Excerpt Three: Outrageous Journalism That Hindered AIDS Science Debate

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http://www.redflagsweekly.com/conferences/aids/2004_aug11.html

 

Oncogenes, Aneuploidy And AIDS: A Scientific Life &

Times Of Peter H. Duesberg

 

By Harvey Bialy

 

Harvey Bialy is a scientist and has known Duesberg

since 1966. He is a resident scholar at the Institute

of Biotechnology of the Autonomous National University

of Mexico and formerly a postdoctoral fellow of the

Damon Runyon Foundation for Cancer Research. He is

also the founding scientific editor of Nature

Biotechnology and a member of South Africa’s

Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel.

 

Go To Excerpt One: The Effort To Silence Duesberg

 

Go To Excerpt Two: A Controversial AIDS Meeting In The

White House

 

(Permission To Serialize Granted By The

Author...References Have Been Omitted For This

Serialization)

 

Excerpt Three: Outrageous Journalism That Hindered

AIDS Science Debate

 

From Chapter Four

 

" Entrapment is this society's / sole activity "

-Edward Dom, Gunslinger

 

John was not always as unkind in rejecting Peter's

submissions to Nature on the subject of HIV and AIDS

as he was to become, though reject them he did, and

often in the most revealing prose. On November 17,

1988, he wrote Peter the following:

 

I am glad you correctly infer from my letter that I am

in many ways sympathetic to what you say. I did not

ask you to revise the manuscript, however. The danger,

as it seems to me, is that the dispute between you and

what you call the HIV community will mislead and

distress the public in the following way. You point to

a number of ways in which the HIV hypothesis may be

deficient. It would be a rash person who said that you

are wrong, but ... if we were to publish your paper,

we would find ourselves asking people to believe that

what has been said so far about the cause of AIDS is a

pack of lies. Anyway, I am glad that your paper is

going to be published (elsewhere).

 

The story of this manuscript, which would appear in

the February 1989 Proceedings of the National Academy

of Sciences (USA) is almost as tortured as the

reasoning-so exactly opposed to the purpose of

scientific discourse-with which it was rejected. It

would also record the first time Peter discovered he

was not bullet-proof.

 

Although even at this relatively late juncture it

might have been possible for Nature to become the foil

rather than the slave of scientific fashion, with the

above letter Maddox put the weight of his journal

(which, along with Science, shapes the thinking of the

vast majority of working biologists) irrevocably

behind the virus-AIDS hypothesis.

 

The road to the Proceedings paper begins with the

first notice taken by either of the two heavyweight

journals of Peter's Cancer Research article and the

attendant interest in the possibility that AIDS was

not precisely the terrible scourge that it was

portrayed to be. It came in the pages of Science in

March of 1988, shortly before the AmFar ambush.

Prototypically, the piece was written by a youthful

journalist, not a serious scientist, and accordingly,

it mainly addressed the sociology of Peter's

challenges rather than their substance. It was

entitled " A rebel without a cause of AIDS. "

Considering the fact that Peter was defending

traditional virology, and the virus-AIDS proponents

were in reality the rebels, the title seemed odd and

slightly offensive then and appears even more so now.

Nevertheless, this piece was to set the future

mainstream journalistic standard in regard to the

kindly professor Duesberg, indelibly coloring his

image with scientists who did not personally know him.

Its author's well-learned lesson: Sufficiently distort

the messenger and no meaningful message can possibly

emerge.

 

Although one can detect a small amount of affection

for the " rebel " Duesberg, the overall tone of the

article by William Booth is a genuflection to the

power of authority and received wisdom, as would be

expected from a reporter far beyond his depth of

competence. But as with many a " period piece, " the

article is much more instructive today than when it

appeared. Res ipsa loquitur. And in this case the

thing that speaks for itself most clearly is the

headshot. Although worth only about three hundred

words in journal space-as it occupies almost a third

of the article's opening page-the photo is in fact

worth " whole volumes in folio. "

 

Peter has an extremely photogenic visage and is most

often captured with a wry grin befitting Booth's

otherwise accurate depiction of him as an " immensely

quotable gadfly with a sharp sense of humor who does

not hesitate to tweak the noses of figures in the

biochemical research community whose egos often loom

larger than life. " But in this remarkable photograph,

he is portrayed as the most sinister and shadowy of

figures, looking " like an expressionist villain in a

Fritz Lang movie, " as he was to email immediately when

I asked if he knew where Booth obtained that

especially ghastly picture. A Science photographer

took it, and others, in my lab. I was wondering at the

time, why in several of them I looked like an

expressionist villain in a Fritz Lang movie, like Dr.

Caligari. Now I know. (3 March 2000)

 

In stark contrast, on the last page of the article we

see a most dignified portrayal of David Baltimore, who

a few years later would be driven from the presidency

of Rockefeller University for his unrelenting

commitment to the veracity of fraudulent research

findings that were published with his name attached.

Booth quoted him in referring to Peter as

" irresponsible and pernicious " ; Baltimore is pictured

in an appropriately-sized quarter-column box, arms

crossed confidently, and exuding all his magisterial

pomposity.

 

The accompanying text is full of equally informative

contradictions. For example, Booth begins in a

reasonable enough fashion by stating: " Basically,

Duesberg does not think that HIV is virulent enough to

cause AIDS, a conclusion he bases on widely recognized

gaps in knowledge about how the virus operates in the

body. " -although even here he could have more

accurately written: " a conclusion he bases on widely

recognized gaps between how HIV behaves and the

behavior of all other viral pathogens. " He then notes

quite accurately that Peter had " aroused a great deal

of anger and exasperation among AIDS researchers, who

insist that an overwhelming body of evidence points

toward HIV as the culprit behind AIDS. "

 

But he immediately continues with a gross distortion

unlikely to be noticed as such by Science's usual

readers, and designed like the photograph to insinuate

unmistakably that Duesberg was an extremely marginal

character. Booth plays on both their ignorance and

their real or imagined conservatism as follows: " At

the same time, these remarks have won for their

proponent a large amount of media attention,

particularly in the gay press where he is portrayed as

something of a hero. "

 

All other implications aside, in fact the amount of

media attention Peter received had been quite minimal,

and more importantly, in the gay press it was only

Chuck Ortleb's New York Native that supported Peter's

position, and he was eventually hounded out of

business by an ActUp-sponsored boycott exactly because

of his paper's contrarian views. Every other gay

activist publication and group was solidly behind the

NIH and the virus-AIDS hypothesis. The truth is that

Peter was even more their enemy than he was the

retrovirologists', whose hypothesis implied that

everybody was at equal risk and that homosexuals were

just unfortunate " to (along with heroin abusers,

Haitian immigrants, and hemophiliacs) be among the

populations where the virus first got its footing in

the United States, " as Booth quoted their real hero

James Curran, director of the CDC’s AIDS program.

Never mind what became of the Haitian immigrants, an

original member of the " 4H club " of AIDS risk

groups-or for that matter the spate of dire

predictions about the impending decimation of the

entire island from which they emigrated-except to note

that these same completely inaccurate predictions are

echoed today in sanctimonious press releases from

Geneva regarding sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil, India,

Thailand, and other tropical places with endemic

public health problems, poor to non-existent

epidemiological statistics, and inhabited by people

with dark skin.

 

Booth continues his enlightening presentation by

quoting Peter who I can picture quite plaintively and

with real bewilderment, asking, " Why won't they

respond? " in reference to the deafening silence with

which the Cancer Research article was received by his

peers. Our intrepid investigative reporter might have

chorused at this point, " Indeed, why haven't they? "

since it is amazing that more than one year after a

respected scientific journal published a damning,

scholarly critique of a widely held medical

hypothesis; a critique that moreover was written by a

member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences whose

pioneering work on retroviruses had frequently caused

his name to be mentioned in Stockholm, not a single

proponent of the hypothesis had seen the need to

respond. Instead, Booth merely asks some of these

scientists Peter's simple question. Their answers are

illuminating, and the fact that Booth lets these

examples of scientific demeanor and logic stand

without any further remark is even more so.

 

" I cannot respond without shrieking, " says Gallo. " It

is absolute and total nonsense, " says Anthony Fauci,

coordinator of AIDS research at the National

Institutes of Health (NIH). " Irresponsible and

pernicious, " says David Baltimore, director of the

Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a

chairman of the Institute of Medicine-National Academy

of Sciences committee that produced the benchmark

report Confronting AIDS. Yet Duesberg keeps pressing.

" Like a little dog that won't let go, " says Gallo.”

 

Booth, Gallo, and Fauci seem particularly fond of this

insulting adjective ( " little " ), as Science's point man

on quotes Fauci once again, using it to full effect.

 

" But he likes to talk about expression and

pathogenesis and latency and this and that, and then

everybody gets confused and says, I don't know what

those guys are talking about. They're all confused! So

maybe this little guy is right.”

 

Fauci's own considerable scientific intellect is

further demonstrated in his reply to Peter's

contention that all of the AIDS risk groups have

obvious, long-term immunosuppressive lifestyles, or

severe health problems. (Nobody receives several units

of transfused blood who is not otherwise quite ill; it

would be hard to argue that the lifestyles of heroin

addicts and the at-risk sector of the gay sub-culture

promote good health; and hemophiliacs are a classic

case of an iatrogenically immunosuppressed group

because of the clotting factor they must receive.)

Apparently forgetting that hemophiliacs rarely reach

the age expected of those with sixty-year-old wives,

and that the case to which he alludes never existed,

Fauci-the coordinator of government AIDS

research-proclaims: " Is Duesberg trying to tell me

that the transfusion cases are caused by life-style? "

" How about the 60-year-old wife of a hemophiliac who

gets infected? She's out cruising, too? "

 

Almost as shameful, and much more to the point of this

debate manqué, is the following from David Baltimore:

 

What Duesberg seems to be saying is that " correlations

are not causality, " says Baltimore. In establishing

HIV as the etiological agent in AIDS, correlations are

extremely important. Duesberg is not the only skeptic

in the community, as he likes to think. In the early

days of the AIDS epidemic, Baltimore says that

virologists like himself watched the scientific

literature very carefully. When Gallo put forth the

notion that AIDS might be caused by HTLV-I, a

retrovirus that has been linked to a rare form of

cancer, there were few converts. In 1983, when Luc

Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris found a

new retrovirus in AIDS patients, there was keen

interest, but still great skepticism, since Montagnier

had failed to prove that HIV was a causative agent

rather than an opportunistic infection. In a rapid

series of papers in 1984, Gallo and colleagues

reported finding antibodies to HIV in almost 90% of a

group of AIDS patients. In 115 healthy heterosexuals,

they detected no anti-HIV activity. The studies were

conducted double-blind. " This was the kind of evidence

that we were looking for. It distinguished between a

virus that was a passenger and one that was a cause. "

 

How these epidemiological studies proved anything more

than the antibody test had some specificity remains

mysterious to me, but David's chronological account is

otherwise quite informative. He unintentionally

corroborates Peter's damning observation that when the

NIH announced it had discovered the cause of AIDS,

there was hardly sufficient evidence to support such a

grandiose contention. Baltimore is also correct in

pointing out that Peter was saying exactly that

correlation is never sufficient to prove causation. In

fact, Duesberg would go on to incorporate that very

phrase in the title of the Proceedings article

published in 1989.

 

Near the end of his piece Booth makes an extremely

interesting admission, and one that an attentive (even

if unsympathetic) reader might have taken to heart. He

writes: " Duesberg has played the role of the rebel

before. After years of working on oncogenes, Duesberg

began shooting holes in some of the overblown claims

that were made linking genes to cancer. " That perhaps

some of the claims about HIV were equally overblown,

and after working twenty-four years on retroviruses,

Peter was only doing the same thing, did not arise.