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By Valendar Turner
Continuum Spring 1998
Original Publication
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/vtwrong.htm
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#Valendar Turner
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#Continuum
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The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking something you don't actually know There’s not a mechanic or a scientist alive who hasn’t suffered from that one so much that he’s not instinctively on guard. That’s the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticising scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you. It does it often enough anyway even when you don’t give it opportunities. One must be extremely careful and rigidly logical when dealing with Nature: one logical slip and an entire scientific edifice comes tumbling down. One false deduction about the machine and you can get hung up indefinitely.
-- Robert Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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There are several scientific issues we could consider and for the previous readers of Contiuum most of these ideas are not new. However, it may unmuddy the waters for us all to collect and arrange these into more manageable chunks. The seminal argument is this: For an HIV theory of AIDS we must begin by proving we have HIV. This involves the following steps:
Since HIV is purportedly a retrovirus we need to know (a) what is a virus; (b) what properties distinguish retroviruses from viruses in general.
From our knowledge of (1) we must devise a method of proving the existence of a retrovirus in AIDS patients that is congruent with the properties of such a family of viruses.
An examination of the published evidence in order to ascertain whether (2) has been achieved for HIV.
What is a virus? The answer is intuitive from common experience. A person in a crowded train is suffering a cold. He or she coughs several times and within hours the former, fellow passengers develop the same symptoms. A child develops hepatitis and a few weeks later his brother and sister complain of anorexia, nausea and soon their skin is also yellow. In turn, these individuals cause others to develop identical symptoms so on. According to the germ theory of disease, the process occurring is that a particle, having a separate existence from the person with the disease, is transferred to another person, invades the cells forming the lining of the upper respiratory passages or liver cells and, in the process of multiplying inside and at the expense of these cells, causes the illnesses. Thus we affirm a virus as a microscopic object (a particle), transmitted from one individual to another and which is able to multiply only at the behest of living cells. The latter property differentiates viruses from bacteria which may multiply on an inanimate source of materials and energy. Not surprisingly, since viruses are obligatory intracellular parasites, they are much smaller than cells or bacteria and do not crowd their limited space with the food and machinery necessary to generate the energy to turn chemicals into copies of themselves. In practice virus particles are a stretch of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) "instructions" for making proteins (the stretch is called the viral genome), packaged inside a protein core which in turn is surrounded by an envelope containing yet more proteins protecting the viral genome from the rigors of extracellular life. However, the viral envelope is not just packaging. Its chemical nature determines its interactional proclivities and thus for example, to what kinds of cells the particle is capable of attaching and entering, that is, which particular cells the virus can infect. A last but vitally important point is that from an electron microscope (EM) picture it is impossible to claim that a particle is a virus, even if it looks like one. From our definition, being a virus is entirely contingent upon a demonstrating that the particles of interest possess the ability to make more of the same particles. This is in fact what is meant by the term infectious and to demonstrate this property experiments are required. All the electron microscope can tell the experimenter is that particles are viral-like (and that the preparation of such particles is pure or impure).
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The steps to prove the existence of a retrovirus flow logically from an appreciation of their nature:
Culture the cells that are considered infected by the retrovirus particle. 2. Purify putative retroviral-like particles by application of a method that is capable of extracting them from everything else that is not retroviral-like particles (banding in sucrose density gradients).
Proof obtained by use of electron microscopy that (a) there are such particles. (It is frankly misleading to proceed as if there are particles when in fact there are none). (b) the particles are pure; (c) the morphology of such particles is consistent with this family of viruses. The procedure to judge the morphology and purity of particles is to focus one’s eye on one particle, decide it has the appropriate size, shape and other distinguishing characteristics, then satisfy oneself that each particle surrounding the first particle is identical, and then repeat this process for all particles. Retroviral particles need to have a dense core, a diameter of 100-120 nM, to be almost spherical and to have their surface studded with knobs approximately 10nM in length.
Disrupt a preparation of pure particles and analyse the constituents (RNA and proteins). The latter must include an enzyme able to catalyse the synthesis of DNA from a piece of RNA.
Take a preparation of pure particles and prove that such particles, when introduced into fresh, uninfected cells, produce exactly the same particles, that is, the particles are infectious. This necessitates repeating steps (1) to (4). Thus proving the existence of a retrovirus involves isolating the particles twice. (And although it may seem trite to need even mention the fact, viral proteins and RNA are those and only those proteins and RNA that appear following disruption of purified viral particles).
Indeed, (1) to (5), with the addition of experiments involving control cultures of cells obtained from sick, non-AIDS affected individuals with AIDS-like diseases, are the challenge underlying the Continuum prize. (This £1000 reward is for a scientific paper proving that HIV exists and is still on offer). For those scientists who fail to use suitable controls (and that is the vast majority of HIV experts), "Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you" if the "assemblage of such properties" is also observed under circumstances where there are no retroviruses. Here it is not necessary to go into details since the views of the Perth group have been published in the scientific literature since 1988. Suffice it to repeat categorically that to date no HIV/AIDS researcher has published such evidence for HIV. Indeed, the interview with Professor Montagnier revealed that (a) despite a "Roman effort", he was unable to find any viral-like particles in his "purified" specimens. (Whatever the other "assemblage of such properties", no particles, no virus but these are the very specimens from which all HIV/AIDS researchers and biotechnology companies obtain "HIV" proteins and RNA by the ton for use in diagnosis and treatment); (b) despite not having any evidence for the existence of retroviral-like particles in his 1.16 gm/ml sucrose density gradient this material was used in other experiments to pronounce certain proteins in this culture "soup" as the "viral" proteins; (c) in his opinion neither did Gallo purify his HIV. Thus, according to the disparity between the definition of a virus and the evidence provided by Montagnier in 1983 and Gallo in 1984 (and everyone else since), there is no scientific proof for the existence of HIV. This leaves us with the uncomfortable question as to why, despite this lack of evidence, does nearly the rest of the world appear to believe otherwise and boldly act on the consequences of this belief?
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