HIV QUESTIONED

HIV cause for AIDS questioned
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_bock/19990205_xcabo_tracking_d.shtml
WorldNetDaily - FEBRUARY 5, 1999

Tracking down political science If I've learned anything in 18 years in the newspaper business, it's that if almost all the major media and establishment experts are of one opinion on a scientific controversy with a political angle, you will seldom be wrong if you assume that consensus is not only wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Remember the dread Nuclear Winter? Global warming is one recent example, as is the fabled destruction of the ozone layer, but how many remember acid rain. I interviewed the top experts in atmospheric science at the time and found that they believed the politically preferred theory of the moment -- that it was caused by power plants in the Midwest spewing poison that drifted to the Adirondacks was the least likely hypothesis and almost certainly not true. But the great herd of independent minds in the establishment media had somehow never found the acknowledged experts (it did take me a couple of days of intensive telephone work). So when a story linking chimpanzees and AIDS received prominent, almost breathless play earlier this week, my BS detector went into overtime. Unless you operate on the assumption that any story with both "research" and "AIDS" in it is automatically a Big Deal, this bit of research didn't seem like much of a breakthrough -- unless one thinks that playing it prominently will convince conspiracy theorists who think AIDS was invented by the CIA to come to their senses.

Scientists have long thought the HIV-1 virus might have been transmitted from chimpanzees or monkeys to human beings. But of 400 chimpanzees in captivity tested for Simian Immune Virus (chimpanzee) or SIV cpz, only three had it, and one of the three had an SIV virus so different from HIV-1 that few believed it was related. Then along came Marilyn, a chimp who had died in 1985 but some of whose tissues had been frozen. Dr. Beatrice Hahn and a team at the University of Alabama used the technique known as polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to recover virus from a tissue and identify it. It turned out to resemble the virus in two other known chimpanzees as well as HIV-1, and all three were members of the subspecies Pan troglodytes troglodytes, which in nature inhabit areas in west and central Africa where HIV-1 has been identified among humans.

Interesting, but it's still only three chimps and nobody claims to know just how the virus got from chimps to humans or why it changed as it did after it made the switch. The theories are all self-admitted speculation. And nobody knows why the virus has never been known to cause illness in chimps. So everybody agrees -- as usual that much more research is needed.

To be sure, real science is a process of fitting pieces of knowledge together and testing them through peer-reviews until patterns seem to emerge, then testing some more and some more until a hypothesis can be said to be proven. It's silly to expect big answers to come forth all at once.

Still, this story is curious. If you read deeply and ask questions, it becomes obvious that ``the riddle of the origin of AIDS'' has not been solved -- not even close. A few chimpanzees have been shown to have a virus very similar to the HIV-1 virus, and they're members of a subspecies known to live in roughly the same area where HIV-1 has been identified. Interesting, but far from conclusive. Most of the rest is speculation.

I decided to go to the most unrelenting critic of the way the scientific establishment has handled the most politicized disease in history for a comment. I had read about Dr. Peter Duesberg, a molecular and cell microbiologist at the University of California at Berkeley who isolated the first cancer gene through his work on retroviruses in 1970 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986, but I hadn't spoken to him before. I had been curious but mildly skeptical about his work. He turned out to be accessible and delightful to talk with.

Prof. Duesberg believes that HIV-1 doesn't cause AIDS at all, that the syndrome of afflictions that have been subsumed within the definition of AIDS are the result of abusing illicit drugs in combinations that degraded the immune systems of those who took them. He also thinks that AZT, touted as a cure for AIDS, makes it worse. Which means that almost all the money spent on AIDS research in the last 15 years or so has been wasted.

Pretty provocative. Although a few people have written about Dr. Duesberg's approach, most establishment media avoid him like the plague. But Nobel Prize chemist Kary Mullis -- who invented the polymerase chain reaction procedure used to analyze Marilyn's virus -- wrote a foreword to Dr. Duesberg's book. There Mullis told how he tried for years -- and failed -- to get any of the established experts to provide him a citation for a scientific study that proved that AIDS was caused by HIV. Prof. Duesberg's website www.duesberg.com has this piece and more scientific papers than you'll have time to read in the next couple of weeks.)

Can it be that no such study exists? That the decision that HIV causes AIDS was a political rather than a scientific determination? Curious, at least.

Dr. Duesberg said he thought the chimp study was good science as far as it went, showing a close resemblance between the SIV cpz virus and HIV-1. But he thinks it fits his theory -- that HIV is not the cause of AIDS -- better than it fits the established theory.

"Leave aside the fact that no method of transmission has been demonstrated," he told me. "The best evidence is that the SIV causes no illness in chimps. Why would it cause an illness in humans? Normally, when a virus migrates from one species to another it becomes less pathogenic, not more -- that's why vaccines work. Why would this one virus and only this one act in the opposite fashion?"

So we've got a scientific dispute with reputable people on both sides that is almost entirely unacknowledged by the major media. Actually there are a number of disputes about almost every aspect of AIDS, which has been from the outset the most thoroughly politicized disease in history, but the party line is almost always characterized in the media as unchallenged and beyond rational dispute.

More research really is needed. But Prof. Duesberg, despite having been awarded in the past a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health -- which is something like the NIH's version of "genius grants" in which the recipient is implicitly told he's so good the NIH wants him relieved of financial concerns for a long period so he can follow his scientific muses freely -- is unlikely to get any more government money. If alternative theories are to be explored, they'll have to be funded by the private sector, but most major foundations are if anything more timid than the government, more concerned with respectability and getting along than with real science.

Alan Bock is senior editorial writer and columnist at the Orange County Register, Senior Contributing Editor at the National Educator, a contributing editor at Liberty magazine and author of "Ambush at Ruby Ridge."

"Of all the things published about Ruby Ridge, Alan Bock did the best job. We appreciate his hard work and dedication to getting as many facts straight as possible.'' -- Randy and Sara Weaver

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