Excerpt Two: Killing A Controversial AIDS Meeting In The White House

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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.

 

Go To Excerpt One: The Effort To Silence Duesberg

 

(Permission To Serialize Granted By The

Author...References Have Been Omitted For This

Serialization))

 

Excerpt Two: Killing A Controversial AIDS Meeting In

The White House

 

From Chapter Three

 

This pure invention of how HIV should behave if it

were causing AIDS has, like other things untrue, found

its way into text books and is the basis of official

U.S. government explanations of AIDS pathogenesis.

Nonetheless, among most researchers the problem of

massive cell killing by miniscule amounts of virus

(David Ho's " new view " and the popular press

notwithstanding) remains the central unanswered

question about the HIV=AIDS equation, as a Pub. Med.

search of the scientific literature using " HIV and, "

pathogenesis, indirect cell killing, mechanisms of

cell killing, cytocidal effects, or similar terms will

quickly verify.

 

Besides the telephone conversation with Fauci, I had

another encounter as a result of Peter's Cancer

Research review that involved me deeper in the growing

AIDS controversy than I ever intended, but which also

nearly got me to the basement of the White House. It

was with George Poste in the autumn of 1987, and the

circumstances were similar to our very first meeting,

only this time I was the host, and the setting was a

bit more exotic than Philadelphia. I had been asked by

Nam Hai Chua, the professor of plant molecular biology

at Rockefeller University, to use my offices at the

journal to help organize another inaugural symposium.

On this occasion the institution to be inaugurated was

the impressive state-of-the-art Institute of Molecular

and Cell Biology, and its location was Singapore,

Nam's birthplace. It turned out to be quite a grand

event, with Sydney Brenner, the senior scientific

advisor to the center, giving the keynote address. One

of our other invitations went to George Poste. At

breakfast the morning before the meeting officially

convened, I asked him to intercede with

Bio/Technology's editor at the time, Douglas

McCormick, regarding a " Last Word " commentary I wanted

to publish, and which Doug was having third or fourth

thoughts about. George was the chairman of our board

of scientific advisors and the one person whose

endorsement could assuage Doug¹s trepidation. The

piece of course was from Peter, and it was entitled " A

Challenge to the AIDS Establishment.”

 

With Doug present, I showed George the one-page

commentary, which was essentially a restatement of the

conclusions from the Cancer Research review quoted

earlier. Since its publication just a few months

earlier, I had probably twenty-five extended

conversations with scientists in the biotechnology

industries who had not read the article but had heard

about it, and they agreed with me that Peter's ideas

deserved a more visible stage among biotechnologists

than Cancer Research provided.

 

To my delight, but not surprise in light of our

previous discussions, George enthusiastically endorsed

publishing the " challenge. " He went on to say that he

had given these arguments a great deal of thought

since he first read them, and he believed he could

respond to at least the crucial virological ones.

 

As did everyone else who honestly looked at the data,

George agreed that there was much too little virus

present to be destroying the entire T-cell arm of the

immune system by direct infection. In fact, he pointed

out, the virus which was used to provide antigens for

the so-called " AIDS tests " was grown in culture in a

cell line derived from the same T-cells it was said to

be killing in the host, but that nonetheless continued

to divide while producing thousands of virus particles

per cell per day. This paradox, which Peter did not

raise in the Cancer Research article, but which he

would subsequently, suggested to George that the

entire immune system was necessary for HIV to do any

damage, and that it did its dirty work by provoking an

autoimmune disease.

 

His reasoning went like this: The one apparently

special feature of HIV that made Gallo's hypothesis

plausible to most people was that the envelope

protein, which coats the virus core, has a shape that

makes it fit quite nicely with a particular receptor,

called CD4, that defines the specialized type of

T-cell HIV preferentially infects and is said to

destroy. Wasn't it therefore possible that this same

HIV protein might, over unpredictable times, provoke

certain very inappropriate antibodies that would

contact the CD4 receptor with disastrous consequences?

This extremely ingenious idea, by assigning a kind of

catalytic role based on a distinctive structural

feature, neatly side-stepped two of the key objections

to the virus-AIDS hypothesis. Only a little virus

would be necessary, and additionally pathogenesis

would require an intact immune system, thus explaining

why even large amounts of virus did not kill T-cells

when they were growing in culture, as would be

expected if uncontrolled virus replication were the

real culprit.

 

George's hypothesis had a number of other virtues, not

the least of which was that it was testable, since it

predicted the existence in symptomatic AIDS patients

of particular autoantibodies. Such antibodies have

never been found, and thus while a real scientific

response to Peter's critique, catalytic autoimmunity

did not turn out to be an adequate one. However, when

some evidence supporting this view of indirect

pathogenesis emerged a few years later, it was cause

for Nature's editor, John Maddox, to write for the

first and only time, a few moderately kind words about

Peter that he would almost immediately take back.

 

When George finished his explanation, I was inspired

to ask if he might be willing to foot the bill for a

one-day closed-door meeting of perhaps six prominent

AIDS virologists and a few other scientists, including

Peter, to discuss in a no-holds-barred,

notebooks-and-references-in-hand manner, the critical

issues surrounding HIV pathogenesis, and that I would

undertake to edit for publication in Bio/Technology.

He said yes.

 

Back in New York, I began telephoning possible

participants.Among those who agreed to take part, in

addition to George and Peter, were David Ho (then an

assistant professor at UCLA), Dani Bolognesi (an old

compatriot of Peter's in the retrovirus cancer wars

who had joined the HIV officer's club and was a

professor at Duke University), and Walter Gilbert (who

was dividing his time between Biogen and Harvard). I

was never clear as to whether Gallo would attend or

not, but I had numerous conversations with Howard

Streicher, his second in command, concerning the

possibility. Subsequent events, however, were to

render this point so moot as to be inaudible.

 

During the ten years Bio/Technology was located at 64

Bleecker Street, an historic Louis Sullivan building

in lower Manhattan, I received two phone messages that

created a general buzz in the office. One was from

Tina Turner, who called to say she had arranged

tickets for my daughter and me to her concert that

weekend; the other was from James Warner, who worked

in the Reagan White House as a senior policy analyst

(directly under Gary Bauer, Reagan's domestic policy

advisor). While the call from Tina was a completely

delightful reminder of my sixties Berkeley youth when

I had gotten to know her slightly, the one from Warner

recalled less pleasant memories of that time when

Reagan was California's governor. Why would the White

House possibly be calling me?

 

The answer involved Chuck Ortleb, the feisty editor of

the New York Native, who apparently had tendrils

stretching into the deepest corners of Washington.

Through Chuck, Warner had learned of the upcoming

meeting at SmithKline, and he was won-dering if I

might like to move the venue to the uber-boss'

basement. You're kidding, right? Not at all. Gary and

I only want to listen, along with one or two

associates. We will not say an-thing or otherwise

interfere, and we will not record anything, I promise.

 

The last promise was in reference to my

tongue-in-cheek remarks about some infamous White

House recordings made by Reagan's southern California

buddy when he occupied the Oval Office. Warner did not

appear to be amused but assured me that yes, I could

bring a technician to guarantee the conference was a

private affair.

 

I posed another condition. I wanted to also bring

along my doctor's diploma from Berkeley, which

contained a facsimile of the Gipper's signature, and

have the President sign it for real. When he agreed,

this time clearly amused, I said I would contact the

various people involved and get back to him.

 

Surprisingly, everyone thought this was a very

interesting offer, and I was able to phone Warner

pretty quickly with the good word. In this

conversation, I suggested that the White House now

contact Gallo and Fauci and invite them directly. I

thought this would end the waffling from Gallo, and

while Fauci was not on the original list, I imagined

he would be available to take part in a meeting on his

home turf, and that his presence would be desirable

even though he was neither a virologist nor an

otherwise particularly distinguished scientist.

 

The day of our 1987 Christmas office party I spoke

with Jim Warner for the last time when he called to

tell me that sadly the meeting was off. He had been

advised that Anthony Fauci, far from reacting as I

anticipated, threw a " small fit " when he was invited,

and demanded to know why the White House was

interfering in scientific matters that belonged to the

NIH and the Office of Science and Technology

Assessment.

 

Because the possibility of the White House meeting had

been leaked to the media, several stories about its

cancellation appeared in the mainstream as well as gay

underground press. According to Peter, the ensuing

pressure was what led Fauci to contact Mathilde Krim

(the head of AMFAR) and organize the debacle in DC a

few months later. Meanwhile, the topic the meeting was

intended to discuss-namely, possible mechanisms of HIV

pathogenesis and their relevance to AIDS etiology-lost

the second clause and became the subject of an

ongoing, inconclusive series of prestigious Keystone

Symposia (generally held to coincide with spring

skiing in the Rockies), to which Peter never once

received an invitation.

 

CONTINUING HERE

 

 

 

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