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By Peter Duesberg
New York Native 29 April 1991
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In Virus Hunting, Robert Gallo offers a highly personal view of his triumphs and agonies with the human retroviruses he believes cause leukemia and AIDS. Gallo's greatest triumph was the notorious press conference in April 1984 when he and the Secretary of Health andHuman Services Margaret Heckler jointly announced that Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the cause of AIDS and that Gallo had discovered HIV. It set the unique precedent, that a scientific hypothesis of immense clinical consequences would be nationally accepted prior to a single publication on the subject by Gallo or any other American scientist. Moreover, Gallo managed at the same time to file together with his employer the National Institutes of Health, for a lucrative AIDS test patent. However, subsequent nucleic acid sequence analyses proved Gallo's virus from 1984 to be the same as the virus discovered by Luc Montagnier in 1983. Since Montagnier had sent his virus to Gallo in 1983, it appeared that Gallo had rediscovered Montagnier's virus. In addition, a legal investigation proved that the photograph of HIV in Gallo's first AIDS papers was that of Montagnier's virus ''inadvertently" used ''largely for illustrative purposes" (p. 210-11). That would have been the end for all claims to immortality by ordinary, academic scientists not working fora government that had committed itself to Gallo's hypothesis.
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Gallo emphasizes repeatedly that I am unprepared to understand AIDS, because I am not an M.D. but "a chemist, a molecular virologist" (p. 291). After Virus Hunting, I wonder whether the M.D. Gallo might not have been better cast using his medical training to treat AIDS patients than trying to resolve the "molecular virology" of HIV and the ''chemistry" of AIDS. Here are some samples of Gallo's effortsto prove "How the AIDS virus works":
1. On why antibody to HIV does not protect against AIDS:
a. "Because retroviruses integrate their genetic information upon entry, the immune response to infection shows up too late to serve as protection against it." (p. 206) Obviously Gallo believes that the immune system only protects if it were faster than viral infection. Yet the immune system against any virus, including retroviruses, never responds until millions of cells have been infected and sufficient viral protein is made for an immune response.
b. But even if antibodies could be made available in time, Gallo argues "that most antibodies are not protective. In many instances none are protective" (p. 292). This of course is a heavy blow to the practice of inducing antiviral antibodies by antiviral vaccination, for 200 years the only protection against virus diseases. Unfortunately, Gallo does not identify the sources of this threatening information. Fortunately, it does not apply to antibodies to HIV, detected by Gallo's "all-important AIDS test" (book jacket), because in the presence of such antibodies HIV is so efficiently neutralized that it is, if at all. only detectable by the most sophisticated and expensive AIDS laboratories. Indeed, two recent papers by Ho et al. and Shaw et al. from the New England Journal of Medicine (April4) just confirm "rapid...and effective immune responses [to HIV] in the host." The fact that antibodies against HIV are not protective against AIDS is not because they don't neutralize HIV, but because HIV is not the cause of AIDS (see Duesberg PNAS 86:755-764, 1989 and 88:1575-1579, 1991).
2. On how homosexuals get AIDS in the U.S. and heterosexuals in Africa:
a. "AIDS is in young gay men... for many obvious and logical reasons.... More blood penetration is likely to take place in rectal sex than in vaginal sex." (p. 291) Perhaps Gallo is not aware of menstruation?
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Yet the politician Gallo does not want to offend American homosexuals or central Africans and their microbes by assuring all of us that "sexual transmission from man to woman... is probably the most common pathway of infection in the world not man to man by sex, as we in the U.S. tend to think" (p. 251). That, however, leaves open the question as to why women represent less than ten percent of all AIDS cases in the U.S.
3. On the long latent period between infection and AIDS, that currently averages about ten years:
"In the early years however, the immune system is still able to handle the challenge. Not so later." (p. 242) At that point Gallo seems to have forgotten that the immune response comes too late, and is not effective at any time as he points out later (p. 292, see #1,b).
4. On the decline of T-cells in AIDS over 99 percent of which are never infected by HIV:
"But it is not only direct killing by HIV that depletes T4-cells. At any given moment... in our experience usually fewer than one in 10,000 cells express virus at most times. Other less direct mechanisms also appear to be operative." (p. 248) This leads him into the theories on cofactors for HIV described below.
5. On AIDS dementia:
a. ''Some of it no doubt is a direct toxic effect of the virus on microglial cells. This in turn may lead to less 'architectural support' to the neurons, whose function may then be compromised." Obviously a speculation.
b. And "another mechanism," as if this one weren't convincing enough, "...another HIV regulatory protein called Nef is also released by infected cells and Nef has some regions of similarity with a brain-poisoning protein from scorpions" (p. 250). Another, totally different speculation for the same question.
6. On HIV causing Kaposi's sarcoma:
The same virus that releases cell killing "scorpion poisons" is said also to release growth factors, termed tat proteins, that make certain cells grow into Kaposi's sarcomas. ''To my knowledge, it is the first time a protein of a virus, normally working as a regulator for virus formation, was observed also being released from the infected cell and acting as a growth factor for another cell." (p. 270) Yet another in the inexhaustible repertoire of evils of HIV!
7. On the 20-fold higher incidence of Kaposi's sarcoma in homosexuals compared to other HIV-positives:
a. "These findings appear to require another environmental (external) factor - such as another not yet discovered virus - in gay men." (p. 271) If in trouble, postulate another virus.
b. "Perhaps this is a result of differences in the levels of male sex hormone, testosterone... Perhaps sexually active homosexuals as a group have higher testosterone levels... This is a testable hypothesis... and it is testable hypotheses that advance science" (p. 271). A long discarded hypothesis, which in the past has led to sentences of forced treatments of homosexuals with female sex hormones.
8. On cofactors of HIV for AIDS:
Clearly Gallo has initiated his retreat from the once solid HIV-causes-AIDS-front to the minefield of HIV-plus-cofactors cause AIDS. ''I also intuitively agree with the idea that cofactors for HIV progression [he probably means AIDS progression] itself can also exist...."
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