"The failure of the HIVNET researchers to properly control their study with a placebo group is not as unusual as one might think. In fact, this failure is perhaps the outstanding characteristic of AIDS research in general. The 1986 Phase II trial that preceded the FDA's unprecedented rapid approval of AZT was presented as a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, though it was anything but that. As became clear afterward through the efforts of a few journalists, as well as the testimony of participants, the trial was “unblinded” almost immediately because of the severe toxicity of the drug. Members of the control group began to acquire AZT independently or from other study participants, and eventually the study was aborted and everyone was put on the drug. As in the case of HIVNET, documents obtained by journalist John Lauritsen under the Freedom of Information Act subsequently suggested that data-tampering was widespread. Documents were altered, causes of death were unverified, and the researchers tended to assume what they wished to prove, i.e., that placebo-group diseases were AIDS-related but that those in the AZT group were not. So serious were the deviations from experimental protocol at one Boston hospital that an FDA inspector attempted to exclude data from that center. In the end, however, all the data were included in the results, and the FDA approved the drug in 1987. AZT, which was developed as a chemotherapeutic agent in 1964 but shelved because of its extreme toxicity, is a DNA chain terminator, which means that it brings DNA synthesis to a halt. It is therefore an extremely efficient cell killer. HIV is a retrovirus, and as such replicates itself by inserting its genes into a cell's genome so that when the cell divides a new copy of the virus is produced. AZT prevents the replication of HIV by killing infected T-cells; unfortunately, it kills all dividing cells indiscriminately, whether they are infected with a retrovirus or not, and will very quickly decimate even a healthy person's immune system. AZT's manufacturer, GlaxoSmith Kline, chose not to comment for this article.
AZT was approved in record time, but that record didn't stand for long. In 1991, the FDA approved another DNA chain terminator, ddI, without even the pretense of a controlled study. Anti-HIV drugs such as Crixivan were approved in as little as six weeks, and cast as a triumph of AIDS activism. This pattern of jettisoning standard experimental controls has continued up to the present, as the HIVNET affair amply demonstrates, and has characterized not only research into new drugs designed to exterminate HIV but the more fundamental questions at the root of AIDS research.
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In 1987, Duesberg published a paper in the journal Cancer Research entitled “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality.” He was, at the time, at the top of the field of retrovirology, having mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses and defined the first cancer gene in the 1970s. He was the youngest member, at age fifty, ever elected into the National Academy of Sciences. In this paper, which in the words of his scientific biographer, Harvey Bialy, “sealed his scientific fate for a dozen years,” Duesberg argued that retroviruses don't cause cancer and concluded by detailing how and why the retrovirus HIV cannot cause AIDS.
As AIDS grew in the 1980s into a global, multibillion-dollar juggernaut of diagnostics, drugs, and activist organizations, whose sole target in the fight against AIDS was HIV, condemning Duesberg became part of the moral crusade. Prior to that 1987 paper, Duesberg was one of a handful of the most highly funded and prized scientists in the country. Subsequently, his NIH funding was terminated and he has received not one single federal research dollar since his pre-1987 Outstanding Investigator Grant ran out. Duesberg lost his lab facilities and had to move twice within a few years to smaller labs on the Berkeley campus, where he spent much of his time writing futile research grant proposals asking to test his hypothesis that AIDS is a chemical syndrome, caused by accumulated toxins from heavy drug use. He lost his graduate students, who were warned that to emerge from his lab would blight their careers. He was denied and had to fight for routine pay increases by his employers at UC Berkeley, where he has tenure and still teaches. He was “dis-invited” from scientific conferences, and colleagues even declared that they would refuse to attend any conference that included him. Duesberg also was banished from publishing in scientific journals that previously had welcomed his contributions, most theatrically by the editor of Nature, Sir John Maddox, who wrote a bizarre editorial declaring that Duesberg would be denied the standard scientific “right of reply” in response to personal attacks that were frequently published in that journal. Prior to 1987, Peter Duesberg never had a single grant proposal rejected by the NIH. Since 1991 he has written a total of twenty-five research proposals, every single one of which has been rejected. “They took him out, just took him right out,” says Richard Strohman, an emeritus professor of biology at UC Berkeley.
And what was it, exactly, that Peter Duesberg had done? He simply pointed out that no one had yet proven that HIV is capable of causing a single disease, much less the twenty-five diseases that are now part of the clinical definition of AIDS. HIV was declared the probable cause of AIDS in a U.S. government press conference in 1984. It was claimed that the virus had been discovered by NIH researcher Robert Gallo. In fact, Gallo had not discovered HTLV-III (Human T-cell Lymphotropic Virus III, as it was known before it was rechristened with the more memorable name HIV). That honor belongs primarily to Luc Montagnier, of the Pasteur Institute, who had sent Gallo a sample of the virus. He pointed to a number of paradoxes regarding HIV and argued that far from being evidence that HIV is “mysterious” or “enigmatic,” these paradoxes were evidence that HIV is a passenger virus.
The classical tests of whether or not a microorganism is the cause of infectious disease are known as Koch's postulates. They state: 1) the microorganism must be found in all cases of the disease; 2) it must be isolated from the host and grown in pure culture; 3) it must reproduce the original disease when introduced into a susceptible host; and 4) it must be found present in the experimental host so infected. Although claims to the contrary have been made, Duesberg maintains that it has never been demonstrated that HIV satisfies all of Koch's postulates. His exhaustive analysis of the peer-reviewed scientific literature has revealed more than 4,000 documented AIDS cases in which there is no trace of HIV or HIV antibodies. This number is significant, because there are strong institutional forces deterring such descriptions and because the vast majority of AIDS cases are never described in formal scientific papers. In fact, most AIDS patients have no active HIV in their systems, because the virus has been neutralized by antibodies. (With all other viral diseases, by the way, the presence of antibodies signals immunity from the disease. Why this is not the case with HIV has never been demonstrated.) Generally speaking, HIV can be isolated only by “reactivating” latent copies of the virus, and then only with extraordinary difficulty. Viral load, one of the clinical markers for HIV, is not a measurement of actual, live virus in the body but the amplified fragments of DNA left over from an infection that has been suppressed by antibodies. Another embarrassment for the HIV hypothesis is the extraordinary latency period between infection and the onset of disease, despite the fact that HIV is biochemically most active within weeks of initial infection. This latency period, which apparently grows with every passing year, enables proponents of the theory to evade Koch's third and fourth postulates.
The foregoing is merely a sketch of the central mystery presented by the HIV theory of AIDS. There are many more, which Duesberg has laid out very carefully in his scientific papers and in a trade book published ten years ago, but they all boil down to the central point that when it comes to AIDS, basic scientific standards seem no longer to apply. It has been claimed that HIV somehow causes cell death even when it is not present by remote programmed “suicidal” mechanisms. Some researchers claim that HIV exploits special receptors on human T-cells that, due to a hypothetical genetic mutation, many “Caucasian Europeans” lack, but most Africans have. What's interesting is that many gay men also seem to possess these mysterious receptors, as do intravenous drug users and transfusion recipients. It is claimed that although HIV does not kill the laboratory T-cells used to manufacture AIDS tests, it does kill T-cells in the human body, even though it infects only a very small proportion of them, typically an average of 0.1 percent. HIV does not sicken or kill chimpanzees, though they do produce antibodies. It was recently claimed that HIV appears to be evolving into a form less dangerous to human beings. Such unproven hypotheses about the ingenuity of HIV proliferate in the popular and scientific media like the seasonal flu. Seldom do journalists insist on good hard evidence for these assertions. AIDS is a “syndrome” defined by twenty-five diseases, all of which exist independently of HIV. No one has ever demonstrated the cell-killing mechanism by which HIV is supposed to cause all these different diseases, and no one has ever demonstrated how a sexually transmitted virus can manage to restrict itself overwhelmingly to gay men and other AIDS risk groups instead of spreading randomly through the population, as do all other infectious diseases. The “overwhelming” character of the evidence for HIV's causation has always been epidemiological; which is to say, a correlation, a coincidence. Whenever we have AIDS, researchers say, we also have HIV. But this correlation is a result of the official definition of AIDS, which states that a disease counts as AIDS only if it corresponds with HIV antibodies. (“AIDS without HIV” has been given a singularly unmemorable name: idiopathic CD4 lymphocytopenia.)
. . .
Such studies might be expensive and tedious, but expense has never been a serious objection to AIDS researchers, who have spent many billions of dollars in the last twenty years on HIV research and practically nothing on alternative causes or even co-factors. (Even Luc Montagnier, the discoverer of HIV, has stated repeatedly that the virus cannot cause AIDS without contributing causes.)
Attempts to rigorously test the ruling medical hypothesis of the age are met not with reasoned debate but with the rhetoric of moral blackmail: Peter Duesberg has the blood of African AIDS babies on his hands. Duesberg is evil, a scientific psychopath. He should be imprisoned. Those who wish to engage the AIDS research establishment in the sort of causality debate that is carried on in most other branches of scientific endeavor are tarred as AIDS “denialists,” as if skepticism about the pathogenicity of a retrovirus were the moral equivalent of denying that the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews. Moral zeal rather than scientific skepticism defines the field. It has been decided in advance that HIV causes AIDS; consequently all research and all funding must proceed from that assumption. Similarly, it was known in advance that AZT was a “magic bullet” against HIV; the word was out that it was a “life-saving drug” before anyone could possibly verify this, and so scientific controls were compromised. Journalists (myself included) who reported at the time that the drug apparently was killing patients were labeled “AZT refuseniks” and even “murderers.”
. . .
Regardless of whether Duesberg is right about HIV, his case, like Fishbein's, lays bare the political machinery of American science, and reveals its reflexive hostility to ideas that challenge the dominant paradigm. Such hostility is not unusual in the history of science, Few today remember the controversies over scurvy and pellagra, which, until the discovery of vitamin C and niacin, were blamed by the medical establishment on mysterious infectious agents. Those who pointed out, even before they knew the cause, that dietary changes cured both conditions were dismissed as flat-earthers. but the contemporary situation is dramatically different from those faced by maverick scientists in the past. Today's scientists are almost wholly dependent upon the goodwill of government researchers and powerful peer-review boards, who control a financial network binding together the National Institutes of Health, academia, and the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Many scientists live in fear of losing their funding. “Nobody is safe,” one NIH-funded researcher told me. “The scientific-medical complex is a $2 trillion industry,” says former drug developer Dr. David Rasnick, who now works on nutrition-based AIDS programs in Pretoria, South Africa. “You can buy a tremendous amount of consensus for that kind of money.”
“You have to write a grant a year almost. And you have to write four to get one, if you're any good. I got out just in time. Everybody who's still in there says the same thing,” says Berkeley's Strohman. “Before the biotech boom, we never had this incessant urging to produce something useful, meaning profitable. Everybody is caught up in it. Grants, millions of dollars flowing into laboratories, careers and stars being made. The only way to be a successful scientist today is to follow consensus. If you're going to produce something and put it on the market you don't want any goddamn surprises. You've got the next quarter to report and you don't want any bad news. It's all about the short term now. Science has totally capitulated to corporate interests. Given their power and money, it's going to be very hard to work our way out of this.”
Duesberg has never been afraid to challenge consensus, but contrary to what many in the AIDS establishment would have us believe, he is very far from being a scientific psychopath. Nor is Duesberg alone in dissenting from AIDS orthodoxy. More than 2,300 people, mostly scientists and doctors, including Nobelists in chemistry and medicine, have signed the petition of the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis, which calls for a more independent and skeptical approach to the question of AIDS causality. In 1997, on the brink of scientific demise in the U.S., Duesberg was quietly invited back to his native Germany to resume his cancer research. During this time, commuting biannually between Mannheim and Berkeley, Duesberg formulated and tested a theory that shifts the focus of cancer causation from the “mutant gene” theory that has reigned for about three decades to a simpler explanation that revives an abandoned thread of research from early in the twentieth century, which posited that cancer is caused by chromosomal malfunction, now known as “aneuploidy.”
Harvey Bialy, the founding scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology, a sister journal to Nature, recently spent four years writing a scientific biography of Duesberg entitled Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS. The book is a history of the papers, review articles, and letters that Duesberg published between 1983 and 2003, and the responses they generated. I asked him why he wrote the book. “I am persuaded that aneuploidy is the initiating event in carcinogenesis,” Bialy said. “Peter has found the genetic basis for cancer. The most immediate application of it will be early diagnosis.”
“When aneuploidy, or genetic instability, or whatever linguistic term you want to use, gets reincarnated as the dominant theoretical explanation for the genesis of cancer, Peter Duesberg will be recognized as a major contributor to that,” Bialy said. “I wanted to make sure that his contributions were not swept aside or ignored.” I asked him about the AIDS controversy. “AIDS is a political thing, and Peter's stuck in it. There's nothing to discuss anymore on that.” Bialy made a critical point: Science is amoral and should be. There is no right and wrong, only correct and incorrect. “Duesberg,” Bialy said, “is a classical molecular biologist. All he is interested in is rigorously testing dueling hypotheses. The twin pillars, AIDS and oncogenes, both are crumbling because of the questions Peter Duesberg put into motion.”
“The basis of speciation is changing the content and the number of chromosomes,” says Duesberg. “Cancer is essentially a failed speciation. It's not mutation. Cancer is a species. A really bad breast, lung, or prostate cancer has seventy, eighty, or more chromosomes. Those are the real bad guys—they're way outside our species. But it's a rare kind of species that as a parasite is more successful in its host than the normal host cell is.”
There has been considerable international interest in Duesberg's new research. Even so, the National Cancer Institute still refuses to fund him. Duesberg has submitted five grant proposals to study aneuploidy, and all have been rejected. One of the most influential cancer researchers in the country, Bert Vogelstein, Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology at Johns Hopkins University, has written a letter urging the NCI to reconsider. “I agree with him that aneuploidy is an essential part of cancer,” Vogelstein wrote. “Dr. Duesberg continues to have a major impact on this burgeoning area of research, through his careful experimental observations as well as through his thoughtful reviews and critiques of the subject. There is no question that he is a world leader in this field of investigation.” In January 2004, he hosted a conference on aneuploidy and invited fifty cancer researchers from around the world who also have been working on the connections between aneuploidy and cancer. Seventy showed up, including such luminaries as Thomas Ried, the National Cancer Institute's head of cancer genomics, Gert Auer from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and Walter Giaretti, who heads the equivalent of the NCI in Italy. And on May 31 of last year, amid considerable tension, Duesberg was invited by the National Cancer Institute to give a talk at the NIH. The auditorium crackled with nervous tension as people filed in and took their seats. His talk was succinct and laced with his characteristic irony, but the questions afterward were civilized, with no tangible hostility. All was not forgiven, however. After the talk, while Duesberg remained at the podium talking to a group of people from the audience, I noticed a very angry-looking NIH publicist standing at the back of the room admonishing a colleague, a scientist, who'd posed a question that somehow connected aneuploidy to HIV. “You opened it up,” she scolded. “We got through it okay, but you opened it up.” As the questioner tried to defend himself, a thickset man who'd been standing in the circle said loudly, as though intending to broadcast it across the room: “Well, at least if he's wrong about this he won't be killing millions of people.”
Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, who discovered the revolutionary DNA technique called the polymerase chain reaction, has long been a supporter of Duesberg, but he has grown weary of the AIDS wars and the political attacks on contrarian scientists. “Look, there's no sociological mystery here,” he told me. “It's just people's income and position being threatened by the things Peter Duesberg is saying. That's why they're so nasty. In the AIDS field, there is a widespread neurosis among scientists, but the frenzy with which people approach the HIV debate has slacked off, because there's just so much slowly accumulating evidence against them. It's really hard for them to deal with it. They made a really big mistake and they're not ever going to fix it. They're still poisoning people.”
Duesberg thinks that up to 75 percent of AIDS cases in the West can be attributed to drug toxicity. If toxic AIDS therapies were discontinued, he says, thousands of lives could be saved virtually overnight. And when it comes to Africa, he agrees with those who argue that AIDS in Africa is best understood as an umbrella term for a number of old diseases, formerly known by other names, that currently do not command high rates of international aid. The money spent on antiretroviral drugs would be better spent on sanitation and improving access to safe drinking water (the absence of which kills 1.4 million children a year).
It's too late to save people like Joyce Ann Hafford, but it is possible that an open and honest debate about the risks of current AIDS treatments and the scientific questions concerning HIV could save others.
harpers.org
"This is similar to the belief that NASA faked the moon landings."
Is there scientific evidence, that is, have there been any third party independent verifications of NASA's data? There are several satellites launched by different countries with digital cameras orbiting the moon. To date, none of them have provided photos of the moon landings by NASA.
"You want to believe that [NASA] is right. . . You want to believe [in spite of the lack of] experiments performed and scientific papers published on [the moon landing that NASA is the sole repository of] the truth. You want to believe that [NASA has no interest in defending] jobs, research funding, status etc." |
