Duesberg/Bialy Torrent
Dean
Okay you file swappers, here it is. If $10 to get the CD is either too slow or too expensive for you, click here to join the Duesberg torrent.
The more seeders we get the better, obviously. Feel free to join in, and please tell your friends, especially if you're a grad student or a recently-minted PhD in biology and you want to learn about one of the most contentious scientific issues of the early 21st century.
I note that in the comments to earlier threads on this, people who haven't even looked at it have attempted to declare it invalid and irrelevant. You gotta wonder what they're so scared of, don't you?
Related Posts (on one page):
- What Is Bittorrent?
- Duesberg/Bialy Torrent
- There's Something Happening Here - Duesberg CD
Such is also the rational reaction to quackery; when someone tells me Alex Jones has a tape up proving the world is run by space lizards who run satanic human sacrifice rings, I dismiss it automatically because it's obvious BS, not because I'm scared of the revelation of the reptilian threat.
Now, I'm not saying that Duesberg is a quack (let alone a flaming nutcase like Rense or Jones), but that his claims do have a bit of the general sound of the quack about them, and that an automatic reaction of dismissal may simply be a misplaced anti-BS reaction, not fear.
Assuming that fear of the righteous truth of your cause is the only reason people would dismiss it is both, well, wrong, and reinforces the snap-judgement of quackery - that's exactly the sort of thing a scam-artist or faker would say (even if one need not be one to say it!).
(link)Samba Diallo (mail) (www):
I actually have been in possession of the said CD since 1996 (courtesy of HB) and have circulated it to a few orthodox but relatively open-minded colleagues (we could call them jesuits of science) and students here and there. I have thoroughly read (and re-read) it and laughed heartily at some of Duesberg's marginal comments on the papers he CAREFULLY READ, my favorite being the one on mathematical models of the aids epidemic talking about the use of math in the absence of data: "cute" was his comment. Check some of them out when you have the time, but keep in mind what Igancio Ramonet concluded in his excellent book "La tyrannie de la communication": "S'informer fatigue" - informing oneself is tiresome. Don't expect predigested notions: if you REALLY want to know, and you have doubts about the relayers of info, go to the sources, which is exactly what you'll find in Harvey's CD. But, of course, if you lack stamina to actually read the info on which knowledge is based, then stick to reviews of your preferred stance. An amazing tool, but only if people actually use it.
Just remember what Sir Charles Babbage commented, long ago, on scientific fraud ("Reflections on the Decline of Science in England", 1830), which can be boiled down to three major forms of lying:
Trimming, which consists in the smoothing of irregularities to make the data look extremely accurate and precise.
Cooking, which refers to the practice of retaining only those results that fit the theory and discarding others that may weaken/limit its range of application (generalizability).
Forging, which means inventing some or all of the research data that are reported, and even reporting experiments to obtain those data that were never performed.
You decide, folks,
Samba
10.12.2005 12:14pm
Thus any attempt to simply dismiss it out of hand is, itself, quackery. No serious or ethical scientist does that. A erious scientist publishes a response in a peer reviewed journal, otherwise all he's doing is admitting that he cannot debate the issues in a scientific forum.
The ad hominem slur is that Duesberg abuses and misquotes the data. Clearly, he does not. Diallo--who by the way is also a professional scientist--has the right of it.
I used to do this. I don't any more. I pause (calibrate my B.S. detector) and simply ask some simple questions:
1. Can I see the tape?
2. Do you have any photographs of these space lizards?
3. Can you name any victims of these human sacrifices? Have you spoken to their surviving family members? What do they say?
4. Are there any good articles you would recommend I read on this subject?
etc, etc.
When I first inadvertanly came across Duesberg's book, my first reaction was pure recoil. What is this Berkeley quack thinkin'? Everybody knows that HIV causes AIDS!
But, then I stopped. Paused. And realized that my reaction was purely trained, inculcated from reading the New York Times and New England Journal of Medicine all these years, watching too much CBS News.
I recognized that I didn't really know anything significant about AIDS, only that I was glad I didn't have it, and sad that Rock Hudson got it.
I realized I didn't know the name of the famous scientist who discovered the cause. I realized I hadn't read the seminal paper, which established the cause. I realized I hadn't read the best critique of the paper that established the cause.
So, I made the huge mistake of giving Duesberg a fair read, a fair shake. And it blew me away.
Now, I don't buy into everything Duesberg espouses. For example, I'm still edgy on what anti-bodies to HIV actually signify, and I'm still skeptical that drug use is the primary cause of immune deficiency, which no doubt is an observable phenomenom.
But I can safely make 2 statements: (1) Duesberg has a keen intellect, an inquisitive mind, and a relentless passion for disentangling commplicated scientific issues and (2) he is far closer to the truth than these hacks, Gallo, Fauci and Baltimore, who have turned AIDS research into a cash cow.
Peace out,
Hank Barnes
"...I hope it's obvious that the issue of "misrepresenting the literature" is not one to be taken seriously. It's just a straw man put out to be knocked down. There's no way that Peter could have gotten away with misrepresenting anything. His critics would immediately pounce, and he'd be done, permanently."
Quite true. Non-scientists have a hard time grasping this: if you're caught misrepresenting data in a peer reviewed publication, you're done. Duesberg's critics refuse to do this, they refuse to even respond except by character assassination. It's hard to describe how incredibly damning that is. This isn't just online discussion threads where anyone can say anything and get away with it. This is a serious, damning indictment and the HIV establishment knows it, which is why they do not respond in the literature at all, choosing instead to do their best to ignore or marginalize Duesberg.
I don't get your stance on credentials, peer review, and such. When the credentials and peer review process are being presented on the side of the establishment, you seem pretty dismissive of them. What was that link you posted a few weeks ago, 50% of peer reviewed stuff is wrong? However, when you're dealing with with someone or something who is on the side of AIDS skepticism, intelligent design, et. al. suddenly these credentials aquire weight and importancs.
That's not completely illogical, as obviously non-mainstream stuff is going to have to jump a much higher bar to make it into a peer reviewed journal, so when it does it's noteworthy. However, it seems odd to me to have such respect for the 'professional scientists' who support your own views and so little for the much, much larger group of professional scientists who don't. Not to mention such respect for peer review - it can't possibly let through a deceptively cited, incorrect paper! - when all of much, much larger group of conventional AIDS papers are also peer reviewed.
How is it currently "clear" that Duesberg does not misuse and misquote the data? Have you been through everything on the CD? It may be clear to you, but it's not gonna be clear to me until I actually read what's there.
1. A makes claim B;
2. there is something objectionable about A,
3. therefore claim B is false.
So, saying someone's claim is false because he lacks credentials, or because he's a 'loon' or 'moonbat' or whatever, is an ad hominem attack. Saying that a person's arguments are not supported by the data and that he/she selectively misquotes and misrepresents the data to make it look as though it does certainly carries the implication that the person is of bad character, but it's not fallacious.
First off, let's not get sidetracked with the intelligent design thing. I've made the same points over and over on that and it's frustrating that it doesn't seem to penetrate: I DO NOT think they are in the right, I just think that the reaction against them is completely out of proportion to any dangers they supposedly represent.
That said: yes, I do tend to have a particular interest in mavericks, mostly because of you look at the history of science it is full of mavericks who successfully challenged the establishment. You see it in every field.
But I do respect credentials. Although an uncredentialed person can make valuable observations, that should be backed up at some point by someone who does have credentials. Jane Pauley, for example, did some great work without any credentials--under the auspices of Richard Leakey, who eventually helped her get her PhD.
I also respect the peer review process. Very much so. In this entire discussion, I have relied almost exclusively on just that: fully credentialed biologists, and peer reviewed papers.
What I don't respect is when the peer review process breaks down and character assassination becomes the name of the game. And no, referring to "the establishment" is not character assassination, and neither is saying that they're wrong, or that they're acting fearful.
Scientists have a right to disagree with each other. That's what the peer reviewed publishing process is for. Duesberg's critics by and large DO NOT respond to his assertions in the literature. They either do their best to block publication, or they engage in character assassination, or they ignore him entirely. This is incredibly damning.
Look, we can jabber jabber at this all day. Do you just want to argue, or will you look at the CD?
So if Duesberg mangles the data, the process for the scientific community is simple: take his paper, and write your own showing how he has done this, point by point. Submit that for peer review. When your critique gets through the peer review process, and is published, it should be devastating.
The lack of any such direct response to Duesberg is incredibly damning for the establishment, and should establish for any credible scientist that the question of HIV is still an open one.
Just look at the CD. Look at the data. We can talk all day.
I only started to download it this morning, and I do have a day job! I will of course look at it, I can't imagine continuing to discuss this issue without doing so.
I do want to know, though, why no one is responding to the substance of Dale's criticisms of Duesberg's use of references in the comments to your other post about this CD. All that's happening there is that Harvey Bialy (who has been very polite to me let me note) keeps telling him that further discussion is useless. I quote Dale's question, "If [my arguments] are so easily dismissed, why won't you spell out what's wrong with them in a way that even an "idiot" like myself can understand?"
That is because it has been clear from your first appearance in the discussions that you possessed 46 chromosomes.
Back in January, I credited Daf with the same number, but over the months, I have begun to have my doubts. You will also note, if you have been following these intricate web threads, that I do not believe Daf is really a single person, and that until he comes absolutely clean about who he is, there is nothing to discuss because he is literally nothing. His interminable 'non-questions'(like your own writings sometimes) suggest more that he is interested in 'argument for argument's sake' (almost like the famous Monty Python routine).
I only say here to you that I hope you have received your complimentary copy of my book, and I look forward to reading your considered, and well composed reaction(s) to it. I also caution you against thinking you can read the material on the CD with anything like the care of Dr. Dialla. You are NOT aprofessional scientist. The CD is really, as I have pointed out interminably, meant for them. Others can have other uses of course, but to think you can actually make determinations about technical questions of serum concentrations of drugs, etc (which is what is involved in a real evaluation, tiresome indeed and requiring knowledge not second hand opinions) is taking yourself much too seriously.
Once the torrented version makes its way thru the ranks of the top graduate depts around the world (which it will quickly) the ripples will begun to be felt in the form of some very uncomfortable questions the bravest and smartest (in science they go together)of them will begin asking their profs. Students of this type love nothing better than showing up their teachers. Then we will see.
That's how the peer review universe works. He'd be relegated to publishing in obscure journals with no real credibility, if that.
So let me say while there is still time to anybody who would possibly post such a comment:
LOOK AT THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF THE JOURNAL BEFORE YOU WRITE ANYTHING REALLY STUPID AND DANGEROUS
I realize that I'm unlikely to comprehend the technical details as completely as someone in the field, but I do have some experience reading research publications and detecting detect shady citation patterns. Dean appears to have found some worth in the reading, so I suspect I will as well.
Refusing to address Dale's points because he's anonymous may be your chosen approach, but from a spectator's standpoint it leaves his point of view much better represented there than your own. I can understand how discussing these matters with 'civilians' can be tedious because we don't have the background to follow quick summaries, but our thinking is unlikely to be influenced by being told we're simply too uneducated to deserve a reasoned argument.
-------------------------------------------------
A closer look, however, reveals a slightly different picture. Real-world indicators of the popularity (importance) of a scientific
hypothesis are how much money is spent on it; which and how many laboratories work on the problem; and how many and in which journals their findings are published. By any of these
measures, retroviral leukemias (and lymphomas) are the last subject any professor working today on cancer would advise her students
to study. The almost total scientific obscurity into which the entire field of human cancer retrovirology has fallen is exemplified
by a review article, “Human retroviruses: their role in cancer,” 16 which appeared at the very end of 1999. Its author, William
Blattner, a long-time colleague of Gallo from the NIH, moved with his friend to the University of Maryland when Gallo was
given his own Institute of Human Virology in 1995, despite being an unindicted co-conspirator in several criminal investigations
involving HIV.4,6,17,18
Significantly, the article was published in the Proceedings of the Association of American Physicians, a journal of such minor
importance that the Institute for Scientific Information—which invented the currently used and all-important rating system for
scientific journals, called the “impact factor”—places it at number 73 out of the 100 publications in its category of General Medicine. That the review appears in such a journal is not accidental. As Blattner admits in the paper’s abstract: “After a long latent
period, adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATL) occurs in 1 per 1000 carriers per year, resulting in 2500–3000 cases per year worldwide.”16
Hard to get too excited about these kinds of numbers. Further, it is only in a journal read (if at all) by physicians that Blattner could claim the following: “For human T-cell leukemia
virus 1 (HTLV-I), the viral regulatory tax gene product is responsible for enhanced transcription of viral and cellular genes that
promote cell growth by stimulating various growth factors and through dysregulation of cellular regulatory suppressor genes,
such as p53.”16 This somewhat bold, although characteristically vague, attribution of a tumorigenic activity to a gene of HTLV-I
is close to nonsensical. Since the putative activating protein of HTLV-I is essential for replication, all cells in which the virus
replicates should be transformed. This is clearly not the case. Further, this gene cannot be relevant for transformation since human HTLV-I-infected leukemic cells do not even produce viral RNAs or proteins.
A similar reassignment to the scientific backwaters, however, was not to befall Gallo’s other human lymphotropic virus, HTLVIII,
which is the subject of more than 130,000 papers, a large number of which are published in the most prominent journals, and
has consumed upwards of $50 billion since its identification in 1984.
Ahh. And, who is this amorphous entity known as the "scientific world?" Do you mean the majority of AIDS "experts," who've made a living milking the cash cow, and would be out of a job if they ever had to account for 24 years of "make-work"?
Where is that elusive vaccine, by the way, which was promised by 1986?
I've read and digested much of the scientific literature on AIDS. I know of one, solitary, unfiltered debate: Duesberg v. Gallo, mano a mano. It was published in Science, 241:514-517 (1988).
In my view, Duesberg bests Gallo, hands down.
Good for Science for publishing it. But huge black mark to Science for providing no follow-up, no further investigation, no further questions. Just silence and/or ad hom attacks against Duesberg.
Despite his mistreatment, Duesberg has survived the blows, and, although hobbled, continues his work at UC Berkeley. Thank God for tenure.
But, he is not the issue. The issue is whether the AIDS "experts" have caused great harm by exaggerating and hyping a disease and, more importantly, pimping these old toxic cancer chemo drugs like AZT, which have made patients worse, not better. That's the issue.
Barnes, Hank
In my experience (which is, admittedly, in a totally different field and a much less hard science) what you're describing would be the penalty for out-and-out lying, or plagarism, or claiming raw data that didn't exist, not for simply selectively quoting or leaving out citations which don't support his case in a review article. I think that's actually not uncommon, although the frequency of it doesn't make it any more intellectually honest.
I quote from my earlier email.
....like your own writings sometimes) suggest more that he is interested in 'argument for argument's sake' (almost like the famous Monty Python routine)
As you very well know that'debate' in Science was not unfiltered at all.
Its real history is given in documented, stark and highly amusing detail in my book, as you also know.
i'm hurt.
Sure, I enjoy argument, it's not as though this is my job so almost by definition it must be a hobby. :-)
Refusing to address points because you think the argument is tedious, circular, or not sincerely intended is obviously your option, and certainly some people aren't worth wrangling with. Ultimately the silent majority of DW's readers get to decide for themselves who they believe is more reasonable. I personally find it discouraging when substantive points go unrebutted, because it makes it more difficult for me to put together an accurate picture of who believes what.
Here's something profitable you can do with your time since you seem so involved with these discussions.
Ch. 3 has been available for you to download and read for a while now. It is perhaps the only stand alone chapter in the book. Why not read it and write a minireview for us here? I'm sure if it is well thought and reasonable, Dean will post it as a teaser to your 'major' review that will appear, I hope, sometime before the year is out.
Sorry, I must have missed it, how can I download the chapter?
I hope you will display more care at reading the contents of the chapter than the contents of this weblog.
Oh, dear, my human fraility has been discovered. I saw the link, but did not realize it was a link to the chapter itself in PDF form. I've got it now, thanks.
Word up.
No harm, no foul.
It's all good.
My three favorite modern American idioms.
Well, I wuz grading on a curve, not on absolute percentages:)
I use the word "unfiltered" because the debate in Science at least gave Duesberg space in his own words, to make the case. In fact, it was sufficient to persuade me that Duesberg was closer to the truth, than Gallo et al, who, unbelievedly, were asserting that Koch's Postulates were no longer "operative". (Talk about goal-post moving!).
I did buy and read your book, but I don't remember any backroom intrigue about the Science debate, unlike the PNAS stuff. Mebbe I'm going scenile:)
Perhaps I should have said that the Science debate was the best of 2 sorry decades of non-debate by the folks who made the biggest, medical blunder of the century.
Anyway, my favorite part of your book was when O'Brien tried to coax PD to sign that stupid paper, years later that said, "Why, Yes, HIV now does meet Koch's Postulates".
You wrote a heluva book, Harv!
Hank Barnes
Sure you do, but the dazzling Damon Runyon homage style in which I couched the entire debate probably left you so tired from laughing that you missed the few paragrpahs right at the conclusion of my boxing match analogy about how faxed documents from someone at the nih to peter showed that the opening salvo from the gallo blattner temin side was in fact written by a nih public relations officer months before in response to ALERTS about the dangerous groundswell that was beginning to build among scientists and god forbid in the MEDIA!
You mean the episode I so fondly refer to as "Night at the Opera". It's one of my favorites too.
Check out what has been going on at the simultaneous CD thread. It has become very, very interesting too.
In response to your mea culpa. I repeat my three favorite Americana idimaticos.
Word Up
No harm, no foul
It's all Good
and add because you are Hank the Tank that the last expression is my favorite or favorites becasue it's exact Tibetan translation is Kuntu Zhango (known in Sanskrit as Samantabhadra)
Saludos, mi amigo blgospherico
Harvey
and add because you are Hank the Tank that the last expression is my favorite or favorites becasue it's exact Tibetan translation is Kuntu Zhango (known in Sanskrit as Samantabhadra)no man it is me who is getting senile, and tired too.
and add because you are Hank the Tank that the last expression is my favorite of favorites because its exact Tibetan translation is Kuntu Zhangpo (known in Sanskrit as Samantabhadra)
Hank (Momma calls still calls me Henry) Barnes
p.s. I think I may have to re-read your book a second time. Lotta good stuff there. I read Gallo's book recently.
How the discoverer of the "AIDS" virus could write an entire book without a solitary footnote is beyond me.
Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus : A Story of Scientific Discovery by Robert, M.D. Gallo (Paperback - July 1993)
Books: See all 21 items (Rate this item)
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and natalie anguish's book about robert weinerg and oncogene hunting goes for 39 cents used.
It is incredibly damning that someone who claims to be a scientist won't put his name on a response in a peer reviewed journal.
Just as it still remains incredibly damning to me that in our discussion back in January, where we showed CDC's data and showed how the number of HIV infections vs. the number of people who come down with AIDS simply doesn't make any sense, I offered repeatedly to publish ANY RESPONSE from a credentialed biologist or epidemiologist. I said I'd give them all the space they wanted, let them use all the illustrations they wanted, with absolutely NO editorial interference from me. The only request, the ONLY request, is that they put their full name and credentials on it. I've directly offered that to more than one anonymous person who claimed to be a scientist, and to at least one non-anonymous person, and the offer either gets no response or a handwaving, "that's hardly necessary." Huh? Jesus Christ, I've got world-class mathematicians and biologists who've looked at it and said it's damning as hell... and you say it's not, that you don't even have to bother because it's so obviously wrong? But you won't go public with a direct response to directly addres the data to explain why it's wrong?
Instead we had these people like Shad and Chris Noble who were making *personal attacks on me* for not instantly responding to every change of subject they offered, even while I explained repeatedly that *my wife was giving birth that week* and I *could not keep up with everything* but would try my best. In response to that, they got even more vicious. Why? My God, my son was being born while some of those assholes were ripping me a new one for not providing instant responses to them! And they knew that because I'd posted it publicly!
Well anyway... I note again that I have sent emails to many scientists to ask them about Peter's work. Those who support him answer in friendly, often cheerful fashion. Sometimes they don't want to be public because they don't want to get into the politics, sometimes they're happy to go on record. I'm talking about scientists with multiple peer reviewed publications and awards to their names, in every case.
When I write to his critics, I get surly responses, changes of subject, and a *lot* of condescension. Emails to the CDC don't get answered at all. I find this incredible, just as I find "Dale/Daf9" (who I'm increasingly inclined to agree seems to be more than one person just from the abrupt shifts of style and substance in his/her/their writing) refuses to identify him/her/themselves, and are content merely to sit back and say "ah Duesberg's wrong, I read that paper and it says X not Y, bah humbug." What can you or anyone say in response except to order the paper, read it, then argue with them? I did that once with one of them, because I actually *had* the paper they were citing* and *knew* they were themselves distorting it--and all they did was back off and change the subject when I pointed this out. I don't remember if it was Dale, or Nick, or Chris, or which it was, but I didn't even have to show why they were full of it, all I had to say was "I have that paper, you're not citing it honestly," and it was *instant backoff time* and change of subject.
How can you argue with someone who plays that way?
So where is the strong, stinging peer-reviewed article that just shows point blank where Duesberg makes stuff up? Or detailed responses to his critiques that don't involve ad hominem reasoning, but simply rebut him point by point?
Hell, why do the defenders use that strange NIH page--a page that never appeared in the literature, has no one's name on it, and makes a bunch of blanket assertions as if that's just enough? Why does no one answer mails on it? And have any of them read this rebuttal to it?
From my observer standpoint, I started this with doubts and came away with convictions, in part because Harvey's book was so damning, in part because the epidemiological data was so damning, and -- I admit it -- because of the personal abuse I got heaped on me just for providing data and providing an open forum for examining the questions, and for not having instant answers to every challenge, most of which were attempts to change the subject.
You make your own choices of course. I don't think people who disagree with me on this are stupid, or evil, or malicious. I suppose some few in the NIH/CDC universe on this may be evil, just as I'm sure there were scientists who knowingly worked evil for the tobacco companies 50 years ago. But I know the vast majority of the establishment really thinks they're doing the right thing--and thinks they have no reason to question what they've been told.
But there is reason to question. The harder you look, the more questions appear. At least, the harder *I* look the more questions appear to *me*.
Why do I do this even though I get so much abuse for it? Not from you of course but from other bloggers and some other commenters here, some of whom I eventually locked out just because I couldn't stand the personal attacks anymore. But I feel like a masochist every time I write about this subject still, I really do. I know, now I sound like I'm whining and I don't mean to, but jesus... I've read papers which attempt to debunk Duesberg, most of them circling around his reasoning and not addressing his points--and some of them Duesberg cites, and are on this CD! I also read peer reviewed papers which 20 years in still admit that they don't full understand HIV's mechanisms. I also read peer reviewed papers which say "this is all wrong, look why they can't answer, because the HIV theory is all wrong." I talk to scientists--quite a few know, all with impeccable credentials--who say "Duesberg's right, he has been all along, and they attack him so relentlessly because they know they cannot answer for his data."
And that's what I see.
“…I started this with doubts and came away with convictions…”
And now entrenched views take over. The distinctions now indicate that only certified PHD’s with CV’s acceptable to HB are permitted to even discuss the matter. Even those with views honestly held are unworthy unless they rebut in peer-reviewed literature.
Harvey announces in the other thread:
“… the CD leaves no room at all for any argument whatsoever…”
Harvey answers my question with respect to sexual transmission with, “my beliefs have not to do with it”. Hogwash.
So, the more conviction seemingly leads to more frustrations, to more demands.
In the course of the lectures that later became The Idea of a University, John Henry Newman in 1852 described the favorite rhetorical trick of secular intellectuals: They persuade the world of what is false, he said, by urging upon it what is true. The next step of course is to have the anti’s find the false amid the true. I see this as precisely as Harvey’s ideology. Result: You’re dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t. And HB seems one really miserable individual.
What I am leading to is that one’s world view or science views isn’t the same for everyone. That can best be alluded to at least in these two links:
I am a believer in the system, not any specific hypothesis
True Believer revisited....especially when he says: “it is up to the system of science to methodically expose its own faulty presuppositions.”
It's no wonder you're frustrated. Only my view, not a personal attack.
Both you and Harvey have at various times stated that ANYONE reading Dr. Duesberg's papers and the literature he cites can see clearly for themselves that accusing him of ignoring or citing literature in a deliberately misleading way is a scurrilous (your word) accusation. But as soon as I post what I see are three examples of Duesberg doing just that, all of a sudden it becomes about me and my credentials and/or lack of them. Harvey accuses me of having multiple personalities, all of them idiotic and all of a sudden it is no longer ANYONE who can read Dr. Duesberg's papers but only those with a CV they are willing to post on the net.
I wouldn't bother with this if I didn't find it slightly offensive every time you state that doctors and scientists and the vast majority of the public believe in HIV/AIDS for no better reason than they are "told" to. I personally have spent a lot of time reading the literature critically and coming to my own conclusions.
As I asked Harvey in another thread, if my criticisms are so laughably ignorant, then why don't you or Harvey just point out the flaws in my reasoning?
Dale
I can sympthatize with your frustration, but from my point of view there's not a lot I can do. I'm not a credentialed biologist, so I can't debate anyone at that level, and the few I know work in unrelated areas. I feel bad for the direct insults you've received, I don't feel you deserve them, but since I haven't made any myself (to you!) there's not I can do much about that either.
If I finish reading the references and conclude, having thoroughly questioned what I've been told, that I still believe Duesberg is wrong, will it be productive to bring it up here? Harvey doesn't want to talk about it to the uninitiated, you don't want to talk about it because of previous change-the-subject experiences, and you two are the obvious standard-bearers of the AIDS skepticism movement on Dean's World. I'm still going to read it all, I'm too interested to just walk away, but I don't want to be tedious.
Have you tried contacting some of the blogosphere's official skeptics like Orac directly to see if they'd be interested in taking this on, or if they know someone who would? And which critics did you write to? I would in many ways be more interested in watching qualified people debate this than talk about it myself because of my lack of background and I'd be willing to help track someone down if it's possible.
Please see the posts I just placed in the simultaneous CD string.
Elizabeth,
You know very well that I have never expected or asked anything of you in respect to reading what I have published after 4 years of concentrated effort other than to offer you (as has Dean) carte blanche space here to write anything at all you want, with no restrictions whatsoever. You have been further assurred that 'whatever' you write will be appreciated by me. I even arranged for a copy to be sent to you.
I am still very, very interested to see what you think after reading Ch. 3.
You might also wish to read the Free Book, which has the MOST detailed and interesting and instructive debate between 'qualified' individuals on HIV/AIDS that has ever gone on on the BLOG or anywhere else for that matter.
Got to run and shave before the surgery (see the posts in the otehr thread), but I will check this once before I leave to see if you have written me.
Saludos
H.
I was saying that people may be assuming he is one, and that your original implication that they're dismissing him because they're "afraid" he's right is therefore not true of all dismissals; some people dismiss him because their BS-detector went off when looking at his general claims.
I repeat, I make no claim about whether their BS-detector is accurate, and I won't pretend to know enough about the issue to judge Duesberg's hypothesis. My point was merely and remains entirely that fear is not the sole, or even the most likely, motive for dismissing Duesberg's work.
from the 13 October Nature:
Editor's Summary
Cancer and cell division
"A hypothesis about cancer initiation, first proposed nearly a century ago, has stood the test of time. German biologist Theodor Boveri
suggested that a failure of cell division might produce tetraploid cells (containing a double chromosome quota) that then undergo multipolar mitosis, leading to genome instability that can trigger cancer. Fujiwara et al. tested the hypothesis using an actin inhibitor to block cell division and generate tetraploid cells. The resulting cells can be transformed in vitro and also generate tumours in mice. The transformed cells exhibit massive genomic instability, including an amplification of a region containing genes associated with breast cancers."
It goes without saying that neither the editorial nor the accompanying paper make any reference to Peter's work, but that is to be expected.
Nonetheless, the literature is replete with his contributions that most certainly influenced and heavily the design and conception of the experiments reported with such glowing enthusiam by nature's illustrious editor (a physicist by the way, not a biologist).
Anyone interested in a history of the aneuploidy theories of cancer from their origial Boveri construction so long ago, to the Duesberg reinvigoration and highly quantitative modernization can of course read my prophetic book
So maybe he is not so wrong about HIV and AIDS?
Linus
Pauling
Being on the right track about one scientific problem (if he is) does not imply that Duesberg is on the right track on every scientific problem he studies.
Dale
Harvey,
ATTENTION: 1) Shih and King's reference #28 = D &Li , Multistep
carcinogenesis ..., Cell Cycle 2, 202 (2003) and 2) Pelham et al. cite
us indirectly in their review, reference #9 in the current Nat paper,
for Cytoskel &Cell Motil D &R 2000.
So its not all bad!
P.
Dale...as usual your reasoning is 'impeccable'. However, Linus was a chemist and his 'theories' about vitamin C were the speculations of a genius in a related but not really all that field.
Duesberg is a very different case since his thinking and criticisms of cellulr oncogene cancer theory are 100% intertwined with his thinking about other retroviral genetic capabilities. HIV is a retrovirus. Peter is a retrovirologist par excellence. It would seem to be make some sort of sense to treat his 20 years of critical writing, of which a key part of it is on the CD, with a little more respect than some (I am not including you, whoever you are, of course)accord.
Read my book and be educated about a history you really do not know very well.
I am beginning to grow very angry at your continued insistences that ANYONE should take anything you write with the least bit of authority since you continue to remain a nameless entity. And to answer your oft-repeated claims that your arguments 'stand on their 'own', let me take off the kid gloves and let you know straight ahead that every single one of your so-called scientific arguments
them is at best sophomorpic and at worst incomprehensible gibberish.
This is not only my professional opinion. I quote you from an email that George Gabor Miklos (you are free to Google him) wrote me after he read a good part of the discussion in the complementary string:
"....who is this Dale character...he sounds like an idiot."
(Elizabeth...please do not jump to some defense...your arguments are scientific stuff and nonsense too, but that is 100% excusable because you have no-real knowledge of these matters, and your remarks are sensible enough to be corrected. I did not (and will not) do that publically because it is impossible by virtue of the medium, but as I have offered to you several times, I will discuss these matters more deeply with you via email if you wish. And at the risk of being really heavy-handed...my book is the single best, serious and reliable history of both HIV/AIDS and cancer genetics that is available. No less than the illustrious people who have reviewed it at Barnes and Nobel say so. So cool your enthusiasms for internet argument until your gratis copy arrives from the publisher and you have enjoyed reading it. ¿Claro? Bueno.
Elizabeth: This is what is so among the best molecular biologists when they read the literature. The quote is from the book p.61.
Perhaps even you might take a clue from Stent when you read what gets published, and by whom, about HIV and AIDS, and cancer.
"When I asked Peter why he was not content with restricting the 1987 critique to the relevance of retroviruses to human cancer, and leaving AIDS alone, his answer was immediate.
It was largely a personal matter. I could not refrain from looking hard at any hypothesis Bob [Gallo] was behind. It’s exactly as Gunther [Stent] said to me when we talked about this very point years ago: “If Crick publishes it, you read it thinking it right. With Gallo, it’s the opposite.”
I don't want anyone to take anything I write with the least bit of authority. I want them to think about it, go read the literature and make up their own minds.
As for you; all I've asked you to do is to explain the flaws in my reasoning that you continue to dismiss without explanation.
Dale
If you are really interested in me explaining the flaws in your 'reasoned' posts then do the following.
Collect them all in one email. Send it to me at bialy@ibt.unam.mx
We can then begin a real discussion, that you will be free to republish if you wish anywhere.
Although any reputable place will demand that you sign the document with a real name.
I did not mean to imply that DW was NOT reputable, but we all know that the discussions here have no weight at all in 'real' scientific circles, although THE TORRENT is another matter entirely!.
I have no desire to publish anything related to HIV. Nor do I wish to engage in an e-mail exchange with you. What I'm asking you to do is "put up or shut up". Explain here on DW or stop calling them flawed without explanation here on DW.
Dale
We can call the collected emails:
I guarantee you that if you will sign such a collection with your real name, and have even a half-way real assoicaiaton with a university of other 'reputable' scientific establishment that Nature or Science will publish it, and post-haste too!
Wouldn't you like to be known as the guy who took down Duesberg?
i just saw your post that interrupted my consecutivas.
You wrote just a few moments ago:
Harvey
I don't want anyone to take anything I write with the least bit of authority. I want them to think about it, go read the literature and make up their own minds.
As for you; all I've asked you to do is to explain the flaws in my reasoning that you continue to dismiss without explanation.
Dale
-------------
seems to ME that i have granted your wish...what has DW got to do with it? Since everybody else is expected, according to you, to make up their own minds, which is the only thing I have ever said from the jump. Look at what this discussion is suppossed to be all about!
tai chi sword class calls...i hope the students don't think the bloody bandage above my eye is from a bad mistake in practice!
Back from tai chi. It was a terrific class, and i still have all my fingers and toes and nose.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, i am a student in this class, and not a very proficient one at that.
(If you would like to see a photograph of my teacher, Claudio Romanini, you can visit this gallery, and look at a piece entitled "The Tai Chi Sculptures of Ju Ming"
I haven't posted in days so not sure why you're back responding to me now, even less why you're cautioning me to cool it. f you're going to wait so long you might want to quote what you're responding to so I can match up your response without having to re-read the entire thread.
Asserting in public that my arguments are 'scientific stuff and nonsense' but only being willing to provide the evidence in private - or when you're rested - or in some other medium - or jam tomorrow jam yesterday but never jam today - is flat insulting, not just to me but to Dean and anyone who is following these discussions with a genuine hope of learning. If you're going to tell me I'm wrong in public, provide the proof in public.
How about this:
I create a LiveJournal community called 'harveybialysuperiorbeing' or whatever you like. It will be moderated, so that membership can be limited to you, me and Dale if he is interested. Dale can call himself anything he likes as far as I'm concerned. I don't give a rat's rear end if he's a PhD or not. We could also include others by choice, but it will not be open to jump-ins from just anybody.
There, I will repost any of my arguments you think are scientific stuff and nonsense, and any of Dale's arguments you think are riddled with flaws, and you can explain, at your leisure, why we are wrong where everyone can read it.
Or stop saying so.
It is true, I am a bastard. Nonetheless, I appear to have ruffled enough tail-feathers so that when you read my book you will do so with the most unfriendly, possible eye for a lay reader. Excellent. As Ike once sang to Tina "That was the plan from the very beginning."
I urge you, when you go through the literature referenced therein -- which I know you will do, because ANYBODY who is so into this that they order a $30 online paper from Pub Med so as to enter into an 'examination' to which they were not invited, is muy serio -- to keep in mind the words of Gunther Stent quoted above.
When you post your review, we can have some more fun. For now i am content that the Torrent is launched with such resounding success, and that shortly graduate students all over the world will begin asking some hard questions of the professors who spout the abstracts of papers by Baltimore, and Gallo and Fauci et al. as though they were gospel, and feel free to trample on the real scholarship of real scientists like Peter Duesberg.
I don't care if you're a bastard; I care if you'll stand behind what you say. You are saying you won't. I'm satisfied to know you're admitting that.
It's hard to come to public forums like this when you have a huge amount of specialized knowledge and take questions and sniping from people who don't know anywhere near as much as you, and be confronted with people who seem to think they can just shoot you down with off-the-cuff questions and assertions. Would you do this to a professor in class? Heck, would you argue with your doctor that way?
I'd suggest that if Harvey is offering to take a conversation private he's got his reasons, probably mostly to do with not wanting distractions and heckling from the peanut gallery. I'd also suggest taking him up on his offer, realizing that it's a quite generous one. It is a potential learning experience you're not likely to equal for less than quite a few thousand dollars in tuition. Do you have any idea how many doctors and PhD biologists studied under him? How many departments and science programs he either personally set up or was instrumental in creating? Yet here is, willing to talk to us and take up the cudgels for another world-class scientist whose work he deeply respects.
I'm grateful Harvey comes here. He posts what he wants and pleases. After the shabby treatment he got in our first discussions on this topic, I'm surprised he ever came back again. I honestly am. And I think that if he's offering you private correspondence which you can republish anywhere you want, you should grab that chance.
This isn't about who can show up who in an argument. It's a genuine opportunity and I, for one, advise not wasting it.
No, I'll write it. I'm just lowering my expectations.
I don't find Harvey's fame an adequate justification for the shabbiness of being willing to tell people that they're wrong and furthermore that they're idiots in public and justifying by hinting at evidence that can only be revealed in private. I'm not seeking private tutoring in virology, conventional or otherwise, so the extended email correspondence offer doesn't hold much interest for me. The LJ proposal I made would be identical to email in format (text and pictures, no hecklers) the only difference is that it would available for others to read. Why is that a problem?
I think the preceeding conversation in this comment thread speaks for itself. I'm not trying to force Harvey to post anything he doesn't want to (since I can't!) but I am trying to draw attention to the pattern of being willing to start an argument but not finish it. I can only guess the reasons for that behavior, as can you. Anyone reading this can come to their own conclusions.
I am very glad you will still write the review, and that as I suppossed your eyes will be very jaundiced, and your claws sharpened to the max when you do.
And when you do, you will be able to post it here for all of DW's many, many ("lots & lots" even)readers to read your comments, and to read my responses to them.
As I have written here several times, this will be, as far as I know, another weblog first here at Dean's, and will be I thibnk pretty well read.
Since a book review is 100% opinion, I will not be able to argue with you at all (isn't that too bad?), and you can be completely cirrect in anything you say, so long of course as you base your conclusions on a more careful reading of the text than you displayed in the other thread where you mistook what was essentially a direct quote from a data table in a paper, and reinterpreted both the paper and the duesberg review as though they were about the one line of data that PD quoted. The whole point of the exercise was to show you that this potent info about AZT was NEVER suppossed to be in the paper in the first place, and it took a v. careful reading of the paper to find it. You never would have if I hadn't called all your attention to it! It slipped past the authors, the editors and the reviewer's afterall. Instead of going off on semantic tangents of "associated" versus "cause", why did you not notice (even though I pointed it out several times) that the paper was all about factor viii and hemophiliacs, it had absolutely nothing to do with azt! The whole point, you missed it. OK.
(Semantic digressions are the favorite tricks of people who really don't have any substantial knowledge about a topic to argue (or pretend to) with people who do.)
Now ¡Basta!, until you publish your review of my very, serious and carefully argued for 300+ pages book.
If you will recall I posted several examples of citations in Dr. Duesberg's paper in which I argued that he took the citation out of context. The one comment on AZT from the Goedert paper was the one that you wanted to discuss as an example of a citation which Duesberg quoted correctly. Now you want to change the goalposts by telling Elizabeth that the paper should never have mentioned AZT in the first place because it was about Factor VIII. In fact, the AZT data was not mentioned in the title or the abstract for the very reason that Elizabeth articulated, it couldn't be interpreted because the hemophiliacs in the study had not been randomly assigned, nor did the study assess time on AZT. The point was that the AZT data could not be assigned the significance that Duesberg attempted to give it. As Elizabeth so nicely demonstrated it doesn't take a Ph.D. in virology or molecular biology to see that.
Dale
Because this "daf9/Dale" wrote, just a few hours ago, the following:
daf9 (www):
Harvey,
I have no desire to publish anything related to HIV. Nor do I wish to engage in an e-mail exchange with you. What I'm asking you to do is "put up or shut up". Explain here on DW or stop calling them flawed without explanation here on DW.
Dale
10.15.2005 4:43pm
What then do you call all this wrting you have been doing here at DW?
I have refrained from pointing this out to you before for just this moment.
Now I have push hands class with Claudio. I am much better at that than swords, but compared to my teacher, still a baby.
It slipped past the authors, except for the point in the text where they explicitly refer to it? As I pointed out to you? It took careful reading, yes, as in reading all of the actual words.
If you are arguing that distinguishing between correlation and causation is semantic gameplaying, I hardly know how to respond. Drawing correct conclusions is impossible if this distinction isn't understood, so if you can't make it, that explains a lot about why your reasoning is so roundly rejected by the scientific establishment. The info isn't particularly potent for exactly the reason that corrrelation and causation are not separable in this study. I understand perfectly well that the study was not set up to examine AZT's effect on AIDS and mortality - why you think that gives weight to your point rather than rendering it meaningless is indeed confusing to me though. I stand by my words: this paper is not an appropriate citation for 'AZT increased the mortality of US hemophiliacs ... compared to untreated controls'. If this is still your best counter to the assertion that Duesberg is playing fast and loose with the literature, it's not doing much for your case.
I'm more and more puzzled whom you think you're impressing with this kind of grandstanding.
It is worth remembering in this conversation, however, how peer review really works, and also that Harvey's not only got a few dozen of those personally published under his belt, but also that as scientific editor of one of the world's most prestigious peer-reviewed journals he's shepherded more through the process than can probably be counted.
When he zooms in on something and says, "oh my God, how the fuck did that get through?" it's significant.
No, of course the data pointed to does not prove anything. You can't prove anything on this until someone does a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment where some are put on AZT and some are given sugar pills and we count off the fatalities.
It is worth considering, however, that this particular data is damning as hell, appears to have slipped through by accident--and it is also worth considering that in the many years since, it has become generally accepted by the HIV establishment that the megadoses of AZT used back in those days was a bad idea. Even our anonymous friend daf/Dale now admits this openly: those megadoses of AZT were not a good idea.
Indeed, I think that if you investigate carefully, you will find that any doctor who prescribed AZT today to an HIV+ person in the way that was done back then, it would be considered malpractice.
The significance of what Harvey (and Peter) point out here is not the gold-standard proof that AZT is bad. Indeed, flip it on its head: what is the gold-standard proof that AZT is a good drug? You'll find similar weaknesses in the data there (indeed, I hazard to say you'll find more and greater weaknesses.)
Rather, it's pointing to something important: that data was out there all along, even back then, that this shit was poison, and that pumping someone full of it who was merely HIV+ and not even sick (Ryan White, anyone?) was a horrific mistake. But for a long while, people were refusing to do ask such hard questions about this drug.
Correlation is not causation. You've zoomed in on an incredibly important truth.
You really, really should read the book. In the next year or two, the entire aneuploidy theory of cancer is going to be front page news. How does that relate to what we're talking about? Seriously: read the book.
And take Harvey up on his offer. Not all arguments are best hashed out in a public forum with nit-pickers ganging up on one lone dissenter.
I had some further communication with Harvey's publisher Friday so I'm hopeful the book is on its way. I will read it as soon as I have it and honor my commitment to review it. (What kind of word count is appropriate?)
I tend to agree there's a decent chance AZT was so toxic that it did more harm than good for many people at original dosages - history of medicine in a nutshell - but if the study cited doesn't "prove anything", then the cite is inappropriate. I don't get how anyone can argue that the relationship slipped through by accident when the authors refer to it in the text. You can argue it's suggestive, you can argue that the authorial explanation for it is speculative, but it isn't a good cite for an assertion of a causal relationship and given the acknowlegement of it in the damn paper, doesn't strike me as an impressive example of Sekret AIDS Kabal machinations either.
The thing about trusting Harvey's peer review skills is that if I weigh the world-renowed experts, pound for pound, there are more of them by an order of magnitude on the side of conventional thinnking on HIV and AIDS. The fact that I'm here talking about it means that I have some respect for both you and Harvey, but that only goes so far. There's a limited amount of time I'm going to devote to this stuff (although you'd never know it from my behavior this week!) and an endless email conversation with no public accountability holds little appeal for me.
As I said, I can't figure out who Harvey thinks is going to be convinced by the "I'm right, but I won't tell everyone why," rhetorical approach, but if that's as far as he'll go in public, then that's as far as we'll go.
AZT:
"You can't prove anything on this until someone does a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment where some are put on AZT and some are given sugar pills and we count off the fatalities."
University California San Francisco 1987:
AZT---Double blind study 1987.
The efficacy of azidothymidine (AZT) in the treatment of patients with AIDS and AIDS-related complex. A double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. N Engl J Med. 1987 Jul;317(4):185-91
[PubMed ID: 3299089] Fischl MA, Richman DD, Grieco MH, Gottlieb MS, Volberding PA, Laskin OL, Leedom JM, Groopman JE, Mildvan D, Schooley RT.
I appreciate the profound inner and exterior efforts of Dr. Bialy but he isn't giving us the full story. They didn't just willy-nilly close the bath-houses and promote precautions against unprotected sex.
Dr. Bialy tells us in his CV that he and Duesberg were consultants to Thabo Mbeki president of South Africa. Duesberg says AZT bad. Mbeki says terrific, SA will follow the dissidents. 2003 Mbeki announces too many folks are dying, yes, we will accept inter-national anti-AIDS medications.
Houston, we have a problem.
But the info-mercial is terrific.
Seriously, I want Harvey's book to be a success. On Barnes and Noble it is currently listed on the top best seller list around 136,000th most popular. And honestly I honor his inner and exterior efforts in promoting his cause.
Hey, this is better than baseball.
You make it sound like it took some real arguing to get me to admit that large doses of AZT were abandoned as a treatment for AIDS because they did more harm than good. The stuff was not a good treatment but it was the best treatment available at the time.
The history of AZT as far as I can figure is that it was introduced as a treatment because the short term studies said that it helped late stage AIDS cases. Because the alternative was dying, it was introduced as a treatment for late and early stage patients; a practise that was abandoned at the point where it became obvious that it didn't help early stage patients at all and its positive effects on late stage patients were very short lived. It was also abandoned as a treatment because better treatments were developed. As Elizabeth has noted, less than effective treatments for human diseases litter the history of medicine. A less than effective treatment doesn't mean the diagnosis of the cause of illness itself is incorrect.
The disagreement between Duesberg and the medical scientific community is not that AZT isn't a toxic drug (the medical and pharmaceutical orthodoxy have always acknowledged that! Who do you think puts the skull and crossbones on the label?) The argument made by Duesberg and disputed by most of the rest of the medical community is that AZT, and not HIV, causes AIDS. Where is the evidence?
Dale
But here i see "daf9/Dale" writing again, and i must wonder (or as you might write) i methinks myself, who is this particular "daf9/Dale" because at least one of them wrote quite plainly that he had no 'desire to publish about hiv related matters' if memory serves, and so he cannot be that one. and so i must reply to my own question in the negative form of i have noooo idea.
passing strange...almost a real catch-22
but what did you mean this is better than baseball?
with a cuban lanzador on the mound for the up to now hapless sox of chicago, this is better than the icebox or channel hopping in between innings...but better than the game...no way jose
Well it's certainly not an effort to publish a refutation of Duesberg. The scientific/medical community has already done that. Perhaps it's a labor of love?
Dale
Elizabeth, why do you continue to say that Harvey refuses to explain what he is saying when he has done so repeatedly, and clearly.
I think this is a case of a phenomenon I have witnessed since I began covering Duesberg, the AIDS wars, the AZT debates, and all the many ruptures in the HIV paradigm, since 1987, namely: Rule #1 PETER DUESBERG CANNOT BE RIGHT ABOUT ANYTHING, EVER. NOT ABOUT A SINGLE CITATION, NOT ABOUT WHETHER THERE IS A MOON IN THE SKY. NOTHING.
This is a classic story of debasement. Debase the scientist, strip him of everything he ever was or might have been, make sure you call him a distortionist liar at every imaginable turn, including when he is not even "saying" anything, but rather citing a FACT in a paper, that is there is black and white for all to read. Still--HE CANNOT BE CORRECT. This entire dialectic is held in orbit by a mass participation, which happen almost unconsciously, of total condescension--as though the man (Duesberg) was brought to earth to express nothing but wrongness, to allow other to demonstrate their own goodness by their pain and rue and exasperation over his sytemic, fantastically well composed, demonic wrongness.
Elizabeth demonstrates her magnaminity by congratulating herself for possessing "some respect" for Dean and Harvey, but then stresses that this sliver of respect "only goes so far."
Neither Bialy, Esmay, nor for that matter Duesberg has any need for Elizabeth's "respect." This is a social measure, as well as a hopeless abstraction; These people are trying to talk about data.
Are you actually questioning, in 2005, that AZT snuffed out human life, by itself? Have you not read the damning Concorde study? Have you never spoken to gay men, those who remain, about the late 1980s, the AZT years, and who died, and why, and how? I have, for over two decades. You may use any euphimism you like, such as that AZT "did more harm than good." That is padded language. It was a drug that, in its earliest doses, of 1800 and later 1200 milligrams, killed people in a matter of months. Are you going to make me document this? Here is but one citation:
From the Concorde study (the only non Glaxo funded long term study of AZT:)
172 participants died. 169 of them were on AZT. 3 were on placebo.
Do real people count, or do you all want to stay inside the myopia of the literature and Duesberg's every citation?
Last year I interviewed a 40 year old hemophiliac who had been "exposed to HIV through Factor 8" some 30 years earlier. I sat with him for several hours and got his detailed life story and testimony. All of his hemophiliac friends were placed on high doses of AZT in the early terror years, when hemophiliacs were sluiced en masse into the AZT promise. He alone refused. All of them died, according to him within about 6-9 months. He alone survived.
Unlike the scientists, like Duesberg, Bialy and others, I have taken the approach (the journalistic approach) of simply collecting human testimonies, over a period of 21 years now. I too have been told that none of what I have collected on my hundreds of tapes bears any relation to the "overwhelming truth" that "everybody knows," and as recently as yesterday was accused of being a peddler of murderous propaganda.
I too cannot be right about anything, even when I am quoting people directly from a taped interview, about their experiences.
If those who remain convinced that Duesberg is "amply refuted" confine their smug convictions to subsets of the literature but refuse to read, listen, or factor in the real life stories of people inside the HIV/AIDS labyrinth, what on earth can be done?
You're right about one thing, I phrased my statement about having respect for Dean and Harvey poorly. When I said my respect for them only goes so far, I simply meant that it doesn't entail wanting to spend unlimited amounts of energy on this topic. Harvey is much more expect on these matters than I am, even if I disagree with him, and Dean has created one of the more interesting blogs around. My respect simply doesn't encompass an assumption that either of them is always right.
The rest of your comment is not related to the previous topic of whether this is a good citation (except for your assertion that it is!) so I'm not pursuing it.
You and Bialy argue that Duesberg was dismissed by the scientific community for the flimsiest of a reasons; I don't know enough of the history of the situation to know whether that's true or not.
What I do know is that when I read his 2003 paper what I saw was a lot of sloppy scientific reasoning. If the scientific orthodoxy is correct then real people get HIV infections and HIV infections will kill many of them. Real people can avoid or at least reduce their chances of getting HIV infections by taking seriously the idea that this is a sexually transmitted disease that is also transmitted from mothers to their children. Of course real people count. This is all about real people.
Dale
I was a bit on the tired/crabby side when I wrote last night. Sorry. The irony is that you are very openminded and willing to discuss this, whereas most people are totally shut down, morally outraged, etc. Of course your respect does not extend to an automatic belief that Harvey and dean are right about everything. That would not be respect!
Dale:
The case argued by dissenters is not that the net of caution should be dropped but that it should be extended to include the many medicinal and environmental threats to the human body that ironically are the result of the HIV paradigm itself. The singular focus on HIV, or proteins SAID to represent HIV, or whatever we might call it, was a risky bet. All chips stacked on one number. What might the world have looked like had they cordoned off, say, poppers, in 1981, banned them, declared them to he 100% correlated with KS and therefore devoutly to be avoided? What about all the other drugs? What about severe malnutrition? What about unclean water in Africa? What about multiple STDs, parasitic infections, etc etc etc?
Many, not all, people with AIDS test positive for HIV. The question is and has always been does that mean it is the CAUSE?
I think it would have been much more helpful if they had kept other avenues open and explored them. This is an extreme understatement. Surely we all agreee that AZT is more of a direct and effective destroyer of all arms of the human immune system...than HIV, which has apparently been "weakening" for 15 years.
The current drug regimens are less dangerous than AZT, unless you count the drugs such as Nevirapine which we reserve for the developing world's pregnant women.
I must excise myself now and get back to various work related deadlines, but I hope you all keep this vital and robust debate alive.
That's cool. I know from previous discussions how strongly you feel about AZT.
My reading on the subject doesn't support the levels of harm you're describing, but at the same time I can understand that if one is focusing on the people involved, as you are, arguing about the precise numbers or which study shows what can seem very detached and beside the point. AZT is a drug of limited benefit and high toxicity, and that there are people who have been harmed by taking it. However, the data from the Concorde trial (I just read up on it) does not support the assertion that it is AZT which causes people to progress to AIDS, although the data from the trial does show that overall AZT was more harmful than helpful when given to asymptomatic people. This doesn't prove that it's HIV which causes people to progress to AIDS, but it does mean that they are separate issues.
I don't mean to seem callous about those people hurt by AZT or by early dire predictions about HIV since I know they aren't 'medical history' but are either still alive or alive in the memories of those who loved them. I think medicine as a discipline has to grapple with finding ways to avoid overeager applications of therapies which don't have a clear benefit, and maybe it's only the personal recognition of people who've been affected that will push that along.
After reading the most recent comments, i am tempted to ask the question, "How many dafs are there in it?" because we now have another voice heard from, and this one quotes his cousin "daf9/Dale/Dale" from the other thread - only incompletely.
That one wrote:
I have no doubt he's a lot smarter and certainly a lot more scientifically productive than I've been or ever will be. He has made seminal contributions to retrovirology, he asked a lot of very relevant questions about HIV and AIDS back in the 80s, he deserves to be a National Academy member and he's doing some very interesting work right now with aneuploidy and cancer. But that doesn't change the fact that I think his 2003 J. Biosci. paper includes a lot of sloppy scientific reasoning.
Dale
Dale
Now me, i generally withhold such off the cuff remarks about members of the national academy (except Bob Gallo and maybe Pope David in more recent years), lest i be taken for an arrogant moron, but the new "daf9/Dale" above appears to have not even the faux-grace of his alphabetically related, relation. This one admits flat out he is ignorant of the history and then goes and says, no matter, I think Duesberg can't reason ..Ta. Ta. No matter that the editorial board and reviewers of the J. Biosci. didn't think so, and no matter that I wrote in the post that began this thread:
Of all the accusations that have been leveled against my friend, Peter Duesberg, over the many years he has been challenging conventional wisdom in cancer genetics and 'deadly'- disease etiology, the one that is most frequently heard in scientific circles, and one that is impossible to counter except by extended debate, either at a scientific forum or in the journals (something that for some reason has never occurred) is that "Peter abuses the literature"
Duh...does this not IMPLY that MOST scientists i have talked to about this in 20+ years (which i think probably number close to 500) have not too many problems with the reasoning. In fact the reasoning is SO good, they must challenge his citations -- the very reason for the CD project.
No matter, all that because this faceless entity with no CV "thinks" something is so. Case closed.
But then again 'daf9/Dale' both does/doesn't claim to be a scientist of some kind, although not an hiv/virological type one. (At least i don't think so. There are so many dafs i am becoming daffy.)
"How many dafs are there in it?"
Scene iii, act ix
Another one enters stage left ...he insists that he needs no authority for his statements other than their own brilliant, self-consistent logic (that idiot me can never quite follow to their various conclusions) and doesn't expect anyone to take him seriously only go and read the literature and decide for themselves.
AND he cannot be the one who makes overblown claims of sufficient personal authority to read the papers of someone who is his scientific better by a Google or more and dismiss them in a hand wave, who writes above.
They are all related, clearly, because not one of them has the cojones to stand up and identify himself, and of course i still am crazy to know which one wrote that he had no desire to publish anything related to hiv?
So, how many dafs are there in it?
Aunt Gertrude also wrote, even more famously, another line that applies perfectly to this 'collective'. She was writing about Oakland...."There's no there there."
P.S. I'm very comfortably retired, and spend my days doing pretty much exactly what I want. What do you do Dale?
please do not write that Duesberg's (or my) reasoning is like "a rose is a rose is a rose."
That would be too pathetic a reposte, even from "you", and i have no desire to be simply sadistic in my comments to "you" here. Others who are actually reading them will have noted that they ALL relate to the MATTER AT HAND on the CD.
In fact, it is the HIV=AIDS equation that is a perfect example of auntie G's immortal line.
I dismiss nothing without an explanation. Anyone following this discussion will see that you are the one dismissing arguments with handwaves and calling on authority to bolster statements that anyone who reads the J.Biosci. article critically can see are flawed.
I'm not saying that Duesberg's ability to reason is flawed but that the reasoning presented in that article is flawed.
Gallo may be an a-hole and Duesberg may be a saint wrongly persecuted. Having never met either of them, I couldn't judge. In any case, personalities don't make scientific data true or false. I note however that if Gallo is indeed an a-hole, I would think that would make the scientific community all the more eager to prove him wrong. Yet 20 years later, the majority of scientists appear to have bought the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS.
If Duesberg's arguments themselves are so straightforwardly impeccable, they should be obvious to any moderately intelligent person. If the arguments are sufficiently sophisticated that they require an extensive background education in virology and medical science to understand, then it's disingenous to present them to a lay audience who lack that background as if they are obvious.
In fact, you want to dismiss any audience who isn't willing to uncritically accept Duesberg's conclusions because you say they should.
Elizabeth writes stuff and nonsense because she isn't a scientist and I write stuff and nonsense because I claim to be a scientist but refuse to provide a CV. Jeremy writes stuff and nonsense because he's just starting out as a scientist. Caltechgirl and Nick Bennett wrote stuff and nonsense for reasons I've forgotten now.
So I have to wonder as Elizabeth does, if the quality of the arguments boils down to credentials, what makes Duesberg's, or yours for that matter, so much better than those of the vast majority of the scientific community?
Dale
daf9/dale: But I have given at least 3 reasons why I think Duesberg's logic is faulty, and you, Harvey (whoever you are!) have consistently dodged and played fancy footwork and avoided answering any of them. Put up or shut up. So there! And besides I will not post my CV because of what happened to my good friend and alter ego Nick Bennett when he had the temerity to do so in your not so famous Free Book.
bialy: i wrote a book that took me 4 years to complete that answers every single one of your 'logical arguments' in sufficient detail that the scientific illuminat, including Sir. Henry Harris (who wrote me that he read it in one sitting, as did Charles Canter)have no problems understanding.
Am i an absolutely shameless promoter of my work? rhetorical pregunta, but why not, neither nature nor Science will do me the favor of trashing it in very public so that it can sell 50,000 copies and the Virtual Library of Biotechnology for the Americas that gets all the profits of my book and the CD will be able to multiply its free distribution of scientific literature online to 20,000 instead of 4000 scientists in Latin America and the Caribbean who have very limited access to the scientific literature on which their work so vitally depends.
So now what you appear to be saying is that the arguments supporting any one of the three statements of Duesberg's that I questioned or the fourth statement that you raised as an example; well those arguments are so complex they can't be articulated in a simple sentence or two but require the reading of a book of over 270 pages. A book whose title and description, by the way, would suggest that the focus the book isn't HIV and AIDS at all.
All I can say is that is a mighty convenient argument for you.
Dale
i can't wait to see what daf9/dale has written in the two hours it will take to play our best 2 out of 3 to 20 match
I haven't been keeping up with the thread, but in quickly reviewing it, it occurred to me what you're saying about Duesberg's use of the data is not that he mis-used or abused it, but that his interpretation is contestable. I don't think Duesberg would disagree with his; his project, after all, is to show that these numbers can be understood differently when not viewed through the HIV/AIDS paradigm. So go ahead and contest his interpretation, but don't fall into the trap--and I realize this is a trip that Dean and Dr. Bialy, somewhat disingenuously, set for you--of debating Duesberg's character, his scientific credibility, wherewithal, and so on.
To Dean and Dr. Bialy: I assume that you're participating in these discussions because you want to carry Duesberg's findings to a wider audience. To do this, you must engage people's criticisms, however facile you think they may be. If all you do is say, it's in my book, or you're too unqualified to understand, I don't see why you started the discussion--or why you're taking part in it--in the first place. Dale and Elizabeth might be more wedded to the status quo than you wish they were, but I've found them, particularly Elizabeth, to be quite open-minded and willing to concede opposing view points when appropriate. My God, the fact that they're participating in this discussion signals their receptivity to new ideas; most people, after all, would dismiss these conversations as the intellectual masturbation of delusional heretics.
Celia, I'm sure I'm not the only one who respects your work and appreciates your entry into Dean's World. Your earlier post about AZT was spot-on. It has become conventional wisdom in the gay community, after much reflection, of course, that AZT was an unmitigated disaster. Imagine the shame and regret that come with realizing that the very medicine you lobbied so hard to get only added to your community's death toll. Elizabeth, although I respect your competing interpretation of the AZT data, I simply can't abide your argument that AZT was the best treatment available at the time--and that it only killed those who were already quite sick, who, in short, were going to die anyway. That drug killed healthy and unhealthy people. It turned healthy people into sickly people who required regular blood transfusions and who were capable of little else than lying in bed. Desperation does not justify using a formerly shelved medicine--shelved because it was excessively toxic--to treat sick people. Duesberg encourages us to consider what might have happened if doctors, instead of prescribing AZT, had instead urged their patients to adopt a healthier lifestyle--to eat better, get more sleep, take vitamins, exit the party circuit, ceased drinking, opiate, nitrate consumption and so forth. Might more lives have been spared? Not enough thought went into AZT, period.
But, at the same time, I think Celia's reliance on first-hand narratives begs an obvious question. What about the conventional wisdom, now ascendant in the gay community, that HAART is a brilliant success, that it has saved many lives and brought many people back from the threshold of death? Real gay men have witnessed other real gay men bounce back from chronic illness and infectious diseases after going on the medicines. They're not symptom free, to be sure, but they sure as hell beat the alternative. The success of HAART, in my view, is the strongest evidence against Duesberg and his allies. If the medicine isn't combating HIV, then what is it doing? Why is it so beneficial? And before concluding, let me first preempt the objection that nevirapine has killed babies and mothers and that HAART causes lipodystrophy and other bodily deformities. To the first point, I agree that no medicine should be foisted onto unwitting patients who are desperate for help (that was the AZT problem); to the second point, yes, the medicine isn't perfect, but if you ask gay men whether the side-effects are worth it, particularly those who have been sick with pcp, cmv, and so on, they will almost uniformly reply yes. It's not enough to say that these medicines have harmful side effects; so do medicines treating alzheimer's, parkinson's disease and so on. You must take the next step and show that these medicines are worse than the illness, or that they're more responsible for the illness than other alleged causes. And I don't think the HIV skeptics have established this.
AIDS patients are now far more likely to die of heart disease than they are of pcp, cmv or kaposi's. And it's true that the medicines contribute to these deaths by raising cholestorol to unhealthy levels. But that doesn't mean that the medicines are doing more harm than good; it simply means that we need to develop meds with fewer side effects.
OMG! Now i know who you are!You are really the president of the United States.
But don't you have better things to do than play around on this weblog with someone who so obviously has as little respect for you as the president of my 'real' country of the corazon? (I mean of course the great Thabo Mbeki.)
Here is a picture of me (disguised) &Carlos in the most wonderful salon de carambola in all of Cuernavaca (and environs.)
And here are some disguised pictures of the mesa itself.
If you last comment was addressed to me, I am willing to read all sorts of things to educate myself. If they are relevant. If you are saying that your book is better able to explain how the scientific data supports Duesberg's hypothesis than is articulated by Duesberg in his scientific writing ... if that's what you're saying then I would indeed be interested in reading your book. But I would like some evidence that is the case before I shell out the $13.97 +S/H that amazon.com will charge me.
Dale
I think it was addressed to me this time. But don't worry, I'm sure he'll start in on you again soon enough.