Virus Myth, Part I

One moonlit night in 1983, a biochemist named Kary Mullis was driving along a California mountain road when he had an aha! experience akin to Newton's with the apple and Archimedes' in the bathtub. Mullis immediately pulled off the road, awakened his sleeping girlfriend, and told her that he suddenly knew how to replicate DNA.

It was a problem that had been vexing scientists and, as it turned out, Mullis was right. His insight into the polymerase chain reaction won him the 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry and led to the invention of DNA-replicating machines and the tests they make possible, including the one for HIV antibodies.

This is simply by way of establishing the impeccable scientific credentials of Dr. Kary Mullis. Because when someone of his stature questions whether the HIV virus causes AIDS, we should probably listen.

Huh? Of course HIV causes AIDS, we all know that, don't we? The CDC tells us so, the media tell us so, our doctors tell us so. End of story.

Well, actually not. There is a sizeable, and growing, chorus of dissenting voices. And unlike many groups that challenge an entrenched mainstream belief, this one does not consist of loudmouths with fringe credentials. It is made up of pre-eminent scientists with rock-solid reputations.

Among dozens of others, in addition to Kary Mullis, we find Dr. Peter Duesberg of UC Berkeley, one of the world's leading molecular biologists; Dr. Heinz Ludwig Sänger, emeritus professor of molecular biology and virology at the Max-Planck-Institute in Munich, Germany; Dr. Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, professor of medical physics at Australia's Royal Perth Hospital; Dr. Walter Gilbert, 1980 Nobel prize winner for his work on DNA sequencing; and Dr. Gordon Stewart, professor emeritus of public health at Glasgow University and a former AIDS adviser to the World Health Organization.

Impressive, and that's just the short list. So, what are these men and women saying?

Kary Mullis: "If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least with a high probability. There is no such document."

A few quick reminders: AIDS is not a disease, it's "Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome," a catch-all applied to those whose natural bodily defense systems have been so compromised that they no longer protect the individual from any number of life-threatening diseases. AIDS vaulted into public awareness when large numbers of gay men in San Francisco started exhibiting horribly devastated immune systems in the early '80s, and began to die of previously rare or normally benign diseases such as Kaposi's Sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. A crash program attempting to isolate the source of this epidemic yielded the discovery of the HIV retrovirus by Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier and its designation as the "cause" of AIDS. Montagnier has since backed off and now considers HIV as merely a "co-factor" in AIDS cases; Gallo still vigorously defends the premise that HIV is the cause. (Full disclosure: Gallo patented the first "AIDS test kit" in 1984.)

There are many problems associated with the HIV/AIDS theory. Take the AIDS test, for example. It establishes the presence of HIV antibodies, not of the virus itself. Why? Because the virus is present in such minute quantities that it's too hard to find. How can such a tiny amount of virus do such awful systemic damage? Good question. Defenders of the status quo have been forced to claim that the virus somehow does its dirty work, then essentially disappears, only to have its effects show up later, often years later. That's a pretty unique kind of infection.

Then, too, aren't antibodies evidence that the immune system is doing its work? Yes. HIV/AIDS proponents claim that the virus is killing T-cells [one of the key components of the immune system], Peter Duesberg says. Yet, "At the same time, all they ever found in patients was antibodies against the virus. And I said those two things don't make any sense at all. A retrovirus isn't killing cells. That's the one thing we always knew and agreed on about retroviruses--that they do not kill cells. The second thing is viruses only cause disease when they are bonded, not when they are neutralized by antibodies. That's what you call a vaccine, when a virus is neutralized by an antibody."

There are reliability difficulties as well. An Australian research team, writing in Bio/Technology in 1993, concluded that no test procedure met the "gold standard," the "quintessential element for the authentication of any diagnostic test," wherein positive tests consistently lead to finding the virus, negative tests to not finding it. Or, in other words, a positive antibody test may mean the virus is there, but it may not.

Additionally, Mullis writes, "[Those] tests are based on a lot of assumptions that are not very easy to prove, because they've never isolated the organism completely by itself. There's not a tube of HIV in the country that's pure. There are cultures that have by mass something like one out of 100,000 is HIV. That's all. That's the best we've got."

Furthermore, treatment of HIV infection often involves immune-suppressive drugs that will, on their own, kill you as readily as any ailment, often closely mimicking the syndrome they're meant to cure. This Duesberg calls "AIDS by prescription."

Finally, there is the classification loop by which the CDC links HIV, AIDS, and disease. A person is said to have AIDS if he or she suffers from one or more of 31 different diseases--all of which existed long before the AIDS epidemic--and if he or she also has HIV antibodies. Someone who succumbs to tuberculosis and has the antibody thus has "died of AIDS." Minus the antibody, it's just plain old TB.

Likewise, "AIDS" is the diagnosis in Africa for anything involving cough, fever, persistent diarrhea and substantial weight loss, a symptom grouping that, probably not coincidentally, also defines malnutrition.

In short, the problems are many and the case against the HIV/AIDS hypothesis is complex. Space limitations mean that we have only hinted at a few basic aspects of it here. But there is a wealth of information on the Internet. www.virusmyth.net is a good starting place for interested readers. It archives papers by Mullis, Duesberg, and many others. We encourage our readers to inform themselves about this ongoing scientific debate, with minds open to the possibility that everything they think they know about AIDS may be wrong.

A stubborn clinging to unproven dogma is one of the worst enemies of the quest for truth. While we're not scientifically qualified to say with any certainty who is right in this controversy, we are sympathetic to Kary Mullis' complaint that "so many scientists have absolutely refused to examine the available evidence in a neutral, dispassionate way. Several respected scientific journals have [rejected] a statement issued by the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the H.I.V./AIDS Hypothesis simply requesting 'a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis'." That kind of peer review seems like a minimum effort that can, and should, be made.

Our final question is, of course: If HIV doesn't cause AIDS, what does, then? There is no one answer. Most likely, the dissenters say, different diseases have different etiologies. Problem is, no research is being done on alternative theories because the HIV people get all the grant money.

In the next issue of WWNK, we'll take a closer look at some of these theories and the roadblocks frustrated researchers encounter in trying to pursue them, and we'll examine the career-threatening consequences of dissent.