VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE
LETTER FROM JOHN MADDOX TO PETER DUESBERG
nature
4 Little Essex St.
London, WC2R 3LF
2 March 1995
Peter H Duesberg
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
University of California
Berkelety, CA 94720
Dear Peter,
First, the good news: we shall publish the essence of what you have
to say. But there are obvious snags. Let me retail my original conversation
with Harvey Bialy. What format? he asked. A letter, I said. That's too
little, he said; what about 1,000 words. I said I was not prepared to negotiate
the length of a letter not yet written. But what you have sent would take
at least 3 pages of Nature.
Second, I resent the way in which you appear to have alerted the world's
press to the existence of your piece. Why do that?
Third, and this may not be such good news, I plan to go through your
piece with a fine-tooth comb with the intention of ridding it of repetitions
and various misrepresentations.
Let me illustrate the last point by reference to your page 3 and the
continuation of the main paragraph on page 4. You start with the phrase
"HIV was proposed to follow an entirely unprecedented course of action,"
you document various misconceptions about the functioning of HIV and then
you conclude with the phrase "this HIV-hypothesis." Frankly,
that smacks of the old Goebbels technique, that of creating a straw man
from a farrago of indefensible propositions and then knocking it down.
I know of nobody who, in the past decade, has put forward your points (1)
to (5) as a unified statement of the conventional position. (Even you have
to assemble the position with 20 references.) On the contrary, the "HIV-hypothesis"
is much simpler: "HIV causes AIDS, in some manner not understood;
most of those infected will develop the disease."
Nor is it a fair representation of Wei et al. and Hoet al. to say that
they "claim" to resolve the three specific "paradoxes"
you list. In truth, they do nothing of the kind. The only conceivable reference
to the 10-year latency period, for example, is in Ho et al., and consists
of the simile of the tap and drain. To quote from Wei et al., "The
kinetics of virus and CD4+ lymphocyte replication" imply "First,
... continuous rounds of de novo virus infection, replication and rapid
cell turnover ... probably represent a primary driving force in HIV pathogenesis
... Second ... a striking capacity of the virus for biologically relevant
change. Third ... that virus production per se is directly involved in
CD4+ cell destruction." Ho et al. go further, but only to this extent:
" ... our findings strongly support the view that AIDS is primarily
a consequence of continuous high-level replication of HIV-1, leading to
virus and immune-mediated killing of CD4 lymphocytes."
My position as an editor is that straight misrepresentations such as
these have no place in a journal like this. You complain at an earlier
stage that I have improperly "personalized" this argument. How
do you suppose that Wei et al. and Ho et al. would feel if we were to publish
your travesty of what they have said?
My suggestion, therefore, is that you throw away the first four pages
of your introduction, and devise a less inflammatory introduction in which
you state that the two papers have not changed your view, and go on to
give the reasons. Please let me know whether that is acceptable. I have
some other less radical comments on the remainder of the text, but there's
no point in sending them at this stage if you cannot agree to something
along the lines I have suggested.
Yours sincerely,
John Maddox
Editor
cc: Harvey Bialy
VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE