[off-topic] Jack: You quote Peter Duesberg: " . . . the HIV-AIDS hypothesis has failed to produce any public health benefits, no vaccine, no effective drug, no prevention, no cure, not a single life saved."
But isn't this (several years old) quote now clearly wrong, wholly undercutting Duesberg's argument that something other than HIV causes AIDS?
The multi-drug cocktails that have become standard treatments since protease inhibitors were developed about three years ago are surely effective drug treatments, have saved many lives, and have produced many public health benefits.
Moreover, from my position as a nonscientist with some scientific literacy, I have been inferring that Duesberg's argument was pretty fully refuted by the fact that the protease inhibitors, the reverse transcriptase inhibitors, etc. were developed based on a detailed knowledge of the structure and properties of the HIV virus. If the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS is wrong, how can these things work so well? Is there an answer to this?
While I share your concern with the way scientific orthodoxy sometimes stifles renegades ("premature genius"), particularly Dr. McCully's case, and greatly value the bigger-picture perspectives you generously bring to this and other SI threads, isn't Peter Duesberg in this case probably just wrong, his ideas justly rejected?
BTW, on the stifling power of scientific orthodoxy you may be interested in Richard Rhodes' book Deadly Feasts, which explores the lively controversy whether mad cow disease, scrapie and their human analogues Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD), "new variant" CJD (NVCJD), etc. are caused by prions or by some as yet unidentified virus or other cause. In that case, the Nobel Prize was awarded a year ago to the prion side of the argument, putting a very heavy weight of orthodoxy against the (I think, fairly persuasive) viral argument. Particularly interesting is the new last chapter in the paperback edition, added since the Nobel Prize.
-- Bob
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