Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (20 page)

If Montagnier and Gallo hadn’t really found this evidence, why was their work published, and why had they been fighting so hard to get credit for the discovery? There had been an international incident wherein Robert Gallo of the NIH had claimed that a sample of HIV which had been sent to him by Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris had not grown in Gallo’s lab. Other samples collected by Gallo and his collaborators, from potential AIDS patients, had grown. Gallo had patented the AIDS test based on these samples, and the
Pasteur Institute had sued. The Pasteur eventually won, but back in 1989 it was a standoff and they were sharing the profits.

I was hesitant to write “HIV is the probable cause of AIDS” until I found published evidence that would support it. Mine was the most minimal statement possible. In my grant request I wasn’t trying to say that it absolutely did cause AIDS, I was just trying to say that it was likely to cause it for some known reasons. Tens of thousands of scientists and researchers were spending billions of dollars a year doing research based on this idea. The reason had to be there somewhere, otherwise these people would not have allowed their research to settle into one narrow channel of investigation.

I lectured about PCR at innumerable meetings. Always there were people there talking about HIV. I asked them how it was that we knew that HIV was the cause of AIDS. Everyone said something. Everyone had the answer at home in the office in some drawer. They all knew and they would send me the papers as soon as they got back. But I never got any papers. Nobody ever sent me the news about how AIDS was caused by HIV.

I finally had the opportunity to ask Dr. Montagnier about the reference when he lectured in San Diego at the grand opening of the UCSD AIDS Research Center, which is still run by Bob Gallo’s former consort, Dr. Flossie Wong-Staal. This would be the last time I would ask my question without showing anger. In response Dr. Montagnier suggested, “Why don’t you reference the CDC report?”

“I read it,” I said, “That doesn’t really address the issue of whether or not HIV is the probable cause of AIDS, does it?”

He agreed with me. It was damned irritating. If Montagnier didn’t know the answer, who the hell did?

O
NE NIGHT
, I was driving from Berkeley to La Jolla and I heard an interview on National Public Radio with Peter Duesberg, a prominent virologist at Berkeley. I finally understood why I was having so much trouble finding the references that linked HIV to AIDS. There weren’t any, Duesberg said. No one had ever proven that HIV causes AIDS. The interview lasted about an hour. I pulled over so as not to miss any of it.

I had known of Peter when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. He had been described as a truly brilliant scientist who had mapped a particular mutation to a single nucleotide in what was to become known eventually as an oncogene. In the 1960s, that was a real feat. Peter went on to develop the theory that oncogenes might be introduced by viruses into humans and cause cancer. The idea caught on and became a serious theoretical driving force behind the research that was funded under the unfortunate name “War on Cancer.” Peter was named California Scientist of the Year.

Not satisfied resting on his laurels, Peter torched them. He found flaws in his own theory and announced to his surprised colleagues who were working on demonstrating it that it was highly unlikely. If they wanted to cure cancer, their research should be directed elsewhere. Whether it was because they were more interested in curing their own poverty than cancer, or that they just couldn’t come to grips with their mistake, they continued to work fruitlessly on the viral oncogene hypothesis for ten years. And they didn’t seem to notice the irony: the more frustrated they got, the more they chastised Peter Duesberg for questioning his own theory and their folly. Most of
them had not really learned much of what I call science. They had been trained to obtain grants from the government, hire people to do research, and write papers that usually ended with the notion that further research should be done along these same lines—preferably by them and paid for by someone else. One of them was Bob Gallo.

Gallo had been a friend of Peter’s. They had worked in the same department at the National Cancer Institute. Of the thousands of scientists who had worked fruitlessly to assign a causal role in cancer to a virus, Bob was the only one who had been overzealous enough to announce that he had. No one paid any attention because all he had demonstrated was an anecdotal and very weak correlation between antibodies to a harmless retrovirus, which he called HTLV I, and an unusual type of cancer found mainly on two of the southern islands of Japan.

In spite of his lack of luster as a scientist, Gallo had worked his way up in the power structure. Peter Duesberg, despite his brilliance, worked his way down. By the time AIDS came along, it was Bob Gallo whom Margaret Heckler approached when President Reagan decided that enough homosexuals picketing the White House was enough. Margaret was the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and thereby the top dog at NIH. Bob Gallo had a sample of a virus that Luc Montagnier had found in the lymph node of a gay decorator in Paris with AIDS. Montagnier had sent it to Gallo for evaluation, and Bob had appropriated it in the pursuit of his own career.

Margaret called a press conference and introduced Dr. Robert Gallo, who suavely pulled off his wraparound sunglasses
and announced to the world press, “Gentlemen, we have found the cause of AIDS!” And that was it. Gallo and Heckler predicted that a vaccine and a cure would be available within a couple years. That was 1984.

All the old virus hunters from the National Cancer Institute put new signs on their doors and became AIDS researchers. Reagan sent up about a billion dollars just for starters, and suddenly everybody who could claim to be any kind of medical scientist and who hadn’t had anything much to do lately was fully employed. They still are.

It was named Human Immunodeficiency Virus by an international committee in an attempt to settle the ownership dispute between Gallo and Montagnier, who had given it different names. To call it HIV was a short-sighted mistake that preempted any thought of investigation into the causal relationship between Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

Duesberg pointed out wisely from the sidelines in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
that there was no good evidence implicating the new virus. He was ignored. Editors rejected his manuscripts and committees of his colleagues began to question his need for having his research funds continued. Finally, in what must rank as one of the great acts of arrogant disregard for scientific propriety, a committee including Flossie Wong-Staal, who was feuding openly with Duesberg, voted not to renew Peter’s Distinguished Investigator Award. He was cut off from research funds. Thus disarmed, he was less of a threat to the growing AIDS establishment. He would not be invited back to speak at meetings of his former colleagues.

W
E LIVE WITH
an uncountable number of retroviruses. They’re everywhere—and they probably have been here as long as the human race. We have them in our genome. We get some of them from our mothers in the form of new viruses—infectious viral particles that can move from mother to fetus. We get others from both parents along with our genes. We have resident sequences in our genome that are retroviral. That means that we can and do make our own retroviral particles some of the time. Some of them may look like HIV. No one has shown that they’ve ever killed anyone before.

There’s got to be a purpose for them; a sizable fraction of our genome is comprised of human endogenous retroviral sequences. There are those who claim that we carry useless DNA, but they’re wrong. If there is something in our genes, there’s a reason for it. We don’t let things grow on us. I have tried to put irrelevant gene sequences into things as simple as bacteria. If it doesn’t serve some purpose, the bacteria get rid of it right away. I assume that my body is at least as smart as bacteria when it comes to things like DNA.

HIV didn’t suddenly pop out of the rain forest or Haiti. It just popped into Bob Gallo’s hands at a time when he needed a new career. It has been here all along. Once you stop looking for it only on the streets of big cities, you notice that it is thinly distributed everywhere.

If HIV has been here all along and it can be passed from mother to child, wouldn’t it make sense to test for the antibodies in the mothers of anyone who is positive to HIV, especially if that individual is not showing any signs of disease?

Picture a kid in the heartland of America. His lifelong goal has been to join the Air Force when he graduates and become a jet pilot. He’s never used drugs and he’s had the same sweet girlfriend, whom he plans to marry, all through high school. Unbeknownst to him, or anyone else, he also has antibodies to HIV, which he inherited from his mother, who is still alive, when he was in her womb. He’s a healthy kid, it doesn’t bother him in any way, but when he is routinely tested for HIV by the Air Force, his hopes and dreams are destroyed. Not only is he barred from the Air Force, but he has a death sentence over his head.

The CDC has defined AIDS as one of more than thirty diseases accompanied by a positive result on a test that detects antibodies to HIV. But those same diseases are not defined as AIDS cases when the antibodies are not detected. If an HIV-positive woman develops uterine cancer, for example, she is considered to have AIDS. If she is not HIV-positive, she simply has uterine cancer. An HIV-positive man with tuberculosis has AIDS; if he tests negative he simply has tuberculosis. If he lives in Kenya or Colombia, where the test for HIV antibodies is too expensive, he is simply presumed to have the antibodies and therefore AIDS, and therefore he can be treated in the World Health Organization’s clinic. It’s the only medical help available in some places. And it’s free, because the countries that support the WHO are worried about AIDS. From the point of view of spreading medical facilities into areas where poor people live, AIDS has been a boon. We don’t poison them with AZT like we do our own people because it’s too expensive. We supply dressings for the machete cut on their left knee and call it AIDS.

The CDC continues to add new diseases to the grand AIDS definition. The CDC has virtually doctored the books to make it appear as if the disease continues to spread. In 1993, for example, the CDC enormously broadened its AIDS definition. This was happily accepted by county health authorities, who receive $2,500 from the feds per year under the Ryan White Act for every reported AIDS case.

In 1634 Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for the last eight years of his life for writing that the Earth is not the center of the universe but rather moves around the sun. Because he insisted that scientific statements should not be a matter of religious faith, he was accused of heresy. Years from now, people looking back at us will find our acceptance of the HIV theory of AIDS as silly as we find the leaders who excommunicated Galileo. Science as it is practiced today in the world is largely not science at all. What people call science is probably very similar to what was called science in 1634. Galileo was told to recant his beliefs or be excommunicated. People who refuse to accept the commandments of the AIDS establishment are basically told the same thing. “If you don’t accept what we say, you’re out.”

It has been disappointing that so many scientists have absolutely refused to examine the available evidence in a neutral, dispassionate way. Several respected scientific journals have refused to print a statement issued by the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis simply requesting “a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis.”

I spoke publicly about this issue for the first time at a meeting of the American Association for Clinical Chemists in San Diego. I knew I would be among friends there. It was a small
part of a much longer speech—at most I spoke for fifteen minutes about AIDS. I told the audience how my inability to find a simple reference had sparked my curiosity.

The more I learned, the more outspoken I became. As a responsible scientist convinced that people were being killed by useless drugs, I could not remain silent.

The responses I received from my colleagues ranged from moderate acceptance to outright venom. When I was invited to speak about PCR at the European Federation of Clinical Investigation in Toledo, Spain, I told them that I would like to speak about HIV and AIDS instead. I don’t think they understood exactly what they were getting into when they agreed. Halfway through my speech, the president of the society cut me off. He suggested I answer some questions from the audience. I thought it was incredibly rude and totally out of line that he cut me off, but what the hell, I would answer questions. He opened the floor to questions and then decided that he would ask the first one. Did I understand that I was being irresponsible? That people who listened to me might stop using condoms? I replied that fairly reliable statistics from the CDC showed that in the United States, at least, the number of reported cases of every known venereal disease was increasing, meaning people were not using condoms, while using the initial definition of AIDS, the number of reported cases of AIDS was decreasing. So, no. I didn’t understand that I was being irresponsible. He decided that that was enough questions and ended the meeting abruptly.

Whenever I speak on this issue the question always comes up, “If HIV isn’t the cause of AIDS, then what is?” The answer to that is that I don’t know the answer to that any more than Gallo or Montagnier. Knowing that there is no evidence
that HIV causes it does not make me an authority on what does. It is indisputable that if an individual has extremely close contacts with a lot of people, the number of infectious organisms that this individual’s immune system is going to have to deal with will be high. If a person has three hundred sexual contacts a year—with people who themselves are each having three hundred contacts a year—that’s ninety thousand times more opportunity for infections than a person involved in an exclusive relationship.