THE HIV DEBATE

By John Lauritsen

New York Native 22 Feb. 1988

Peter H. Duesberg, Professor of Molecular Biology at Berkeley, was in New York City a couple of weeks ago for a leukemia conference. As readers of the New York Native and Christopher Street are aware, Duesberg is the man who almost a year ago provided comprehensive and devastating refutation of the prevailing hypothesis that the cause of AIDS is HIV-. Despite a near-blackout in the general media, and despite stonewalling on the part of the U.S. Public Health Service and the leading "AIDS experts", belief in the "AIDS virus" hypothesis is rapidly eroding.

Duesberg spoke on January 12, 1987 to a Town Meeting in San Francisco, which was attended by 600 people (several hundred more were turned away for lack of seating). According to Caden Gray in the San Francisco Sentinel: "Dr. Peter Duesberg received a hero's welcome... inside the Metropolitan Community Church on Eureka Street Tuesday night."

A week later in New York, Duesberg appeared on gay cable TV program, "Out in the 80's", along with Michael Callen of the People With AIDS Coalition and host, Drew Hopkins. Earlier in the evening, Duesberg attended an informal dinner-symposium with members of the media at Dojo's Restaurant. Besides myself, there were William Booth of Science Magazine; Harvey Bialy of Bio/Technology, which also published Duesberg on HIV; Bruce Lambert of the New York Times; Joe Nicholson, medicine-science editor of the New York Post; Celia Farber and Anthony Liversidge of SPIN, which published an interview with Duesberg in January; Robert Lederer of Covert Action; Joseph Sonnabend, M.D., an independent AIDS researcher in New York City; Hopkins; Callen; and Michael's lover, Richard. By the time we'd finished coffee, every person at the table seemed to be convinced that, whatever the cause or causes of AIDS might eventually prove to be, HIV was not it.

The CRI Forum

Two days later (January 21), Duesberg accepted the invitation of Sonnabend and Callen to speak at a meeting of the Community Research Initiative (CRI) at the Gay Community Center. Despite the short notice, a capacity audience showed up to hear a panel composed of Duesberg, Sonnabend, and Dr. Michael Lange, of St. Luke's/Roosevelt Hospital Center, moderated by Michael Callen, discuss the merits of the HIV hypothesis.

Several hundred people listened in silence for almost half an hour, as Duesberg put forward his reasons, some of them rather technical, why HIV could not be the cause of AIDS.

For several years -- indeed, well before the 1984 "AIDS virus" announcement of Secretary Heckler -- Dr. Sonnabend has opposed the notion that AIDS is a totally new disease, caused by a single, unique "AIDS agent". In addition to supporting the analysis of Peter Duesberg, Sonnabend gave additional reasons of his own why HIV was a poor candidate as the cause of AIDS. Most striking was an "evolutionary argument", which runs roughly as follows: There is no longer just one "AIDS virus"; there are several, perhaps as many as four or five, at last count. It is now claimed that both HIV-1 and HIV-2 are capable of causing AIDS, a disease which allegedly appeared in the world for the first time only a few years ago. However, viruses are products of evolution, and very ancient -- there is no such thing as a "new" virus. HIV-1 and HIV-2 differ in genetic structure by up to 60%; they are completely different viruses, not merely variants or strains; they do not have a closely-related common ancestor. The proposition that, within the space of a few years, two different viruses, each capable of causing the same new disease, should have come into being, or should have gone from an animal reservoir to susceptible human populations, is beyond the bounds of probability.

Michael Callen pointed out that a year ago, the "AIDS experts" were putting forward a "Pac Man model" of how HIV was supposed to destroy the immune system: that is, HIV went around gobbling up T-4 cells. Since Duesberg's Cancer Research article appeared, which demonstrated that HIV does not and cannot kill T- cells in a living animal, the "Pac Man model" has quietly been dropped. (Needless to say, none of the "experts" have admitted they were wrong.) It is no longer claimed that HIV kills cells directly, and "indirect mechanisms" are desperately being sought. (Anyone who can think of a halfway plausible "indirect mechanism" should immediately contact the National Cancer Institute at (301) 496-6641; they need your help.)

Callen has conducted a study of long-term survivors, those who were diagnosed as having AIDS five or more years ago. One third of these men showed no evidence of ever having been exposed to HIV -- despite repeated testing, HIV could not be cultured from their blood, and they had no HIV antibodies. To anyone with a scientific outlook, this evidence argues powerfully against the hypothesis that HIV is the cause of AIDS. The CDC, however, decided that /these people with AIDS (PWAs) had never really had AIDS in the first place!/ -- this despite the fact that they had had PCP, KS, and any number of other, qualifying opportunistic infections, and were in no meaningful way different from other PWAs, aside from having survived for so long. This is an exquisite example of what I have previously referred to as the CDC's "procrustean epidemiology".

Lange was left with the onus of defending the "AIDS virus" theory, and in the course of the discussion he seemed to move closer to the positions of Duesberg and Sonnabend. Lange surprised some members of the audience when he gave a passionate denunciation of the "unprincipled" and "unethical" behavior of the Public Health Service and the medical establishment, accusing them of "stonewalling" on the HIV question.

The ethics of scientific dialogue

The bitter truth is that at this point, the cause or causes of AIDS are unknown. Vast amounts of time, energy and money have been squandered on the basis of an untenable hypothesis. It will take real struggle to arrive at a point where researchers are again willing to explore all reasonable hypotheses in the spirit of scientific free enquiry. It will take struggle to undo the self-perpetuating delusional system that has developed around the "AIDS virus", to undo the atmosphere of demoralization and intimidation which have resulted from the totalitarian tactics of the Public Health Service.

While we need not agree on which etiological hypotheses are the most promising, there can be no denying that the medical establishment has behaved in a shamefully unscientific manner. I think that future history of science courses will look back upon the "AIDS virus" episode as being even worse than such atrocities as Lysenkoism, in which for many years the principles of modern genetics could not be taught in the Soviet Union.

When Duesberg's Cancer Research article was published, it became incumbent upon those scientists who had championed HIV as the cause of AIDS to respond to his challenge. It is a cardinal principle of scientific ethics that scientists must be willing to engage in dialogue; they must be willing to defend their hypotheses in open debate. Specifically, the "AIDS virus" experts, individually or collectively, should have submitted a reply, written with appropriate dignity, and substantiated with references, to Cancer Research or another medical journal. Their personal desires or inclinations, their interests or disinterests, had nothing to do with the matter. It was their duty, as members of the scientific community, to reply to the well-reasoned and well-documented arguments of one of their peers.

Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Drs. William Haseltine and Myron Essex of Harvard University -- not one of these HIV protagonists has had the courage, the honesty, or the simple decency to reply publicly to Duesberg. And yet it is upon the word and reputations of these four men that HIV has come to be accepted as the cause of AIDS. Their behavior is shameful; it cannot be condoned. It is not merely that they have violated the ethics of science, or that they have been discourteous to Professor Duesberg. By repudiating scientific dialogue, they bear moral responsibility for the consequences of basing the fight against AIDS on a false premise.

If HIV is not the cause, then almost all current research efforts, and hundreds of millions of dollars, are going down the drain. Precious time and energy are being squandered. And thousands of lives are needlessly being lost -- *our lives*.

References

1. Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., "Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality", Cancer Research, March 1, 1987. See also Jaoh Lauritsen, "Saying No to HIV: An Interview With Prof. Peter Duesberg Who Says, 'I Would Not Worry About Being Antibody Positive'", New York Native, issue 220 (reprinted in Christopher Street, issue 118); and Peter Duesberg, "A Challenge To The AIDS Establishment", Bio/Technology, November 1987.

2. John Lauritsen, "Caveat Emptor: The Report of the National Academy of Sciences on AIDS Is Filled With Misinformation", New York Native, March 9, 1987.