THE AIDS DEBATE
part 1
the
Most Controvrsial Story You've Never Heard
Prologue
In 1984, Robert
Gallo, a government cancer-virologist, called an international press
conference to announce that he'd found the probable cause of AIDS.
He claimed that a retrovirus called HIV was destroying the immune
systems of young gay men and IV drug abusers, leaving them open to
a variety of both viral diseases and cancer.
According to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, AIDS is not a single disease,
but rather a category of 29 unrelated, previously-known conditions
including herpes, yeast infections, salmonella, diarrhea, fever, flus,
TB, pelvic cancer in women, pneumonia and bacterial infections. The
CDC also designates HIV- positive people who aren't sick, but
have a T-cell count below 200, as AIDS patients (T-cells are a subset
of white blood cells). The only thing that separates an AIDS diagnosis
from any of these conditions is a positive HIV test, which itself
is based on Robert Gallo's research.
Gallo's HIV
theory, however, was not the only AIDS theory, and according to a
growing number of concerned scientists, researchers and activists,
it wasn't the best. For 70 years before Gallo, retroviruses were
known to be a non-toxic part of the cell; moreover, no single virus
could simultaneously cause a viral disease like pneumonia, in which
cells are destroyed, and a cancer like Kaposi's Sarcoma, in which
cells multiply rapidly.
These scientists
argue that Gallo's unified HIV/AIDS theory is flawed and that
treating 29 unrelated diseases with extremely toxic AIDS drugs like
AZT and protease inhibitors is at best irresponsible and at worse
medical genocide.
They may have
a point. Ninety-four percent of all AIDS-related deaths in the US
occurred after the introduction of AZT, according to CDC statistics
through the year 2000. And according to the University of Pittsburgh,
the No. 1 cause of death in US AIDS patients today is liver failure,
a side-effect of the new protease inhibitors.
The questions
arise: Did Gallo truly solve the AIDS riddle, and are we treating
AIDS humanely and effectively?
To answer these
questions, I spoke with three prominent AIDS researchers.
Dr. Peter Duesberg
is a chemist and retroviral expert. Duesberg discovered the Oncogene
(cancer gene) and isolated the retroviral genome (of which HIV is
one) in 1970. He is professor of molecular biology at UC Berkeley.
Dr. David Rasnick
is a protease specialist and has been in AIDS research for 20 years.
He and Duesberg work in collaboration on cancer and AIDS research.
Both Rasnick and Duesberg were advisors on President Mbeki's South
African AIDS panel.
Dr. Rodney Richards
is a chemist who worked with Amgen and Abbot labs, designing the first
HIV tests from Robert Gallo's HIV cell line.
The interviews
were conducted separately and integrated into a dialogue. Individual
points-of-view belong to individual speakers.
How did you get
involved with AIDS research?
Rasnick:
I'm a chemist and protease enzyme researcher. I design and synthesize
inhibitors to stop tissue-destroying viruses and cancers. When Robert
Gallo announced HIV caused AIDS, I wanted to work on inhibitors that
would stop it.
In '85 I was
at a research meeting where HIV was being discussed. An AIDS specialist
was asked how much HIV was present in an infected AIDS patient. He
was asked, “What's the titer of HIV?”
What's
a Titer?
Rasnick:The
titer is the number of infectious virus particles in a blood or tissue
sample. A titer of live virus is easily obtainable from the particular
tissue that the virus infects. A sample from this infected tissue
contains millions of infectious virus particles. If you have herpes,
the sample comes from a cold sore; if it's polio, it's from
the intestine; if it's smallpox, from a pustule; if it's a
cold, from the throat.
When you're
infected with a virus, it infects and kills about 30 percent of the
specific tissue that it targets before you get any symptoms. You can
take a titer of any infected area, put it under a microscope and see
millions of living viruses.
So, the virologist
was asked, “What's the titer?”
He answered, "Undetectable.
Zero."
I thought, how
is that possible? How can you be made sick from something that isn't
there? With polio, researchers threw away a hundred viruses before
they found the right one. I assumed Gallo had simply gotten the wrong
virus, and we'd have to start over.
By 1987, there
were 30,000 cumulative AIDS cases. Numbers were not growing as predicted;
and AIDS hadn't left its original risk groups. Six years after
the first AIDS cases, 95 percent of infections still occurred exclusively
in men - 2/3 gay men, and 1/3 IV drug users. Additionally,
each AIDS risk group suffered from specific diseases.
Viruses don't
cause different diseases based on gender, sexual preference or lifestyle.
Viruses have unique but limited genetic structures, which manifest
in a limited but identical set of symptoms in all patients. The herpes
virus makes herpes lesions, but never a sore throat. The chicken pox
virus always produces skin sores, but never paralysis.
Viral epidemics
spread exponentially in the first months and years, killing everyone
who can't survive long enough to develop immunity to it. HIV wasn't
growing; it remained in its original risk groups, and it caused different
diseases in each. It clearly wasn't acting like a contagious virus.
In 1988, I came
across an article written by Peter Duesberg in the science journal
Cancer Research. The article was on retroviruses in general,
and HIV in particular. Duesberg was the world's preeminent retrovirologist.
He'd studied and mapped the retroviral genome in the '70s.
Duesberg's knowledge of retroviruses was unparalleled. In the
article, he laid out, point for point, what retroviruses are, and
what they can and can't do.
HIV is a retrovirus;
what are retroviruses?
Rasnick:
Retroviruses are a subset of viruses that are not toxic to cells.
They were discovered in the early 20th century. They're one of
the first identified cellular particles. There are about 3,000 catalogued
retroviruses. They exist in every animal: dogs, cats, whales, birds,
rats, hamsters and humans. Retrovirologists estimate that one to two
percent of our own DNA is retrovirus.
Retroviruses are
RNA strands that copy themselves into our DNA using an enzyme called
Reverse Transcriptase. Retroviruses are passed down matrilineally
- from mother to child. They're not sexually transmissible. Lab
animals do not exchange retroviruses with each other, no matter how
much they mate. But babies always have the same retroviruses as their
mothers.
Current research
strongly indicates that they're simply a naturally occurring part
of us. In 50 years of modern lab research, no retrovirus has ever
been shown to kill cells or cause disease, except under very special
laboratory conditions.
Peter Duesber:
In 1987 I was invited by Cancer Research to discuss whether
retroviruses, including HIV, could cause disease or immune deficiency.
I was invited because of my experience with retroviruses.
In 1970, I was
working in UC Berkeley's virus lab. The big program in virology
at the time, which we were part of, was to find a virus that caused
cancer. There was also a large government cancer-virus program at
the National Institutes of Health. Robert Gallo was one of the scientists
working on that project.
We began looking
at retroviruses because of their unique qualities. Typical viruses
kill cells. Their strategy is to enter the cell, kill it and move
on to the next one. However, with cancer, cells aren't killed;
in fact, they multiply very rapidly. Therefore a virus couldn't
cause cancer. Retroviruses, however, don't kill cells. This quality
made them an outstanding candidate for a cancer virus.
In 1970, I made
a discovery that got a lot of attention. I isolated a retroviral gene
from a cancer cell, and infected other cells with this gene. The cancer
virologists were very excited. They thought this might be the thing
they'd been looking for - a retrovirus that could infect other
cells and cause cancer. I was suddenly famous. There were job offers;
I was given tenure at Berkeley and admission into the Academy of Science.
Of course, if
a virus, or a unique retrovirus, caused cancer in the real world,
then cancer would be contagious. But nobody “catches” cancer. A "case
of cancer" doesn't go around the office. However, such fundamental
thoughts were not on the minds of the virus hunters. Scientists like
impressive-sounding proofs, regardless of what we know is true in
the real world. The retroviral cancer-gene was just a lab artifact.
It didn't exist in humans or animals in nature. We created it
in the lab, and that's where it stayed. It was purely academic.
As part of the
cancer-gene experiment, my associates and I mapped the retroviral
genome. We made the maps that today are used as the blueprints for
all retroviruses, including HIV.
What do retroviruses
do?
Duesber:
In terms of disease, they do nothing. They're transcribed into
the DNA in a few cells, and they hang around there for the rest of
your life as part of your genome. Nevertheless, cancer-virus hunters
continued to look for a cancer-gene using the technology we created
and the retroviral maps we made.
Rasnick:
In the mid-'70s, Robert Gallo claimed he'd found a cancer-retrovirus
in the cells of a leukemia patient. He called it HL23V. He found it
the same way he would later find HIV - not by finding the retrovirus
in the blood - but by looking for antibody and enzyme activity that
he claimed stood in for the actual retrovirus.
By 1980, his claim
was refuted by both the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center and
the National Cancer Institute. Gallo's supposed HL23V antibodies
weren't the result of a cancer-virus, but rather the result of
“exposure to many natural substances” which create antibodies in humans.
Today nobody, not even Gallo, claims HL23V ever existed.
In 1980, he tried
again. Gallo claimed to have a new cancer retrovirus called HTLV-1,
which caused a kind of leukemia in which T-cells multiplied into fluid
tumors. T-cells are one of many subsets of white blood cells. Once
again, the proof was less than convincing. Less than one percent of
people who tested positive for HTLV-1 ever developed leukemia. It
was a less-than-successful validation for his theory.
How did Gallo
move from cancer to AIDS research?
Rasnick: In
the early '80s, gay men were showing up in emergency rooms with
a variety of simultaneous illnesses and infections. At the time, medical
journals speculated that the diseases were drug-related. Gay men had
been abusing toxic, immune suppressing and even carcinogenic drugs
like poppers, cocaine and amphetamines on a daily basis for the better
part of the '70s.
In 1983, Luc Montagnier,
a French scientist at the Pasteur Institute, claimed to have found
a new retrovirus in AIDS patients. But nobody paid attention, because
he hadn't isolated a virus, and he hadn't found a single viral
particle in the blood - remember the titer was zero, undetectable.
Seeking some academic support, Montagnier sent a cell sample to Robert
Gallo at the NIH. Gallo took the cell-line Montagnier sent him and
modified it slightly. Then he did something strange. He stole it.
In 1984 Gallo
called an international press conference and together with Margaret
Heckler, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services,
announced that he'd discovered the “probable cause” of AIDS. It
was a new retrovirus called HTLV-III, (later re-named HIV). Later
that same day, he patented the modified cell-line he'd originally
gotten from Montagnier. He hadn't published a single word of his
research. Robert Gallo, a government-backed scientist, simply announced
that a retroviral-epidemic was on its way.
He sold the cell-line
to Abbot Labs, a pharmaceutical company that makes HIV tests. The
French government demanded that all patent rights be returned to Montagnier.
Gallo refused, claiming it was all his work. In 1987, Gallo and Montagnier
were forced by President Reagan and French Prime Minister Chirac to
meet in a hotel room to work out the HIV patent rights. In 1992, Gallo
was officially convicted of theft by a federal scientific ethics committee
Rodney Richards:
At first Gallo claimed he invented the whole process. Now he claims
his sample might have been “contaminated” by Montagnier's
Duesberg: The
NIH itself ran a two-year investigation of Gallo's HIV claim,
and they couldn't come up with any convincing evidence that he
came up with it on his own.
What did Abbot
labs do with Gallo's cell line?
Rasnick: Abbot
labs makes HIV-antibody tests out of it. Abbot's made billions
selling HIV tests, and Gallo's made millions from his patent.
So when we're
given an HIV-antibody test, we're tested based on what Gallo and
Montagnier claim to have found. How did Luc Montagnier find HIV?
Richards:
First he looked in his patients' blood, but he couldn't find
it there. In fact, no one has ever found HIV in human blood.
Right, the titer
was zero - so where did he look?
Richards:
Montagnier took tissue from the swollen lymph node of a gay man who
was a suspected AIDS patient. In an infected person, the lymph tissue
will presumably be littered with infected cells.
Montagnier attempted
to perform a cell culture with that tissue. This is the lab technique
used to isolate viruses like herpes and mononucleosis. In a cell culture,
infected cells are mixed with uninfected cells in a petri dish. Separated
from the body's immune system, viruses that are being suppressed
can surface. The virus travels from the infected cell to the uninfected
cell through the liquid in the dish. The scientist collects this liquid,
concentrates it, and spins it through a sucrose density gradient to
isolate the virus.
A sucrose density
gradient is a tube of layered sugar solution of specific densities.
The layers become thicker from top to bottom. The cell liquid is gently
placed on top of the sugar solution. This is spun in a centrifuge
for many hours to force the viral particles to descend through the
density layers. Cellular particles, including retroviruses, have known
densities. The known density corresponds to a layer in the test tube.
The descending particles stop when they find a density equal to their
own. This layer is photographed with an electron microscope. In cultures
from virally-infected patients, the photo plate is filled with millions
of identical viral particles.
Finally, a new
cell culture is performed with the isolated viral particles to see
if they are indeed infectious. Once again, the cell fluid is separated,
spun and photographed to verify that the same virus appears. This
is what's known as viral isolation.
Is this what Montagnier
did?
Richards: He
tried to, but it didn't work. Montagnier took lymph tissue from
a suspected AIDS patient, mixed it with cells from a healthy blood
donor and performed a cell culture. He removed the liquid and spun
it in a centrifuge, but he found no virus. But that didn't stop
him. Montagnier repeated the experiment but added a crucial new step.
He took the suspected
AIDS tissue and mixed it with a variety of cells in a culture, including
cells from an umbilical cord. Then he added powerful chemicals called
Mitogens that artificially force cells to replicate. He found, after
2 or 3 weeks, evidence of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase,
a sign of possible retroviral activity.
But he hadn't
found any virus?
Richards: No.
He found an enzyme that retroviruses use. But reverse transcriptase
is found in many other microbes, cellular components and processes,
including umbilical cells, and forced replication. Montagnier then
separated the mitogenically stimulated fluid from the culture and
poured it into another dish of healthy cells and again found reverse
transcriptase activity.
He put this through
a sucrose density gradient and found reverse transcriptase activity
at the density layer where retroviruses were known to purify. What
he did not find was a virus. When he looked through the electron microscope
at that same density gradient, he found nothing - but he didn't
acknowledge that until years later.
That's what's
known as isolation of HIV.
How does this
prove that an infectious virus was making people sick?
Richards:
It doesn't. This is insufficient evidence to prove that HIV, or
any infectious virus exists, let alone that it causes disease.
How did Gallo
use Montagnier's cells to prove HIV existed and caused AIDS?
Richards: Gallo
cultured the cells, but didn't find enough reverse transcriptase
activity to convince him that Montagnier had found a retrovirus. So
Gallo added another step. He mixed cells from 10 AIDS patients together;
then he added those to leukemia T-cells from his HTLV-1 retrovirus
experiment. At that point, Gallo found enough reverse transcriptase
activity to convince him that there was indeed a retrovirus. That's
how he claims to have found HIV.
But Gallo had
already found reverse transcriptase activity in the leukemia cells.
How did he prove that there was a new retrovirus - HIV?
Richards: Many
scientists don't believe that he did prove it.
You said Gallo
used a T-cell line to grow HIV. Isn't HIV supposed to kill T-cells?
Richards: That's
what Gallo initially claimed, but Abbot labs grows its HIV in human
T-cells. It's even called an immortal cell line, because the leukemia
cells don't die. To date, no researcher has demonstrated how HIV
kills T-cells. It's just a theory that keeps money flowing into
the pharmaceutical approach to treating AIDS
Rasnick:
Gallo patented the leukemia T-cell mixture the very same day he announced
he'd found the “probable cause” of AIDS.
What do HIV tests
do?
Rasnick: They
look for antibodies in your blood to proteins that are taken out of
this mixture. Your body produces antibodies as a response to all foreign
material - germs, yeasts, viruses, even the food you eat. Viruses
are DNA or RNA strands wrapped in protein building blocks. Antibodies
grab onto these proteins, immobilizing and destroying the virus. When
these antibodies encounter different viral proteins in the future,
they'll very often grab onto them, too. This is called cross-reactivity
Duesberg:
Viruses are only dangerous the first time you encounter them. Once
you've made antibodies to a virus, you have immunity for the rest
of your life, and the virus can't get you sick anymore. This is
the opposite of HIV theory, which states: You become infected; you
don't get sick; you make antibodies; and 10 years later, you get
sick and die.
Rasnick:
There are two common HIV antibody tests. One is the Elisa, in which
a bunch of proteins from the T-cell mixture are stuck in a series
of little plastic wells on a test plate. The other is called Western
Blot. In this test, the proteins are separated onto individual paper
strips. Your blood is added, and if antibodies from your blood stick
to proteins from this mixture, you're said to be HIV positive.
They're assuming
the proteins are from HIV; but they never isolated HIV, so how can
they say these tests can diagnose HIV-infection?
Rasnick:
They can't, and they don't. None of the proteins in the Elisa
and Western Blot tests have been proven to be specific to HIV or any
retrovirus. For this reason the FDA has not approved a single test
for diagnosing HIV-infection
Richards: There
are at least 30 tests marketed to test for HIV. None of them are approved
by the FDA to diagnose the presence or absence of HIV. Not the Elisa,
not viral load, not Western Blot, not the P24 antigen test. The FDA
and manufacturers clearly state that the significance of testing positive
on the Elisa and Western Blot test is unknown.
AIDS researchers
admit that the tests contain at least 80 percent non-specific cellular
material - they're, at best, 20 percent effective. But in my scientific
opinion, they contain no HIV at all. The medical literature lists
at least 60 different conditions that can register positive on the
HIV-test. These conditions include candidas, arthritis, parasites,
malaria, liver conditions, alcoholism, drug abuse, flu, herpes, syphilis,
other STDs and pregnancy
Rasnick:
It's very simple to see how you can get false positives. Antibodies
cross-react. The more viruses and germs you're exposed to, the
more antibodies you'll produce, the greater risk you'll test
positive on a non-specific antibody test. If you live in a country
without clean water or sanitary living conditions, you're going
to have constant microbial and parasitic infections that produce antibodies.
You carry antibodies
to all the colds, flus, viruses and vaccinations you've ever had.
If you're pregnant, you're producing antibodies that will
react with Abbot's Elisa test. Pregnancy is a known cause of false
positives on the HIV test.
Different races
have different ranges of naturally-occurring antibodies. That's
why blacks have a nine times greater chance of testing positive than
white Europeans, and a 33 times greater chance than Asians. It doesn't
have anything to do with infection or health. In one study, a tribe
of South American Indians was given Elisa tests. Thirteen percent
of them tested HIV-positive, but nobody was sick. They just had antibodies
that reacted with the test.
If the tests aren't
specific, and we can't find HIV in the blood, then what is AIDS?
Richards: According
to the CDC, AIDS works like a formula: If you have an AIDS-indicator
disease like salmonella, tuberculoses, pneumonia, herpes, or a yeast
infection, and you test HIV-positive, then you're said to have
AIDS, and you're treated with toxic AIDS drugs. If you test negative
or don't know your HIV status, you're spared the toxic drugs
and simply treated for the disease you have.
In 1993 the CDC
expanded their definition of AIDS to include people who are not sick
at all but who test positive and have a one-time T-cell count under
200. Based on this new criteria, by 1997, about 2/3 of all AIDS
cases were perfectly healthy people. As it happens, '97 was the
last year the CDC told us how many people were healthy and how many
were sick. Now they just count everyone who's HIV-positive as
an AIDS patient, whether they're sick or not.
Let me clarify
this. When people die of AIDS, they actually die of a known disease.
But if their blood reacts with an HIV-antibody test, they're no
longer said to have the disease, they're said to have AIDS?
Rasnick: That's
how it works. And the sick people who test HIV-positive are put on
the most toxic drugs ever manufactured and sold.
What about AIDS
in Africa?
Rasnick: It's
the same story, even worse. Fifty percent of Africans have no sewage
systems. Their drinking water mixes with animal and human waste. They
have constant TB and malaria infections, the symptoms of which are
diarrhea and weight loss, the very same criteria UNAIDS and the World
Health Organization use to diagnose AIDS in Africa.
These people need
clean drinking water and treated mosquito nets [mosquitoes carry malaria],
not condoms and lectures and deadly pharmaceuticals forced on pregnant
mothers.
We've put
20 years and $118 billion into HIV. We've got no cure, no vaccine
and no progress. Instead we have thousands of people made sick and
even killed by toxic AIDS drugs. But we can't just treat them
for the diseases we know they have because if we do, we're called
“AIDS denialists.” Treating them for the diseases they actually have
would be more humane and effective than forcing toxic drugs down their
throats, and it would also save billions of tax dollars. AIDS is a
multi-billion dollar industry. There are 100,000 professional AIDS
researchers in this country. It's as hard to challenge as big
tobacco at this point.
What does Luc
Montagnier say about this?
Rasnick:
In 1990 at the San Francisco AIDS conference, Montagnier announced
that HIV did not, after all, kill T-cells and could not be the cause
of AIDS. Within hours of making this announcement, he was attacked
by the very industry he'd helped to create. Montagnier's not
a liar. He's a so-so scientist who's in over his head.
Afterword:
In a 1997 interview,
Luc Montagnier spoke about his isolation of HIV. He said, “We did
not purify [isolate] ... We saw some particles but they did not have
the morphology [shape] typical of retroviruses ... They were very
different ... What we did not have, as I have always recognized it,
is that it was truly the cause of AIDS.”
Robert Gallo hasn't
made such large concessions. He has, however, amended his AIDS death
sentence. He now believes that it's possible to live with HIV
“for 30 years until you die of old age,” as long as you live a healthy
lifestyle and avoid immune-compromising substances.
In 1994 Gallo
quietly announced that the major AIDS defining illness in gay men
- Kaposi's Sarcoma, could not be explained by HIV but that nitrite
poppers, a drug that had been extremely popular in the gay community,
"could be the primary cause." Somehow, this didn't make
headlines.
Gallo also said
that Peter Duesberg's research into a drug-based AIDS model should
be funded. Duesberg's funding has all but evaporated since he
publicly challenged the HIV/AIDS model.
>>
PART 2
1884 Market St 
