VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE
DEBATING AZT
The Pope of AIDS
By Anthony Brink
When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals.
He has nerve and he has knowledge.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), English author.
Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
"The Speckled Band" (1892), of Dr. Grimesby Roylott.
For any number of obvious reasons, it would probably be disquieting to
most folk at large to discover that Mother Theresa - to employ a fanciful
illustration - had kept a Swiss bank account. One would imagine that the
honesty of men working at the frontiers of science in that hazy twilight
terrain between the known and the unknown, the certain and the speculative,
would count for quite a bit as well. Particularly where their pontifications,
advices and theories have the potential both to reap magnificent honours and
riches, and very directly affect us dumb fucks out in the laity, who sit at the
feet of these guys and crave as much of their wisdom as we can get. And
especially in a time of a perceived medical emergency, or during the rise of an
hysterical epidemic, fuelled by a medieval fear of tainted blood and poisoned
semen - and now evil mothers’ milk - in which we look up with frightened eyes
to these secular sages for deliverance from tiny invisible enemies which we are
told beset us. Mostly when enjoying our favourite evening recreation.
Science at its outer limits is populated by no end of ambitious cowboys
of modest acumen hungry for fame, glory and the Ferraris in which some of their
lucky chums in bio-tech cruise out of their labs’ parking lots in the direction
of their Cessna hangars. They live so to speak in remote Wild West towns with lamentably
few marshals to keep an eye on things. Many are the left-overs too mediocre to
cut it in university environments who wind up in homes for scientific dullards
like the politically powerful health bureaucracies of the National Institutes
of Health and The Centres for Disease Control in the USA. As we’ve all seen,
when these oracles mumble, press trumpets blare and the entire world eagerly
gobbles up every word, without demur. Notwithstanding how many fake health
crises they have delivered still-born into the popular consciousness, like the
idle herpes scare in the 70’s, the great swine flu fiasco in the same decade,
the phantom syphilis epidemic in the first half of the 20th century,
and that shining emblem of medical idiocy, the pellagra plague in the US South
over the same period, treated inter alia
with arsenic, electrocution and ruthless quarantine, which turned out to be
plain malnutrition among the politically awkward droves of poor white crackers
in deep south industrial towns.
We need contagious epidemics to fight. Even imagined ones. They’re
tremendously psychologically useful. Germ theory so dominates contemporary
medicine that it seeks germs everywhere, the more virulent the better, and
especially if they can be linked to our culture’s great taboos, sex and death.
Anything to avoid facing up to unappealing political realities like widespread
chronic undernourishment among a shameful number of our countrymen as the
time-honoured and common sense cause of broken health. Or, at the other pole, for
those of us felicitously occupying the higher orders, factors inextricably tied
to the excesses of our culture of affluence.
Of course, the loftier the degree of scientific specialisation, the
sharper the point of the pyramid, the smaller and remoter the frontier town,
and the fewer the guys with badges. As in a funny little corner of theoretical
(some say virtual) virology called retrovirology - served at the commencement
of the AIDS era by only a handful of labs run by the same guys who’d lost the ‘war
on cancer’ declared by Nixon in 1971, by putting all their money, and 40
billion of their country’s, on the perfectly ridiculous theory that cancer was
an infectious condition caused by viruses.
Folk inclined to the view that a reasonable degree of personal integrity
is essential to serve as a brake on the perennial temptation tickling largely
unpoliced scientists at the frontiers of their specialisations to make
extravagant claims with fabulous commercial potential beyond those which their
data really support might be put out to learn that the pope of AIDS is a
complete scum-bag.
We speak of Robert Gallo, who told the worried world at a press
conference convened by the US Health Department on 23 April 1984, before the
publication of any paper for his fellows to assess, that he’d discovered the
cause, a virus he said, of the poor health that a narrow subset of gay men with
ruinous lifestyles were experiencing - later christened, in a flourish of
conceptual surplusage, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Having sneaked
through a patent application on the blood test he’d devised for his claimed
viral culprit ahead of the previously lodged French one, thus guaranteeing him
a fortune in royalties, Gallo went on to publish four papers in Science two
weeks later. Then the
trouble started, an exuberant international disputation over who stole the fake
diamonds. For Gallo this was the Paula trouble that led to Monica.
Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in France complained that the
samples containing what he believed to be his newly spotted virus and which
he’d trustingly sent Gallo had been flagrantly ripped off. He sued across the
sea. Gallo brazenly counter-charged his accuser. It was embarrassing for the US
administration to have its premier AIDS scientist accused of theft and fraud,
but with the help of a gang of lawyers hired to fudge the facts and conceal
boxes of crucial discoverable documents, Gallo got off - by dint of a neat
political compromise agreeing a history, cosigned by no less than the
presidents of the respective republics, Reagan and Chirac, in terms of which
these two giants of modern biology were henceforth to be deemed co-discoverers
of the ‘AIDS virus’.
The sham began unravelling almost immediately. A trouble-making investigative
journalist on the Chicago Tribune,
John Crewdson, began sticking his nose in. He went to print with a
comprehensively researched expose spilling the beans on Gallo’s theft of Luc
Montagnier’s samples, even his photographs of them. Hardly able to do
otherwise, Gallo’s bosses in the National Institutes of Health instigated an
enquiry with Yale biochemist Frederic Richards as overseer. Reviewing the four
seminal research papers upon which the entire HIV-AIDS causation paradigm is
founded - if feebly - the inquiry found fraud, a discrepancy between what had
been reported and what had been done. The NIH watered it down, finding Gallo
guilty merely of “creating and fostering conditions that gave rise to
falsified/fabricated data and falsified reports.” This loyal whitewash was
promptly criticised by Richards and by Senator John Dingle, who had got wind of
the misfeasance in Gallo’s laboratory, and had begun his own investigation
under the aegis of his Sub-Committee on Oversights and Investigations of the
House Energy and Commerce Committee. The Department of Health’s Office of
Research Integrity reviewed the NIH report and disagreed with the cop-out. It
had no trouble finding Gallo guilty of scientific misconduct, the gravest
possible verdict, and a capital offence in career terms. So did the Dingle
Committee in its draft report. Facing criminal prosecution for the perjury
adorning his patent application, Gallo was forced to leave the National
Institutes of Health in disgrace. On the scandal festered, until 1993, when
happily for Gallo, it all went away. The government dropped the patent charges,
and those of fraudulently making a misstatement in a scientific journal and
failing to credit the work of other researchers in claiming it as his own. Why?
Because, a review board, comprising lawyers naturally, not scientists, had
raised the bar in asserting a brand-new revised definition of scientific
misconduct, which Gallo’s prosecutors in the Office of Research Integrity
doubted they could clear. Unlike Sol Kerzner who kept his head down when the
bribery case against him was dropped, Gallo boasted complete vindication.
Before making becoming famous for HIV, Gallo’s laboratory had been found
by an investigative panel of university scientists appointed in 1974 to be one
of the worst offenders in the scandalous abuse of federal funds dished out
during Nixon’s ‘War on Cancer’. Two co-researchers later went down for
embezzlement and taking secret gratuities.
From this scientific cesspool was spewed the constitution for The Terror,
the founding papers of the most powerful, all-pervasive and terrifying medical
model of our time, the HIV-AIDS-causation hypothesis. No wonder the Nobel
committee has set its face against the whole stinking shambles. Yet its
integrity as a premise is assumed in the almost one hundred thousand papers in
the subject that have been published since. Those critics making a living in
the scientific establishment who point a finger at the emperor’s pink arse do
so at immense professional and personal risk, and for some, at terrible cost.
But there’s another story.
Curiously,
the Office of Research Integrity found that the fraud tainting Gallo’s
claim-to-fame papers did not affect the validity of the papers’ main
conclusions, even though some of the key research work was described as “of
dubious scientific merit”, and “really crazy.” Suffice it to say that others
who have meticulously scrutinised Gallo’s original HIV research claims -
allowing for the purpose of reviewing them that the dubious research data is
sound - have found them to be, well, shall we say troubling. The adventurous
leap between the papers’ contents and their headings, for starters. But that’s
another yarn still.
Gallo’s disgraceful behaviour in relation to his AIDS research was no
first. Had he not ascended to such power and influence within the federal
health bureaucracy, it is likely that his claim to have found a single
infectious cause for the disparate diseases grouped together as AIDS in the
early 1980’s would have been laughed out of court. After all, this was the bright
spark who, with almost as much
fanfare as that at his flash-bulb popping HIV press announcement, had loudly
touted his discovery of what he claimed to be the first identified human
retrovirus, HL23V, in the mid 70’s. After another look, this exciting find
turned out to be nothing of the kind, just an accidental laboratory artefact.
His laboratory hadn’t done the most basic controls. The virus had never
existed. To his great embarrassment, Gallo had to retract his fancy claims, and
HL23V then completely disappeared from the scientific lexicon.
As the last misfired shots were going off in the failed cancer war -
staged largely around the retroviral-cancer hypothesis - and it had become
irresistibly plain to everyone that cancer had nothing to do with germs, and
the whole thing had been a monumental waste of money, Gallo and his mates
(known in-house as the Bob Club) sought new funding opportunities for their
imminently redundant laboratories. Ever eager to position himself where the
action was, he began punting another retrovirus which he claimed to have
discovered, HTLV1, as the possible cause of the odd diseases like Kaposi’s
Sarcoma and Pneumocystitis carinii pneumonia suddenly appearing to ail urban fast-track
life-style gay men in San Francisco and New York. The virus had in fact been
identified by biologists in Gallo’s lab, principally Poiesz and Ruscetti, not
Gallo, but true to form he appropriated the discovery and took the accolades.
Wanting the virus to be all things, the theory that HTLV1 could be responsible
for AIDS was ludicrous. He had previously claimed this virus, again on absurd
grounds, to be the cause of a rare form of leukaemia, which amounts to
disorderly immune cell replication, not premature cell death. “One of the most
exciting stories of twentieth century biology”, he gushed. Nobel laureate Kary
Mullis thinks it “a joke.” The virus had first been posited to be a cell
division stimulant, not a killer. Obviously, Gallo’s new converse role for
HTLV1 went up like a lead balloon, but it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t long
afterwards that Montagnier sent Gallo his samples, and we know the rest. In
cravenly seeking the imprimatur of Big American Science, by seeking the
endorsement for his work of an abject rogue, Montagnier naively left his keys
in the ignition, and the next thing it was gone. Gallo resprayed Montagnier’s
LAV as HTLVIII. It was later renamed HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, on
the basis of Gallo’s claims, without proof to warrant its fearsome title.
(Unless one thinks that correlations disclose proofs of causation. As if
sparrows sometimes seen on telephone cables cause crossed lines.)
Whether HIV (or rather the minute biological traces said to evidence its
presence) actually lives up to its frightening billing, is something Gallo
can’t seem to make up his mind about. This ought to come as some comfort to
those who live in wait for the clatter of the hangman’s key. Once insisting
that HIV “kills like a truck”, and “would kill Clark Kent”, he now concedes,
“We don’t know that…100 percent of people infected with HIV will die with AIDS.
We don’t know that. We shouldn’t be predicting that, and it could even
precipitate suicide. They shouldn’t have put that on the front page (of the
Washington Post), even if it were true.
But the fact is that we just don’t know.” In 1995, The Pasteur Institute’s
Simon Wain-Hobson confessed, “An intrinsic cytopathic effect of the virus is no
longer feasible.” The biggest medical research effort in history has found HIV
to be biologically inactive. Gallo has tried weaselling out of the difficulty
created by this humbling observation by suggesting that ‘cofactors’ might be
involved in AIDS, since HIV can’t do any mischief on its own. (Time
magazine’s 1996 Man of the Year,
David Ho’s opposite assertions in 1996 have imploded on his childish
mathematical errors.) Gallo had lots to say about a virus called HHV8 for a
while, implicated as a ‘co-factor’ in the development of that signal AIDS
condition Kaposi’s Sarcoma, but like all other exciting breakthroughs in AIDS
research, it too has proved to be just another flash in the pan. Worse still,
it is now generally accepted, and since 1994 by Gallo too, that those horrible
skin blotches have nothing to do with HIV at all.
At last count, Gallo was on SABC TV a couple of years ago, singing his
own praises for his alleged breakthrough anti-HIV protein HAF, distilled from
the urine of women with child. About which we have heard nothing since.
Naturally, since it was just another rodeo stunt. Gallo’s new laboratory in
Baltimore had produced nothing to show for the millions he had duped state and
municipal authorities into giving him, and was about to have its plug pulled by
the Maryland legislature accordingly. A neatly timed “very important discovery”
defeated the danger.
Since the case for Gallo’s HIV-AIDS hypothesis is invariably pressed with
calls to the authority of its famous protagonist, in the absence of scientific
proof in the sense that most curious folk understand, it’s as well that we know
what kind of bloke we’re relying on.
With such scintillating credentials as Gallo’s, no wonder that astute German
virologist Stefan Lanka - referring to HIV-AIDS, Luc Montagnier, and Gallo -
talks of “a medical theory concocted by a French mediocrity who right from the
start doubted the validity of a virus-only theory of AIDS causation, and only
last week unleashed a new wave of doubt; and an American scientific gangster
who had committed so many crass, self-aggrandising blunders in the previous
decade, that he could not really be reliedupon to tell the time correctly.” The Einstein of modern
biology, Kary Mullis, doesn’t mince words either; he considers Gallo and his
acolytes “so stupid they’re to be pitied.”
CONTENTS
DEBATING AZT
VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE