BOOK REVIEW (WASHINGTON TIMES)
Current theory holds that AIDS is caused by HIV. At least one scientist
calls this crazy.
To his friends, Peter H. Duesberg is a "prince of science"
and he certainly possesses impressive credentials. A professor of molecular
and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, Duesberg
is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, whose associates
are elected to the organization by the 1,600 fellow members. He is also
a recipient of a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National
Institutes of Health, or NIH, the federal government's premiere medical
agency.
But to his detractors, who are legion, Duesberg is at best a maverick
who refuses to accept facts held as dogma by his colleagues or at worst
a kook who perversely refuses to submit to the obvious, perhaps out of
a desire to grab headlines.
For the past decade, the 59-year-old Duesberg has been the nation's
most outspoken opponent of the long-accepted-as-fact proposition that HIV,
or human immunodeficiency virus, causes AIDS, the well-known acronym for
acquired immune deficiency syndrome. HIV destroys the body's natural immune
system - the incubation period can be 10 years or more - leaving the body
vulnerable to opportunistic diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia and
cancer, which kill the victim.
The persistent Duesberg recently renewed the battle with Inventing the
AIDS Virus, a closely argued 711-page book in which the Berkeley professor
(and pioneer researcher in retroviruses, the family of viruses to which
HIV belongs) details his arguments and challenges fellow scientists to
answer them - a possibility he deems remote. Scientists, he tells Insight
from his laboratory in Berkeley, "have sacrificed academic freedom
and self-correcting debate to conformism."
Duesberg's beef with the HIV-AIDS hypothesis: It's "sloppy science."
The claim that AIDS is caused by HIV was announced, suddenly, at a 1984
NIH press conference held by scientist Robert Gallo and Margaret Heckler,
President Reagan's secretary of health and human services. The discovery
was made public, Duesberg points out, without the standard scientific practice
of peer review, whereby scientists who specialize in a given field evaluate
the research of their colleagues.
Why did the scientific establishment rush to judgment?
Groups such as NIH were under enormous pressure to find the answer to
the growing number of AIDS cases in the early 1980s, Duesberg says. It
then became impossible to admit there might be doubts about HIV and AIDS
because billions of federal dollars were pouring into research establishing
their connection. "The commercialization!" exclaims Duesberg.
"Twenty years ago, it would have been regarded as an intolerable conflict
- a commercial interest in the science you're doing. But now laboratories
cost a lot. Universities come surrounded with biotech companies like a
metastasizing primary tumor. Professors are half-owners or hold consultantships
amounting to half their income or more. Scientific independence has been
sacrificed to federal money."
Had researchers examined Gallo's papers themselves, Duesberg writes
in his book, "they might have objected that some of his AIDS patients
had never been infected by the virus. They would have pointed out that
no virus had been found in any of Gallo's AIDS patients, but only antibodies
against it." These objections are basic, Duesberg insists, because
in both instances, AIDS researchers have discarded views long held by science
concerning viruses and ignored traditional methods of scientific inquiry.
"Ever since Jenner discovered the smallpox vaccination, the presence
of antibodies in a body has been a sign of defense against the disease,"
says Duesberg. In the case of AIDS, however, the presence of HIV antibodies
(which is what the AIDS test uncovers) is taken as a sign that the virus
still is potent. HIV-AIDS science thus ignores the first postulate of famed
19th-century scientist Robert Koch: To verify the causative
agent of a disease, "the germ must be found growing abundantly in
every patient and every diseased tissue." But the virus rarely is
found in the blood or tissues of AIDS victims, although HIV antibodies
abound.
In Inventing the AIDS Virus, Duesberg discusses numerous instances in
which victims have died of AIDS-linked diseases but had no HIV infection.
Researchers have written these victims out of the AIDS literature by redefining
AIDS, he claims, carefully excluding everyone without HIV - even those
originally diagnosed with AIDS. Having diagnosed the causes of AIDS incorrectly,
medical science is using the wrong approach to cure the disease, according
to Duesberg. Its most mistaken therapy is the use of the drug AZT. (See
sidebar.)
Is Duesberg right? Almost to a man and woman, the many thousands of
researchers involved in AIDS studies would say not. As Gallo and two colleagues
wrote in a 1988 issue of Science, "Biology is an experimental science,
and new biological phenomena are continually being discovered," arguing
that a completely new virus such as HIV should not be expected to conform
to rules established for entirely different organisms. Redefining AIDS
as time passes, Gallo and his colleagues claimed, was part of the process
of learning what the disease is. Two years later in the British journal
Nature, two prominent virologists admitted that "Duesberg is right
to draw attention to our ignorance of how HIV causes disease, but he is
wrong to claim that it does not."
For the vast majority, the HIV-AIDS connection is received fact, the
basis for further investigation. Alvaro Muoz, a professor of epidemiology
who first began to study AIDS 10 years ago as a faculty member at Harvard
University and who now is at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, last
year worked out a mathematical model involving subjects who have tested
positive for HIV but not come down with full-blown AIDS. Muoz says that
he and his colleagues found that about "10 percent of homosexual men
with HIV infection will not have AIDS-defining diseases after 20 years,"
a finding, Muoz says, that will help concentrate scientific study on these
individuals - called "long-term nonprogressors."
Nevertheless, Muoz believes HIV causes AIDS, as does Francisco Sy, head
of the International Society for AIDS Education at the School of Public
Health at the University of South Carolina. Sy, who sometimes uses the
word "pandemic" and sometimes "epidemic" to describe
the AIDS phenomenon, says HIV is "a virus capable of spontaneous changes
in its genetic makeup," able to create "new strains, new varieties
- I don't know what the right word is." Sy says the virus' complexity
makes him "pessimistic about science coming up with a therapy, a cure."
Duesberg finds such talk objectionable. Despite its "newness"
and its malleability, he sees no reason - yet - to assume that it so readily
violates rules that govern the behavior of every other virulent and pathogenic
organism studied by science, from those that cause the common cold to polio.
What does he think causes AIDS? Duesberg blames lifestyle - drug use, a
record of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and malnutrition. He
points out that the most at-risk groups (in the United States) are intravenous-drug
users and homosexual men, many of whom had longtime involvement with recreational
drugs, particularly "poppers" (nitrite inhalants) and cocaine.
Duesberg points out that the association of drugs and AIDS isn't his alone.
"It was the earliest finding of the Centers for Disease Control,"
he notes, adding that extensive recreational drug use along with promiscuous
sex were common denominators among the earliest homosexual AIDS victims.
The controversy has left Duesberg a scientific persona non grata with
few graduate students, all of whom are about to finish their work with
him with no funding. But he does take hope from the support of 100 scientists
who have formed the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS
Hypothesis. Kary Mullis, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry, supplied
an introduction to Duesberg's new book and minced no words in his support:
"No one has ever proved that HIV causes AIDS. We have not been able
to discover any good reasons why most of the people on earth believe that
AIDS is a disease caused by a virus called HIV."
Interestingly, there is one point at which Duesberg and strong advocates
of the virus theory meet. Both encourage people to avoid recreational drugs.
Says South Carolina's Sy, "This elusive virus is hard to get. It's
not like TB you can get from a cough. It is a human behavior problem. We
need to go to the root of the problem. We need to have people ask themselves
why they have behaved the way they have behaved. Are multiple sexual partners
necessary?"
Meanwhile, Duesberg insists he remains open to explanations for AIDS
derived from good science: "I don't want to reject anything a priori.
But if no scientific law is found [to explain the evidence], it is just
basic logic that it cannot be there. I'm not totally stubborn." His
point, he says, is that "in science it doesn't help to defend [any
hypothesis] beyond reasonable evidence."
DRUG OF CHOICE
Peter Duesberg believes that treatment with AZT, the most common AIDS
therapy (often administered to people who test positive for the HIV virus)
is the worst thing that can be done for victims of the disease.
AZT is a potent chemical that is shipped in containers labeled with
skull and crossbones. The treatment was developed 30 years ago for cancer
patients, then abandoned as too dangerous. Giving it to AIDS patients,
whose bodies have been ravaged by drug abuse, is like throwing gasoline
on a fire, according to Duesberg.
In his book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Duesberg describes a disease
known as SMON, which broke out in Japan in the 1950s. "In many ways,
SMON anticipated the later AIDS epidemic," Duesberg writes. "For
15 years the syndrome was mismanaged by the Japanese science establishment,
in which virtually all research efforts were controlled by virus hunters.
Ignoring strong evidence to the contrary, researchers continued to assume
the syndrome was contagious and searched for one virus after another."
In the end, scientists found that the SMON epidemic was caused not by
avirus but by the misuse and overuse of the drug clioquinol for treating
disorders of the stomach. Once clioquinol use was abandoned, SMON disappeared.