly sound arrogant.

Sorry about that. My apologies.

By the way, I have only just learned what point Harvey is going to come up with tomorrow, so I didn't write with any pre-knowledge of that. But I do think it is a persuasive one, yes, I have been saying the same thing for some time. It is one of about 32 things that one can list that say that this theory is impossible.