VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE

SUMMARY OF PHONE CONVERSATION BETWEEN JOHN MADDOX AND HARVEY BIALY

On the afternoon of January 12, [1995] the day the Nature issue containing the Ho and Wei et al. papers appeared, and one day after the press conference announcing these landmark publications, I received a rare telephone call from my colleague, the newly knighted, Sir John Maddox, editor of Nature. The essence of the ensuing conversation is summarized below.

After congratulating John on his recently acquired honorific, I asked to what did I owe the pleasure of his call. He then asked me what I thought of the "HIV-1 dynamics" papers. I replied by thanking him for publishing them, as they were so transparently bad, they would convince any reasonable scientist who had the endurance to read them that the HIV-AIDS hypothesis was absolutely intellectually bankrupt. I also chided him by saying that even Wain-Hobson didn't know what to make of them, judging by his incoherent News & Views piece that accompanied their publication.

To my surprise, his response to these remarks was remarkably devoid of any outrage. We discussed in a cursory manner some of the more obvious criticisms of the papers, such as their lack of controls, and the methodological and biological problems with their estimates of free infectious virus. I also mentioned that I thought it ironic that after years of denying that T cells turned over at the rate of 5% in two days, the HIV-AIDS protagonists were now at last admitting this well known fact. He responded by asking how did I explain the "dramatic increase in T cells after treatment with the protease inhibitor." I replied that this transient, hardly dramatic, increase was also a well known phenomena called lymphocyte trafficking, which occurs in response to many chemical insults.

The conversation then changed direction and John said that he had, without success, been trying to reach Peter (Duesberg) to inform him that he was, in this instance, willing to rescind his previous "refusal of the right of reply" and would welcome a correspondence from Peter (and myself) addressing what we perceived as the shortcomings of Ho and Wei et al. He promised me that if the piece was relevant, succinct and not personally rude, he would publish it "unslagged." When I asked him what this meant, he said that it would be published as received, without prior review and without a response appearing in the same issue. I said "do you mean it will be allowed to generate its own replies?," and he said "yes." I congratulated him on his willingness to open a proper scientific debate, and said I would communicate our conversation to Peter.

I was a bit surprised to see his editorial in the following week's Nature in which he went much further than our conversation in offering the pages of Nature to uncensored debate. I was, however, not surprised to discover, some weeks later, that the response which appears unedited in this issue of Genetica, was deemed "too long by half and too unfocussed" to warrant publication in his own highly esteemed journal. *

VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE