Excerpt One: The Effort To Silence Duesberg

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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.

 

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