Guest guest Posted August 21, 2004 Report Share Posted August 21, 2004 http://www.redflagsweekly.com/conferences/aids/2004_july19.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. Excerpt One: The Effort To Silence Duesberg (Permission To Serialize Granted By The Author...References Have Been Omitted For This Serialization)) From Chapter Five In the fall of 1994, when all his grants had become unworthy of funding, students were warned not to seek Peter Duesberg’s mentorship, he was no longer considered qualified to offer graduate-level classes, and he had gone from chairman of the seminar committee to organizer of the yearly departmental picnic. I received a telephone call from Peter I have always remembered as " A Night at the Opera, " even though its humor was as far from the Marx Brothers as imaginable. In substance, Peter tells me the following: The other afternoon, I hear from my old buddy Steve O'Brien. He is on his way to China on some NIH business and is in the Bay Area for only a brief time. But he has tickets for the SF Opera that night, curiously enough, Susa's Dangerous Liasons. He wants to invite me to discuss old times and some important matters. The intrigue is irresistible, so I take an old tux from the closet and we meet. Afterwards we go out for a quiet drink, and just like in the movies, Steve surreptitiously pulls out a folded manuscript from the inside of his own tuxedo pocket, and sotto voce says, " This has already been accepted at Nature. All you have to do is sign. " The manuscript is one that we have already encountered - " HIV Causes AIDS: Koch's Postulates Fulfilled " - except this time the authors were Peter H. Duesberg, Stephen O'Brien, and William Blattner. Peter told him that he would carefully read the proffered offer at redemption and get back with his response. I said to Peter something like, " Cheer up. It means you are still making big waves and they are so intellectually bankrupt, this is the option of last resort. " It did about as much to cheer him as it did me, although any notions we might have retained about the way AIDS science was supposed to operate were in tatters long before this epiphany. Peter spent more than a few hours rewriting the essay; his efforts included altering the title to something more appropriate to the facts. And he did this with the urgency that O'Brien had conveyed on his way to the mysterious East. After several international phone calls and faxed revisions between the two, on October 11, Peter received the following: I want to bring a personal reflection to your attention because it influenced my decision to approach you with the intention to sign the essay. I was outlining to my post-doc in China the other day some more blatant examples of fraud in science. As I was explaining to him how the scientific community had been thoroughly duped by [here followed a list of prominent names that have been deleted on advice of the publisher's counsel]. I realized that there was one striking exception, Peter Duesberg. Your skepticism about oncogenes made skeptics and better scientists of us all, even the 20 plus National Academy Members that oncogenes regalized. But to be honest, Peter, your campaign that HIV does not cause AIDS is not so compelling and I am afraid wrong, just wrong. I am sorry if you think my assessment harsh, but having said that I believe that you should consider signing the article for your own good. The piece, of course, never appeared in Nature. Minus the Duesberg recantation it was just another restating of the so-called facts about HIV. It did, however, resurface in 1996, essentially unaltered from the draft Peter had rejected, in the much more obscure journal, Current Opinion In Immunology. Blattner's name had also disappeared, yet the published version included a note that Peter had declined joint authorship, which must have completely bewildered anyone who bothered to read the article carefully enough to notice. Nonetheless, in this disingenuous guise, O'Brien's publication became a key citation in The Durban Declaration and thus managed to sneak into Nature via the back door in July of 2000. The Durban Declaration is an unprecedented piece of science by consensus that came about because the questions Peter had championed for more than a decade (through all the personal vilification, humiliation, and marginalization) had taken sufficient hold to require the equivalent of a Papal edict to put a stop, once and for all, to a potentially dangerous revival of the anti-HIV/AIDS heresy. The main reason for the revival, and the timing, was that South African President Thabo Mbeki had convened a Presidential Advisory Panel to examine the credibility of all the claims that had been making headlines about the ravages of HIV and AIDS in South Africa since the democratic reforms of a few years earlier. The panel was comprised of about forty-five invitees, two-thirds from the mainstream AIDS establishment and the other one-third most politely referred to by the media as " dissidents, " of whom Peter was the most prominent. The Advisory Panel's final formal meeting coincided with the annual AIDS international media and pharmaceutical company circus, scheduled that year for Durban. ----------------------- Let us follow the story that led to The Durban Declaration and the American presidential decree that AIDS in Africa is a matter of U.S. national security. In 1998, Duesberg and David Rasnick published an updated, comprehensive review in Volume 104 of Genetica, entitled The AIDS Dilemma: Drug Diseases Blamed On A Passenger Virus. The time between submission and acceptance was the normal few months, perhaps because while highly respected, Genetica is regarded as a specialist journal. Moreover, John McDonald, then its editor, had invited the paper with the express purpose of ending the silence about the still unproved HIV/AIDS hypothesis. He was to more than accomplish his purpose, only not quite as he had anticipated. In fact, a readership of one was all that was necessary to restart the stalled AIDS controversy with a resounding roar. The article was among the first pieces of criticism of the virus-AIDS hypothesis that Mbeki read carefully. ---------- The major part of the forty-plus-page Genetica review is a painstaking demonstration that chemistry, not a chronically dormant virus, more plausibly explains the distribution of the diseases that in the U.S. and Europe are called AIDS, if and only if they are diagnosed in the presence of antibodies to HIV. It also explains why HIV is much more common in certain groups than in the general population, and is therefore in the U.S. and Europe a surrogate marker for AIDS' risks. I quote here in full the abstract in which the basic arguments are enumerated: Almost two decades of unprecedented efforts in research costing US taxpayers over $50 billion have failed to defeat Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and have failed to explain the chronology and epidemiology of AIDS in America and Europe. The failure to cure AIDS is so complete that the largest American AIDS foundation is even exploiting it for fundraising: " Latest AIDS statistics 0, 000, 000 cured. Support a cure, support AMFAR. " The scientific basis of all these unsuccessful efforts has been the hypothesis that AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, termed Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and that this viral immunodeficiency manifests in 30 previously known microbial and non-microbial AIDS diseases. In order to develop a hypothesis that explains AIDS we have considered ten relevant facts that American and European AIDS patients have, and do not have, in common: (1) AIDS is not contagious. For example, not even one health care worker has contracted AIDS from over 800,000 AIDS patients in America and Europe. (2) AIDS is highly non-random with regard to sex (86% male); sexual persuasion (over 60% homosexual); and age (85% are 25-49 years old). (3) From its beginning in 1980, the AIDS epidemic progressed non-exponentially, just like lifestyle diseases. (4) The epidemic is fragmented into distinct subepidemics with exclusive AIDS-defining diseases. For example, only homosexual males have Kaposi's sarcoma. (5) Patients do not have any one of 30 AIDS-defining diseases, nor even immunodeficiency, in common. For example, Kaposi's sarcoma, dementia, and weight loss may occur without immunodeficiency. Thus, there is no AIDS-specific disease. (6) AIDS patients have antibody against HIV in common only by definition – not by natural coincidence. AIDS-defining diseases of HIV-free patients are called by their old names. (7) Recreational drug use is a common denominator for over 95% of all American and European AIDS patients, including male homosexuals. (8) Lifetime prescriptions of inevitably toxic anti-HIV drugs, such as the DNA chain-terminator AZT, are another common denominator of AIDS patients. (9) HIV proves to be an ideal surrogate marker for recreational and anti-HIV drug use. Since the virus is very rare (< 0.3%) in the US/European population and very hard to transmit sexually, only those who inject street drugs or have over 1,000 typically drug-mediated sexual contacts are likely to become positive. (10) The huge AIDS literature cannot offer even one statistically significant group of drug-free AIDS patients from America and Europe. In view of this, we propose that the long-term consumption of recreational drugs (such as cocaine, heroin, nitrite inhalants, and amphetamines) and prescriptions of DNA chain-terminating and other anti-HIV drugs, cause all AIDS diseases in America and Europe that exceed their long-established, national backgrounds, i.e. >95%. Chemically distinct drugs cause distinct AIDS-defining diseases; for example, nitrite inhalants cause Kaposi's sarcoma, cocaine causes weight loss, and AZT causes immunodeficiency, lymphoma, muscle atrophy, and dementia. The drug hypothesis predicts that AIDS: (1) is non-contagious; (2) is non-random, because 85% of AIDS-causing drugs are used by males, particularly sexually active homosexuals between 25 and 49 years of age; and (3) would follow the drug epidemics chronologically. Indeed, AIDS has increased from negligible numbers in the early 1980s to about 80,000 annual cases in the early '90s and has since declined to about 50,000 cases (US figures). In the same period, recreational drug users have increased from negligible numbers to millions by the late 1980s, and have since decreased possibly twofold. However, AIDS has declined less because since 1987 increasing numbers of mostly healthy, HIV-positive people, currently about 200, 000, use anti-HIV drugs that cause AIDS and other dis- eases. At least 64 scientific studies, government legislation, and non-scientific reports document that recreational drugs cause AIDS and other diseases. Likewise, the AIDS literature, the drug manufacturers, and non-scientific reports confirm that anti-HIV drugs cause AIDS and other diseases in humans and animals. In sum, the AIDS dilemma could be solved by banning anti-HIV drugs, and by pointing out that drugs cause AIDS – modeled on the successful anti-smoking campaign. Substitute chronic malnutrition for heroin or AZT as the chemical cause of immunodeficiency and hence increased susceptibility to otherwise common infections, and one can easily see why Mbeki found this analysis to be so relevant to the unprecedented health crisis that was said to be destroying his beloved country, when after so long it could at last be called his. By the end of 1999, South Africa's President had read and assimilated as much of the scientific literature on HIV and AIDS as he needed in order to telephone Rasnick and ask if he and Duesberg would participate in a panel. CONTINUING HERE The book can be ordered at online outlets and bookstores. The publisher is North Atlantic Books. P4 - Send Scientific Feedback Send Comment Back to conference Online Conference Center Home | Archives | Columnists | Online Conferences | RFD Store | Site Philosophy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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