Document:Rappoport interviews molecular biologist
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AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century
1988
The following interview with a respected molecular biologist was done in the winter of 1988. As publication of this book neared, he decided not to go on record with his remarks, and so I deleted his name from these pages. The alternative would have been to change certain parts of our conversation, and I refused to do that.
It is important to understand that at no time did this scientist retract anything he said. Nor did he feel, some months after our conversation, that the considreable force of his remarks needed tempering because of recent research developments concerning AIDS. On the contrary, he has become more convinced than ever that HIV has not been proven to cause human disease.
He had his own personal reasons for removing his name from this interview. They concerned how he would be judged by his peers, most of whom are utterly convinced that HIV is the central disease-agent of our time – though, he told me, "I can't figure out for the life of me why they think so. Has the quality of research deteriorated so badly? Let me answer my own question. Yes."
In this, and the next conversation with Peter Duesberg, both men maintain: Not only is HIV unproven as the cause of AIDS, it is latent, dormant, it lies around without replicating, without spreading. There is no evidence, either, that it destroys human cells in the body. There is no conclusive evidence that it gives rise to indirect mechanisms which in turn destroy cells or harm the body. When the actual virus can be found in a person who has been diagnosed with AIDS, its concentration (titer) is so low that special lab procedures have to be used to induce it to grow in a dish, outside the body, so that then it can be detected at all. It exists in so few cells that even if it did destroy them, the result would be "like a pinprick."
It is important to note that, whether one agrees or disagrees with the way these two scientists characterize the personality of HIV, that virus is still unproven as the cause of disease.
Q: You've read a great many professional papers written on the subject of AIDS. What is their general quality?
A: Their general quality is poor. Poor, relative to good virology. Poor, relative to papers with well-assembled statistics. Poor compared to rational thought.
Q: Any speculation as to why that is?
A: It's a very important epidemic.
Q: I don't understand.
A: It's an easy field in which to get money to do experiments. It's an easy field to publish in. People tend to publish hastily.
Q: Why are so many researchers convinced that HIV causes AIDS?
A: You mean people who work on HIV? I don't know why they think it causes AIDS. I think there's a lot of circumstantial evidence you can use to convince yourself that what you're working on is important, is worth doing. There's a termendous amount of authoritarianism in science. When everyone is telling you that this is so [HIV causes AIDS], it's easy to convince yourself that, indeed, it must be so, otherwise how could all these people be working on it?
You're a retrovirologist. You're told by everybody that there is transfusion-AIDS and that it's now been stopped. That there is pediatric AIDS. That there are cohort studies in which it's know that AIDS is transmissible. You've been told that by the head of the CDC, by the head of the Allergy and Infectious Diseases unit and you're getting more grant money than you've had in ten years, to work on this virus. And every time you find something, it's immediately publishable, in the best journals. So why should you pay attention to a man like Peter Duesberg who comes along and says, 'Wait a minute, hold on here, let's relook at all this data that you believe in.' In fact, when you look at what you believe about AIDS, you find that it's all quite fatuous. There is no hard evidence [that HIV causes AIDS]. But few people are going to reverse their field.
Q: We hear that once upon a time, people used to debate issues like HIV seriously, freely, in journals. They didn't ignore these issues.
A: There has never been a time before this when medical research and basic biological research were both connected to the money machine. The fundamental change is that now biology is a for-profit science. Yearly, the directory of biotechnology companies grows.
Q: Was there really a period when issues of biology were debated freely and openly?
A: Yes. I grew up in molecular biology at a time when theories were constantly debated in the journals. This is what molecular biology was. The debate about whether there in fact existed a repressor molecular, debates about specific initiation facotrs, how E-coli DNA replication prodeeded, whether it prodeeded from one origin or several origins. People of considerable talent debated these issues, with good experimental data. Whether transforming viruses had particular oncogenes or not. Pretty good debate. Still going on in one form or another.
The argument that you hear from the AIDS establishment – "Oh my God, what would have happened if AIDS occurred twenty year sago when we didn't have the techniques we have today, it would have wiped out the universe" – I turn that around. In some ways I would rather have seen AIDS twenty years ago. When it would have been dealt with by more orthodox medical practices and it would be over with.
Q: People say they've proved AIDS is transmissible.
A: If one tries to differentiate transmissibility of the disease from transmissibility of the virus, it's extraordinarily easy to do. Once you remove the equation that transmission of the virus equals transmission of the disease, AIDS does not look like a terribly tramissible disease anymore.
Q: In other words, if you don't make the assumption that HIV causes AIDS, all you have is the transmission of this interesting but possibly harmless virus.
A: That's right. The disease itself does not appear terribly transmissible... the transmissibility within a cohort, when studies, is always within cohorts that are engaging in precisely the same kind of activity, so it's impossible to say that X gave it to Y who gave it to Z. All you know is that X, Y, and Z were doing the same thing, and X, Y, and Z came down with the same peculiar set of infections.
Q: And one thing they were doing was having sex with each other in, say, the case of the gay community.
A: That's one of the things they were doing. They were doing a whole bunch of other things...under the umbrella of ingesting large number of potent chemicals.
And in the other [risk] groups, who knows what the AIDS is? One looks at transfusion AIDS, and in the time between 1978 and 1983, there were millions of transfusions in the US, when the blood supply was not being screened, was not being scrutinized, and should have contained the largest amount of this virus at any time in "the epidemic's history." And out of those million sof transfusions, there were 400 cases of transfusion-related AIDS. And of that 400, only a small fraction of them are really described in the medical literature, as to their symptoms, and in none of them does one know the HIV [status] of the recipient before the transfusion. Again, these are whole-blood transfusions. They could have gotten some nasty combination of things [other than HIV] from the blood which gave them their AIDS. If you want to be hard core about it, tranfusing whole blood doesn't exclude anything else [as a possible cause of subsequent disease].
Q: I have the picture that only a few people control the necessary equipment to do research on HIV.
A: No. Nothing special about that at all. [1]
Q: This equipment is available to lots of people.
A: Oh yes. Lots and lots of people are working on HIV. Whole companies have been founded on it.
Q: A few, but not all studies, show that HIV antibodies are found more often in people with AIDS, or people in so-called high-risk groups, than in people from low-risk groups. Why?
A: Because the virus is hard to transmit. Hard to cause even a sign that it has been present in the body. It would be more likely to show up in people who immune systems were shot. Probably, on the whole, there are more people in high-risk groups whose immune systems are already compromised.
Q: What would have to be shown to say that HIV causes AIDS?
A: What would be convincing to me? A chimpanzee succumbing o AIDS. That would make me go back and look at the other arguments and say, well, there's something going on we just don't understand. Also [to convince me] a demonstration that the virus has an active site of replication [2] [in the human body], at some concealed site that we don't really know about. And that its replication in that spot is somehow destructive to T-helper cells. Also [to convince me], the demonstration of a plausible mechanism to expain latency of the virus. [3]
Q: You mean plausible genetic mechansisms?
A: Genetic, physiological, biochemical, immunological – I don't care. Something. Anything. Anything that made the slightest biological sense. I don't see it. And I think the [HIV] virus is really well known. There isn't a single secret in the genome [genetic structure]. No new gene waiting there to come out. There's hard evidence that say HIV only behaves in a particular way. Like every other retrovirus, extremely latent, extremely inactive...not killing the human cell in which it's expressing [its] genes.
HIV is in people with symptoms, and in people without symptoms. If there is a secret site where it really is replicating, it seems to me one should have been able to detect that by now, with the kind of scrutiny that has gone on.
Q: How could a fantasy arise that HIV was replicating to begin with?
A: It was just taken as an assumption, all the way along, and when the data began to show that it wasn't so, that data was just ignored. People said, "Well, we know it's causing the diseas, and when we understand more about its behavior, we'll understand this replicating business too. This too shall come to pass." It's a myth that's constantly being provided the world through Gallo and Fauci and others who claim that this is the most complicated retrovirus in the history of the universe. "With more study we'll understand everything, it's so pecular, how it behaves, how it causes this disease, but don't worry, we'll figure it out."
But all the things that are peculiar about it are things that would make you look at it and say, Gee, this virus is not a pathogen! It doesn't do anything. Humans make a perfectly good antibody response to it; in fact it's so good, maybe that's why the virus is so latent [harmless].
Q: Recently, Gallo said animal models [4] for smallpox and tuberculosis never existed either, and use that as a reaon for ignoring that fact that chimps don't get AIDS.
A: I'm not sure about tuberculosis. Smallpox will not infect chimpanzees. But there is a very virulent monkeypox which is an exact model for human smallpox.
Simian viruses, though, are lousy models for human AIDS. They're said to be good models, but nobody really believes they're good models, because of the following reasons: It is not a disease [monkey AIDS] that occurs in the wild. It only occurs in caged monkeys. It can only be given to these monkeys by injecting them with high doeses of the virus at a time when their immune systems are rather poorly developed, immature. The onset of the immunodeficiency is rapid, there is an accompanying viremia, the opportunistic infections are quick, and very lethal. The whole thing is over quickly. Take those things and say, how much of that looks like AIDS? Plus the [simian] virus itself is very unrelated to HIV. How much of a model is that for human AIDS? It's a terrible model, in all of its aspects. [5]
Q: What about the people who argue that, say, viruses like sheep visna are good comparisons for HIV? Visna is supposed to be a latent virus that lies around for a long time in sheep and then causes brain rot that kills them.
A: That's another one of those viruses...when you have the disease, you can't find the virus anymore.
Q: You mean it's like HIV in that respect.
A: Yes. Arguing about visna on behalf of AIDS is assuming that the data about visna is understood. That we understand how this [sheep disease] happens. That we understand how a sheep can get infected and 20 years later, ten years later, can develop this neuroencephalopathy. The whole field of slow viruses cannot be held up [as an example for AIDS]. Some of those viruses don't even exist. They only exist int he journals. Like kuru virus. It's highly specious.
Q: In other words, you're saying, since we don't understand how visna plays a role in malignant sheep disease, then there's no way to make a parallel to HIV.
A: Yes. Visna is a case in which there isn't [virus production]. When the animal dies, you can't find the virus naymore.
To explain HIV latency by visna latency is imagining you understand visna latency.
Q: Do you think there are researchers out there, people who are thinking, "I'd really like to say in public I agree with Duesberg, but I don't want to. I shouldn't."
A: There must be. Duesberg will make it that much more difficult for figures to be fudged in the future, to perhaps keep an epidemic going that really doesn't exist, and to continue to use the fear that any moment we're all going to get it [AIDS]; to manipulate people, which I think is the overriding political interest, in AIDS. If Duesberg is right...then the imagined numbers of cases will not develop. Evidently, they've not developed in Haiti. I can't find anybody who has any real information on what's happened to the 200,000 cases that were supposed to develop in Haiti by now.
The AIDS literature is full of screw-ups. Papers that are published with great authority that are baloney. You look at the data and it's unbelievable, the conclusions that are drawn from them: Papers about homologies between AIDS protein and other proteins. The gene experiments with HIV, which tell you nothing about the way these HIV genes function in the body, in the human organism. You're talking about a virus [HIV] that doesn't do anything, except in Gallo's H9-line [a laboratory cell-line used to culture HIV and make it grow]. He probably proclaims HIV grows in this cell-line of his better than in any cell-line in the word, that that's why he can study it better than anyone else can. Blithely overlooking the fact that he's got a cell-line infected by HIV, making more HIV, making more of this "deadly" virus than any cell-line known to man. And yet this "deadly" virus doesn't kill these cells it's growing in. Bizarre.
It became very fashionable at some point to say that if you had a disease and from the patient you simply isolated a retrovirus [a class of virus to which HIV belongs], the retrovirus was automatically the cause of the disease. That set the stage for isolating a retrovirus from AIDS patients and calling it the cause of the disease.
Q: Fashionable?
A: Yes.
This interview suggests one of the reasons researchers don't want to debate anti-HIV people in any serious way, which is to say in professional journals. Their critique of HIV has roots in deeper criticsms of virology that have to do with unwarranted assumptions about the latency of certain animal viruses. That would move the debate back over twenty to thirty years of significant biological research and throw doubt on the value of it.
Footnotes
- ↑ Some sources say that Robert Gallo has long controlled who gets the HIV virus for study and research purposes.
- ↑ Several researchers are coming to the conclusion that HIV does not actively and aggressively replicated, does not produce more and more of itself in the body.
- ↑ Latency refers to the initial period of months, or years, during which HIV supposedly lives in the body without causing measurable harm, after which it is said to become active and virulent.
- ↑ Refers to the step in fulfilling Koch's postulates, in which animals are injected with a germ thought to cause a disease, to see if all the symptoms develop in them.
- ↑ Also, in order to get microbes to infect monkeys, the animals may be radiated or dosed with chemical toxins, both of which weaken their immune systems. Such procedures would further disqualify animal-model analogies to human AIDS.
© 1988 by Jon Rappoport
Originally published in AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century
