Sick fo It All: A vigilant -- and much-vilified -- band of dissidents decries the HIV=AIDS=death mythology

By Mark Anderson
Valley Advocate Jan. 1998

Christine Maggiore is HIV-positive. She's also HIV-negative. She's tested "indeterminate" before too. She's all and none; both and neither. In a word, Christine Maggiore is HIV-complicated.

Today she's one of the leaders of the burgeoning "AIDS dissident" (sometimes called "HIV realist") movement. Dissidents argue that the HIV=AIDS=death equation -- drummed into the public consciousness since the 1984 press conference that dubbed HIV "the virus that causes AIDS" -- has never been proven and that a vast body of scientific evidence suggests that it's simply wrong. They assert that research and public awareness campaigns, costing American taxpayers $35 billion and counting, have produced little more than thousands of unnecessary deaths and billions of dollars in profits for the medical industry and pharmaceutical corporations.

Maggiore has been called insane, a "treatment rejectionist," a "conspiracy theorist" and a "purveyor of dangerous information." She also may be the most important AIDS activist working today.

Heading the Los Angeles chapter of Health Education AIDS Liaison -- the leading AIDS dissident activist organization today -- she has brought the AIDS dissident cause into the world's spotlight. When she founded HEAL-LA in 1993, the organization had four chapters. (The other three were in Minneapolis, New Hampshire and New York, the original chapter, which was founded in 1982.) HEAL now boasts 26 chapters around the world, including groups in Buenos Aires, Germany, Switzerland and Amsterdam. HEAL-LA alone has a roster of 700 participants -- it's not a membership organization -- and the North American chapters will hold their first national meeting in Toronto in April. HEAL-LA also distributes Maggiore's informational pamphlet What If Everything You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong?, 8,000 copies of which are in circulation. The pamphlet is now in its third printing and is being translated into Spanish, French, German and Russian editions.

Maggiore began her own AIDS odyssey in 1992, when she first tested HIV antibody-positive in a routine checkup. (She had never been tested before.) An AIDS specialist later deemed the test inconclusive.

That AIDS specialist played another special role in Maggiore's journey; she credits him with provoking her first doubts about the medical-industrial complex she found herself in the midst of. "I thought he was insane," she recalled. "Because the only words he had for a person supposedly infected with a fatal virus were 'wait till you get sick, and then we can give you medicine,' which sounded so passive I was about to explode just hearing it. If somebody tells you you're going to die, you're not just going to sit at home and wait for the guy to come and shoot you. You're going to do something. It always reminded me of sitting on the train tracks, waiting until the light was shining on you and you could hear the horn and maybe see the engineer before you decided to get up and move your ass."

That experience set Maggiore on what she now calls "a rock and roll roller-coaster ride of positives, negatives and indeterminates that happened over the course of 36 months."

Starting out a believer in the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, her 1992 diagnosis prompted her to join Los Angeles AIDS organizations, seek out specialists and enter support groups. As an intelligent and articulate heterosexual woman with an HIV antibody-positive diagnosis, Maggiore was quickly tapped by Los Angeles-area AIDS organizations to represent them in fundraisers and public information campaigns.

She spoke at rallies, seminars and school functions. She spoke to adults, children and students about the dangers of HIV and AIDS. "I even went to a drill team convention," she said. "Spoke to drill team girls."

But doubts continued to plague her about the message she was conveying and the jobs she was expected to carry out. She recalls being trotted out at fundraisers for potential donors, as she puts it, "to get their check-writing hand loosened up. Get those wrist muscles flowing. ... They would send me out for these things because I was a good 'AIDS pet.' Because I was a white heterosexual girl."

Attending one AIDS seminar, she found her naturally inquisitive nature came in handy -- in the final analysis, it may have even saved her life. "There was a slide on the wall that showed that we had, as a group of people who were HIV-infected, supposedly five to eight years of life," she said. "A five- to eight-year period in which we could expect to become ill and die. And I noticed a reference for that information was based on a San Francisco gay men's study which had studied a group of men from a hepatitis and sexually transmitted disease program. And these men had been infected with Hepatitis A and B, syphilis, gonorrhea -- lots of infections of syphilis and gonorrhea -- and had been under antibiotic treatments for years and years and had been drug users and had lived a fast-track lifestyle of staying up all night, partying."

She asked the doctor presenting the information what the findings had to do with a woman whose only indication of supposed ill health was an HIV antibody-positive test.

"He paused for a moment," she recalled, "looked down at the floor, moved his loafer over a spot in the floor, looked back up and said, 'Nothing.' And I was like, 'Ding ding ding ding ... Yes! Here we go!'"

Soon thereafter, friends from Italy told Maggiore about an interview they'd heard with professor Peter Duesberg of the University of California, Berkeley. His research since 1987 has pointed to the conclusion that AIDS is a syndrome of previously existing diseases brought on by a combination of lifestyle factors, including drug abuse and toxic "AIDS therapies" such as AZT and ddI. Duesberg argues that AIDS, in short, is not an infectious disease. (His work was presented in detail in the Advocate's May 30, 1996 cover story "What If He's Right?")

After contacting Duesberg and receiving a "huge packet" of papers and articles from him, Maggiore started out skeptical of his thesis. But the more she read the scientific papers presenting the AIDS dissident case, the more she was convinced of its ultimate truth.

She founded HEAL-LA when the two existing forums for AIDS dissident information and support closed their doors in 1993. (The first, Project AIDS International, stopped holding public meetings that year, and the second, Praxis Cure Now, folded.)

With its popular twice-monthly meetings and growing prominence in the Los Angeles AIDS community, HEAL-LA has also begun to attract the attention and ire of some of the mainstream HIV-AIDS groups Maggiore once worked for, including AIDS Project Los Angeles, LA Shanti, and Women at Risk.

And, almost to a person, her friends and former colleagues from those organizations, those who followed the conventional AIDS therapies, have since died. (Maggiore's memoirs, which she's now preparing, are tentatively titled Excuse Me for Living.)

The current members of orthodox Los Angeles AIDS organizations, however, are unambiguous in their feelings about HEAL. When Maggiore invited members of the Los Angeles AIDS organization Women Alive to a recent HEAL gathering, one Woman Alive responded with a faxed invitation of her own that read, "HEAL: Harmful Erroneous AIDS Literature! Members of HEAL are cordially invited to Women Alive for an informal exchange of blood and other bodily fluids."

"We hate them," said Nancy MacNeil, coordinator of Women's Programs for Women Alive. "They're giving out dangerous information. ... It just is insulting that they're so adamant."

Maggiore responds that she encounters vitriol all the time from mainstream researchers and activists. But, she adds, temper tantrums don't change the hundreds of published AIDS dissident research papers and articles that, as she puts it, "overwhelm[s] the HIV-might-cause-AIDS evidence." (Archives of dissident studies and articles have been set up at http://www.virusmyth.com and www.livelinks.com/sumeria/aids.html [link is defunct ed.]).

Indeed, HEAL-LA was founded as an organization to set up a debate between AIDS dissidents and mainstream scientists. Over the past three years, Maggiore noted, HEAL has invited 115 "doctors, organizations, educators, activists, researchers from Pediatric AIDS Foundation to AmFAR to UCLA AIDS Care Clinic Doctors to [immunologist and original AIDS discoverer] Michael Gottlieb -- everybody you could possibly imagine that is a prominent orthodox AIDS figure -- to come and debate with us. And no one will do it."

When she was still with AIDS Project Los Angeles, Maggiore also tried to arrange for a public forum where AIDS dissident scientists could present their research and open their work up for scrutiny. No one ever let her do that either.

"Of course, they'll never meet with Duesberg in a public forum and address this once and for all in front of a group of people," Maggiore noted. "That was my biggest clue something was up. The fact that nobody would meet with any of the doctors or scientists -- those Nobel Prize-winning scientists who are so stupid for saying HIV doesn't cause AIDS. [The case could be made] that it's so obvious and so simple to understand. Well, why wouldn't they show up and present this obvious and simple information? They could render these critics of the HIV hypothesis foolish in the eyes of the media and the public, brush their hands, walk away and go, 'Done. Mission accomplished. We won't have those little pests bothering us anymore.' Every innocent man cannot wait for his day in court. Every person who believes they're right longs, yearns, for the opportunity to prove that. Why don't they?"

***

Maggiore is not alone in her frustration. HEAL-Detroit founder Paul Philpott was an engineering graduate student also completing his pre-med degree at Florida A&M University when he first discovered AIDS dissident research and studies.

"One day I tuned in to a PBS interview with Peter Duesberg, and what he was saying made a lot of sense," Philpott said. "But I wondered how my professors could possibly be that wrong."

So Philpott enrolled in an independent study to learn about the AIDS dissident theory in detail. He read Duesberg's papers, looked up the references in Duesberg's papers and read those too. He was elated. "I thought I had come across something my colleagues would come across a few years down the road, and I'd be doing them a favor by telling them now."

He presented his findings to his superiors, however, and found a response that was a little different than elation: "I introduced my discoveries to my three professors at the time. Each of them dismissed the view out of hand. They refused to look at the papers and labeled Duesberg crazy. I was really shocked. I pressed each of these professors on why they wouldn't even look at what I had found. They invented on-the-spot apologies for what they were teaching."

Estrella Shier, a pre-med graduate of Loyola University in Chicago, had planned to start medical school this fall, but, after encountering hostility when she questioned the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, she decided not to attend. Instead, she founded the HEAL-Chicago chapter, which will hold its first meetings next month.

Her experience was similar to Philpott's -- discovering AIDS dissident research, looking for a convincing refutation of the AIDS dissident position and provoking only denial and disdain from her professors.

"There are a few golden rules for a virus to cause a disease. Certain things have to be in place," Shier noted. "Everybody who has the disease has to carry the virus, and the virus has to be found in abundance. Neither of those rules are obeyed with HIV. And the 'HIV test' itself -- that's a test for antibodies, which for every other virus indicates that your body just fought off a disease."

Like Shier, Philpott kept asking questions. And when the experts couldn't answer his questions, he decided to look into the issue further. He found one discovery particularly disconcerting. "None of these 'experts' could remember a time when they had to be convinced," he recalled. "They never had a doubt. They learned about AIDS and HIV causing it the same place we all did, from that press conference in 1984. They didn't question it, and that's the whole story."

As he did further study and became more convinced of the AIDS dissident theory, he had all the greater a desire to hear a convincing case -- not just the hype and empty arguments he was encountering -- for the orthodox HIV/AIDS theory. So he reserved a lecture hall and sent out an invitation.

"I made some shocking flyers, saying 'HIV is Harmless; AIDS is not Contagious,'" Philpott recalled, "and I put them in the boxes of all the faculty, inviting them to debate me, to prove me wrong. Not one of them showed up."

Instead, he ended up using the time to speak to the non-experts who had assembled for the debate. "There was a huge turnout. It was a big success," he said. "After the seminar, the head of the Health Services circulated a memo saying that I was a threat to the public health and a danger and a menace. I was so angered after that. He wouldn't meet with me, he wouldn't talk to me. He wouldn't debate me. I said, 'You're the guy with the M.D. If you're so right, you should be able to smash me. Why don't you?'"

However infrequently he finds the opportunity to do so, Philpott remains eager to entertain substantial scientific arguments for HIV as the cause of AIDS. On several occasions, he said, studies have been published that, if they were correct, would mean the dissidents must be wrong.

"I remember coming across an article that said there was no role for drugs as a cause of AIDS," he said. "And I thought, 'Well, maybe Duesberg is wrong.' But I read the data in the paper, and I found that of 1,500 gay men who were HIV positive in the study ... only 4 percent said they didn't use narcotics. And nearly all the men were taking AZT, and AZT hadn't been controlled for."

A few times every year a silver-bullet study, allegedly proving once and for all that the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy is correct, appears in the headlines, forcing a response from the AIDS dissidents. But Philpott has yet to see a study that didn't fall apart when he actually looked at the numbers. "The titles and abstracts of papers don't match up with the data," he observed.

Maggiore had a similar experience last year with the introduction of protease inhibitor AIDS drugs and "combination cocktails." (See "The Big 'Tease" in the archives). Although the headlines trumpeted protease inhibitors as the new miracle AIDS drugs, Maggiore found no studies that actually demonstrated that the drugs could help patients to live longer or feel better.

"We only have anecdotal information about protease inhibitors, save for one study which was published which claimed a 50 percent reduction in morbidity and mortality among the protease-treated patients," she said. But even that study had some problems when one looked at the fine print, Maggiore found.

Namely, the miraculous results actually came out of a subset of patients that represented only 1.4 percent of the patients in the whole study.

"That's absurd," Maggiore laughed. "This was as recently as September 11. That was the great brouhaha, the big hoopla. It appeared in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. And it also made the front page of the Boston Globe. 50 percent reduction in mortality for patients on protease inhibitors. Yeah, for 1.4 percent. What happened to the other 98.6? That's a big chunk to be leaving out of your study. That's nearly everybody."

***

HEAL has opened nine new chapters in the past year alone. (Two others closed shop during the year.) But one of the oldest HEAL organizations is HEAL-New England.

HEAL-New England founder M. Dennis Paul has been a member of the AIDS dissident camp since there was a virus theory against which to dissent.

A producer and director of poetry and performance festivals on the West Coast in the 1970s, Paul had close ties to the gay communities that AIDS would soon strike. "Young gay kids were finding a new life, but they were still living with great shame and toxicity from the abuse of recreational drugs," he said. "I did a piece in 1974 where I said that in 1984, sexual freedom will come to mean freedom from sex."

He found his own prescience disturbing when he first heard about the announcement of an "AIDS virus," though. "It was scary," he said. "It struck me the day of that press conference. I said right there that something's wrong. ... These were drug toxicities that these people were dying from -- poppers, Special K, ecstasy, heroin, speed, habitual use of antibiotics and so on."

And now, HEAL-New York President Michael Ellner noted, drug toxicities are coming from the supposed treatments. "We're in a pharmaceutical nightmare," Ellner said. "Healthy people are being treated by their doctors. It's shameful."

The HIV hypothesis is more of a red herring than a workable solution, Paul insists: "If you're a rational and reasonable individual, you should be asking first: Where's the proof of the isolation of a virus? Then: Does that virus actually do anything? We haven't done the first step, and we're nowhere near doing the second step."

To this day, Paul continues to advocate for an open and enlightened debate on the HIV-AIDS hypothesis. After meeting Ellner and finding a kindred spirit, Paul founded HEAL-New England in 1989 to raise public awareness of the AIDS dissident position. He and other HEAL activists staged protests around the Northeast, but ultimately Paul's Windsor, N.H. location proved too remote to facilitate regular meetings. So instead, he has concentrated on counseling. (He has also expanded his focus to include alternative medicine, changing the name of his organization to Health Education Alternatives Liaison in 1993.)

Paul said that much of his counseling work deals with AIDS dissidents who are still processing and coming to terms with the implications of the AIDS dissident perspective. Many dissidents find the societal pressure to conform to the HIV-AIDS theory overwhelming at times, he said, especially if they've ever tested antibody-positive or if a family member has tested antibody-positive. "It's confusing," he observed, "because people were raised in a culture where the doctors are like gods."

***

For the founders of both HEAL-Cleveland and HEAL-San Francisco, doctors have been more like gods from the underworld. HEAL-Cleveland's Frank Green and HEAL-San Francisco's Dean McKown have lived with the dual stigmas of being antibody-positive gay men and AIDS dissidents. (Green was first diagnosed 10 years ago, McKown nine years ago. Both have avoided the AIDS medications and are symptom-free.)

"I realized that the medical profession is my nemesis," Green said. "They weren't helping me at all."

McKown and his twin brother Dennis were active members of ACT UP San Francisco before they decided to form a HEAL chapter. (It can be reached at http://www.healsf.org .) San Francisco has the distinction of being home to two ACT UP chapters, ACT UP-SF, which does not take donations from pharmaceutical companies and is sympathetic to the AIDS dissident cause, and ACT UP-Golden Gate, which does and isn't.

For Dennis McKown, who learned about the AIDS dissident case from his brother, the major causative factor with AIDS is not biological but societal.

"The immune suppression comes from lifestyle, bad diet, malnutrition, stress, drugs and the so-called AIDS drugs. It's a multi-factor problem, a new name for the old diseases. It's a category -- but one that got whole new wings of university hospitals built," he noted.

As for the oft-touted correlation between "HIV-positive" diagnoses and AIDS symptoms, McKown points to the work of the "Perth team" of biophysicists from Australia. "[The antibody tests] are responding to oxidative stress," he said, referring to several groundbreaking studies from the Perth team -- which are available at the above AIDS dissident web site archives. "It's a result of cells being exposed to toxins and stress."

The biggest hurdle to be cleared by dissidents isn't the research, though. The science has already been done, McKown argues. Money, not proof or objective truth, is what matters most in the HIV industry these days.

"We're up against a huge multibillion-dollar biomedical industry," McKown observed. "That's why we don't get much of any coverage. There's too much invested in orthodox medicine. No one wants to lose their job. But the answer is going to come from the ground-up and not the top-down."

Take protease inhibitors, McKown says. There are two very different perspectives on these "miracle drugs": one that can be found on the covers of Time and Newsweek and one that McKown finds on the street.

"It's becoming a very common belief in the gay community that the drugs are bad," McKown noted, adding that he knows of a lot of gay men who aren't taking the drugs anymore: "They may fill their prescriptions just to get their welfare and public assistance, but they're flushing the drugs down the toilet." One study McKown discovered showed that seven out of 10 participants in protease inhibitor studies were either taking less than their prescribed dosages or none of the drugs at all. That is, McKown offered, the story behind the "miracle cure" of protease inhibitors may simply be that some patients are getting healthier because they are no longer taking their meds.

With money, Green argues, the AIDS mainstream can not only push "miracle drugs" to healthy people but can even buy out common sense, if only for a time. "They're always coming up with these tricks to keep their paradigm," Green said. "First the latency period was five years, then it was 10, now I've heard some say it's 20."

Still, the rewards of fighting for the dissident cause keep both Green and the McKown brothers in the game. "I've seen our information give people their lives back," Dennis McKown said. "There are thousands of people who have recovered from AIDS, but not by the traditional approach of taking the drugs."

"I see HEAL growing a lot over the next few years," Green said. "Things have been going on for so long now with the dominant paradigm not working. People are now more open-minded just from pure experience. And HEAL itself is becoming more organizationally savvy. Christine Maggiore is instrumental in all of this. That's why the Los Angeles chapter has been so successful."

As a performance artist, Green uses his AIDS dissident perspective to inform his work. And given that vista, he sees a slow turnaround in public receptiveness to the AIDS dissident cause.

"When I first started this, that's when I got my most negative reactions," he said of his early experiences presenting AIDS dissident art. "But I'm finding a lot more people now saying that I've really struck a chord with them. ... [Positive reactions] are starting to be just as common as the negative reactions. ... Anyway, much of the negativity you get now is from people who are economically invested in the AIDS paradigm -- HIV doctors or people who run clinics or AIDS organizations or support groups."

He adds, though, with a drop in his voice, "I feel like we're in this for the long haul, and this could take many years."

***

HEAL's critics find the group most hazardous when its members go beyond raising questions about the AIDS orthodoxy and insist that HIV does not cause AIDS.

"We're for exploring all avenues in research," said Women Alive's MacNeil. "But they're not scientists. They don't have the answer. ... If it's a possibility is one thing. Just saying it's so is another."

In other words, what if HEAL is wrong? As the most visible and vocal members of the dissident community, the activist wings of HEAL -- in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and San Francisco -- would undoubtedly deserve criticism for steering sick people in the wrong direction. But what of the other chapters, existing to answer questions and provide information -- so members of the public can weigh both sides of the issue and make up their own minds?

Patricia McGoldrick, for instance, founded the HEAL-Las Vegas chapter as an opportunity to provide the same service to others that she was able to provide for her son.

Her son was recently diagnosed HIV antibody-positive, and McGoldrick began researching what she would need to know as a parent of a presumed AIDS patient. A query on the Internet attracted the attention of a HEAL-New York member, who emailed her a 22-page informational paper.

"I started wondering why I hadn't heard all this before," she said. "I'm a very well-read person. And I started thinking, people need to know. People like my son have the right to make an informed decision. ... It's all based on sound scientific studies. All these people were world-renowned researchers until they came out against the HIV hypothesis, when they were blackballed."

McGoldrick told her son to wait until she learned more about Duesberg et al's work before he started taking any AIDS drugs. She already had lost one son in an accident and six friends to AIDS. She was not going to repeat any previous mistakes this time.

"My position was I buried one kid, I'm not going to bury another," she said.

She sent for a subscription to the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis' newsletter Reappraising AIDS. (See sidebar.) Along with her check, she sent a note explaining her situation.

The turn-around time was quick. "Two days later, Dr. [Charles] Thomas called me up, asking me for the sake of my son's life not to allow him to take the AIDS drugs," she recalled. "All of a sudden, I was enveloped in a big support system."

She sent copies of AIDS dissident papers to her son's doctor, who refused to read them. Even so, the doctor wanted to put McGoldrick's asymptomatic son on AZT and a protease inhibitor. "I asked, 'Does my son show any sign of illness?'" McGoldrick recalled. "She said no. So I responded, 'Well why are you prescribing this?'"

As the head of HEAL-Las Vegas, McGoldrick regularly gets calls and email (HealLV@aol.com) from people trying to find more information about challenges to the HIV-causes-AIDS establishment.

"I get phone calls, and I hear this tone of fear," she said. "I know that fear. That was in my son's voice. ... I've heard a lot from people who were diagnosed positive 12 years ago and they say 'My doctor told me I had 18 months to live, but something told me not to take the medicines. And I saw all my friends die who took the medicines.'"

Still, like every other HEAL member -- activist and information-giver alike -- McGoldrick faces accusations that she's everything from a public health menace to a threat to society.

"I don't care if they hate me," she responds. "I just think people have the right to know."

For more information, contact HEAL-New England at (603) 478-3664 or HEAL-LA's 24-hour information line at (213) 896-8260.

It all started with a letter.

In 1991, a handful of biomedical scientists, doctors and activists sought to express their dissatisfaction with the state of AIDS research, in which a vast majority of AIDS researchers around the world assumed -- without anyone ever having made a reasonable scientific case for assuming -- that the HIV virus was the cause of AIDS.

The scientists wrote a paragraph expressing their position, put their names to it and sent it to the journal Science. It was never published. The missive met a similar fate at the journals Nature, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Here is their revolutionary tract, in its entirety:

It is widely believed by the general public that a retrovirus called HIV causes the group of diseases called AIDS. Many biochemical scientists now question this hypothesis. We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group. We further propose that critical epidemiological studies be devised and undertaken.

Dr. Charles Thomas, the author of the letter, was surprised at the fate of such a conservatively worded statement. As Dr. Peter Duesberg points out in his 1996 book Inventing The AIDS Virus, Thomas "had all the right credentials. As a professor of biochemistry at Harvard University, he had pioneered studies of how the body synthesizes proteins. But he found the years of [National Institutes of Health]-financed science too intellectually restrictive."

Thomas, Duesberg and their fellow virologists, molecular biologists, biochemists, pharmacologists and pathologists who signed the HIV declaration of independence were clearly expressing an unpopular viewpoint.

But a few rejections weren't about to stop them. The 42 signatories to the Science letter, plus 14 others who came on board for successive attempts at publication, founded an organization based on the principles expressed in their four sentences.

The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis may sport an unwieldy name, but its objective is quite simple.

"The group's role is to stand up for truth and the scientific method," Thomas said. "And both of those principles have been seriously abrogated with the advent of HIV."

The group now boasts a membership of more than 1,000 -- half of whom are medical professionals. They also publish the monthly newsletter Reappraising AIDS -- edited by Paul Philpott, founder of the AIDS dissident organization HEAL-Detroit -- and have plans in the works for a national media conference.

"I view the role of the group as supporting the people out there trying to end the AIDS monopoly," Philpott said, "the monopoly in universities, in thought, in speech that only recognizes HIV as the cause of AIDS."

To make a dent in the scientific world, Philpott states, the group would require better funding than it now enjoys -- but not nearly at the levels that the orthodox HIV/AIDS industry commands. "Because we have truth and rationality and consistency on our side, we don't need tens of billions of dollars in order to advance our view. We could overturn the AIDS apple cart with tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe a million bucks."

"I think science and scientists will be seriously discredited when the real story comes out about AIDS," Thomas added. "It's not too late to do something about it. But it's been a serious miscarriage of American science so far."