Science Guardian

Famous polemicist and skeptic let down by his medical high priests

His faith and hopes buoyed by clinical trials which only promised death, as Berkeley’s Duesberg could have told him

Could he have found better alternatives in nature’s prescriptions that he scorned as quackery?

Research says yes, so why are the FDA and NIH standing in the way?

Like Steve Jobs, Hitchens is gone, early, at 62, hastened to his end at the hands of modern medicine, the inevitable tragic outcome of barbaric treatment that cannot save many esophageal cancer patients from death and, owing to its horrendous side effects, probably accelerates their demise.

As in the case of Steve Jobs, it is appropriate to ask whether alternative medicine may have ameliorated his decline or even saved him, given the accumulation of promising results from the armory of (plant derived) phytochemicals now proven potent in killing cancer cells in the lab and in animal studies. Though not as yet in human trials, owing to the anachronistic prejudice of the FDA whose personnel seem as illiterate as most cancer specialists in the latest research, freely available to them as well as the general public at PubMed.

If so, they have cut short the life of a heroic heretic, one willing to attack hypocrisy and stupidity from Mother Theresa to God itself. What some may not have realized is that Hitchens was on the side of life and freedom, the greatest values of all.

“If you’re at Vanity Fair and you’re talking about some of the things that Christopher has taken on, at the top of the list is going to be Mother Teresa,” said Graydon Carter, editor at Vanity Fair and a longtime friend.

In 1994, Hitchens co-wrote and narrated a documentary on her called Hell’s Angel.

“This profane marriage between tawdry media hype and medieval superstition gave birth to an icon which few have since had the poor taste to question,” he said in it.

Hitchens wrote about her for the magazine, too. Carter said it didn’t go over so well.

“That’s a tough topic to go after,” he said. “It was quite negative, and we had hundreds of subscription cancellations, including some from our own staff.”

Hitchens’ killer charm

We always appreciated Hitchens for his remarkable capacity to charm his intellectual victims and the audience with a joking verbal twist as he thrust his dagger in. Only Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) matches him in his capacity to poleaxe the peddlers of nonsense without personally offending them or the onlooker, who was free to revel in the language Hitchens employed with Wildean wit and Johnsonian sense.

The only thing we found hard to take was the fact that Hitch liked the sound of his own voice as much as everyone else did, and was fairly deaf to information that came from outside the oral culture of his Washington insider club. We got nowhere trying to enlighten him about science and the self serving behavior of scientists willing to sell the public a bill of goods, but again, that is par for the course for left wing liberals, who generally seem incapable of understanding, let alone questioning science and scientists. The fact that the one time Trotskyite Hitchens grew tough mindedly rightwing on Iraq for the sake of pushing back what he saw as the Islamic threat to Western freedoms didn’t seem to make any difference. But then, as Oscar himself remarked, “One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.”

As far as “God” is concerned, the great contributi­on Hitchens made was to encourage others to straightfo­rwardly reject the prima facie ridiculous notion of a personal God who “loves” humanity and will somehow (never detectably­) protect us from misfortune and if we are good elevate us out of our bodies to a heaven (precisely why this place serves as a reforming attraction to the faithful remains a mystery greater than the Virgin birth. since an eternity there must be hellish – no physical pleasures or other sensations at all, presumably, and no basis in events for social communication. Is there a more reliable basis for utter boredom? Thank God – in a manner of speaking – we are headed for the other place.)

Instead of being sensitive to the need of the fearful to believe in God and not to have their fond fairy tale shattered, Hitchens robustly advocated use of the faculty of reason “God” gave us. Publish and be damned – just as he did. Thank “God” for someone who had the strength of mind and the spine to tackle the problems of life lived, with all its joys and sorrows, and not take refuge in fantasy, and not apologize for his realism and his sense.

This kind of straightshooting seems unkind to some. Yes, there is something so anti-life about convention­al religion – the milquetoas­t and childish leaning on the hope of succor from the supernatur­al that the religiousl­y inclined are sold on and try to sell us. But is it not cruel to try to remove the pillar on which the weak lean?

On the face of it Hitchens’s intellectual assault on emotional comfort food may seem ruthless. Most of us prefer pussyfooti­ng on the issue in case we hurt the feelings of the religious. But Christophe­r was quite justified in attacking religion because his unkindness actually promoted the opposite – celebratin­g the precious experience of existing, for however brief a span.

In this sense Hitchens was not a threat to the happiness of people who look to “God” as somehow providing the purpose and value they cannot see in life in itself.

On the contrary, he actually pointed in a moving and honest way to what they should be doing – loving life, not “God”, and each other, not long dead Christ, and all people, not just those belonging to Christiani­ty, Islam or some other religious tribe.

What’s more, this is actually what Christ taught, it seems clear. The irony is that Hitchens was more genuinely Christian than the Church which peddles all the guff about God up above and angels in heaven saving us from ourselves.

Christopher’s new religion

The biggest irony is the tragic one, however, where one of the most famous skeptics in modern public life staunchly resisted the blandishments of the Church of God only to fall, in his physical vulnerability, into the hands of the Church of Science, which proceeded to sacrifice him on the altar of Trials of Promising but Toxic New Drugs.

That of course is the problem of human vulnerability, it leads us to run into the arms of whoever we conceive to be our rescuer. In the case of the Christian Church, or Synagogue or Mosque, we rush to sign up from our deathbed, on the principle that no man is an atheist in a foxhole, or as Pascal advised, bet on God’s existence, that way, if you are wrong there is no penalty.

NIH Deathwatch

In the case of physical frailty, apparently you can be the greatest skeptic in the world but if your incessant smoking and drinking leads to esophageal cancer (cancer of the item lower than the throat on the way to the stomach) you rush to put your welfare in the hands of your friend Francis Collins, the Pope of modern medicine in this country, the head of the NIH.

You will, it seems, question everything in human society and up in Heaven, but not modern medicine, or at any rate, the High Priests of the Church of Modern Medicine, in whose care you entrust your life without ever examining their Bible to check and see if everything is up to date.

So Christopher Hitchens, champion skeptic, iconoclast and debunker, once he was terrified by the diagnosis of esophageal cancer, crumbled into a devout disciple of the NIH, its commandments and its works, and took refuge with Collins, who apparently used his influence to shoehorn Hitchens into the latest trials of supposedly promising drugs aimed we are told at whatever genes the oncogene cowboys had decided were the wolves which eat the sheep alive.

Meanwhile Hitchens publicly dismissed any advice he was offered by those pointing to the promise of alternative medicine as crackpottery purveyed by worms who emerge from the woodwork whenever anyone famous gets cancer. He preferred the company of his new mentor Collins, top general of the established army, bemedaled with clinking decorations and politically and socially renowned for his proven, peer reviewed knowledge, if not his genius.

Anyone thinking of steering Hitchens in a different direction therefore drew back, as we did, knowing that our advice was discredited in advance. The result was that Hitchens bravely slogged on under increasingly savage assault from standard chemotherapy, with any contribution from natural palliatives not only ignored but probably barred by his caretakers, lest they interfere with the supposed benefit of the standard drugs he was given, or the potential effect of the new, genetically targeted ones he was given in the trials.

The latter were reportedly tried one after another, to see what happened, and in the end they killed him, with the aid of his cancer, by defeating his immune system, wreckage which in other circumstances would be called AIDS. Indeed, it is not inaccurate to conclude that Christopher Hitchens was partly or wholly brought down by iatrogenic AIDS, that is, AIDS induced by his doctors and their drug testing ministrations.

In this regard it is noteworthy that Phase 1 clinical trials have as their chief purpose to test the toxicity of a drug, which is primarily measured by how rapidly it kills the patient at what dose.

What Hitchens didn’t know

What did Hitchens evidently ignore, in his understandable vulnerability and rush into the embrace of the heroic figure of Collins, at the helm of the vast passenger liner of established medicine? What icebergs loomed that he was unaware of, what land could he have sighted, rather than drown in the slowly sinking ship he embarked upon?

The first might be the fact that for thirty years our research and understanding of cancer has been fruitless because it has been steered in quite the wrong direction. The Titanic has been ploughing through the sea of ignorance directly towards the iceberg of futility, rather than towards land.

The fashion for thirty years has been to look for specific genes or gene groups to blame for particular cancers, the so-called oncogene paradigm, which has seen its leading adherents award each other more than one Nobel prize.

The assumption of this line of research is that if you identify which gene or gene group has somehow gone wrong, you have identified the way to potentially target it more accurately, and slow the cancer, stop it or even cure it.

The only problem is that it has led nowhere fast – cancer cure rates (once separated from the manipulation of data based on the oncogene assumption) have generally not improved much in thirty years.

Why is this the case? Apparently because the cause of cancer is not spontaneous gene error or mutation but massive disruption of the genome, caused by the familiar threats of radiation or chemicals (including chemotherapy, by the way, in that chemo can reduce the body’s own capacity to curb cancer).

Such massive disruption results in cancer cells typically having quite the wrong number of chromosomes, sometimes as many as double the norm. Technically this is known as aneuploidy, and is well known to cancer researchers, but it has been largely ignored as a research avenue or even by textbooks ever since it was uncovered a hundred years ago by Boveri (in 1914; David von Hansemann suggested it even earlier, in 1890).

Cancer cul-de-sac or highway

Only recently has it been the focus of renewed attention in what may be a sea change in cancer research led by the remarkable Peter Duesberg at Berkeley. Duesberg has always been a total skeptic as regards the usefulness of the oncogene approach in cancer, and he has devoted more than a decade of research into aneuploidy and the part that it plays in cancer.

Recently he brought out a paper which very specifically outlines this avenue and why it is far more likely to lead to results than the thirty year old cul de sac of oncogene study, despite the Nobels that have accrued, most notably to Harold Varmus who is now in charge at the NCI.

What the paper points out most notably is the failure of the oncogene theorists to produce any evidence for it after sampling tens of thousands of cancers, an embarrassment for the Nobel winners and a signal that skeptics who have followed Duesberg in questioning the approach are right.

We will detail the situation in a later post on Duesberg’s revolutionary paper, but the lesson is clear. Those who fed Christopher Hitchens one drug after another targeting the genes of his cancer as the potential key to its cure produced only one useful result: they were able to see the damage caused, each attempt another step towards the grave of the notable polemicist.

Hitchens, skeptic and investigator par excellence in politics and culture, would have found out all this if he had troubled to ask. But such is the nature of established medicine in an age where only specialist researchers read the papers available to all on PubMed, and health officials, researchers and practitioners confine their enquiries updating their knowledge outside their field to their oral culture (the “Joe-says-pedia”) that no one among his consultants knew to tell him, and he rejected outsiders as unreliable.

A decade of mainstream hints

Unaware of how myopic and blinkered the cancer establishment remains even after a decade or two of remarkably promising research into plant based or “phyto”chemicals, Hitchens seems to have allowed them full rein in directing him away from nature and its curative cancer armory and towards artificial drugs, the one without side effects in reasonable doses and the other with horrendous effects particularly on the immune system, the body’s own defense against cancer.

Would phytochemicals have saved him? Given the commercial apathy towards mounting expensive clinical trials for substances that cannot regain the expense in high prices and large profits, not to mention the outright hostility of the FDA and drug companies towards nature’s compounds, which are scormed as the unproven offerings of quackery, and a threat to the pharma economy, it is impossible currently for science to say.

But there are a slew of studies which suggest that if the right phytochemicals can be administered to impact esophageal cancers in patients as effectively as they can be in the lab or in animal studies, and lethal chemotherapy withheld, there is a distinct possibility that the cancer can be stopped in situ and even reversed. For this is what the studies in lab dish and rats have shown.

Red and black berries

In Columbus at Ohio State , for example, researchers have won noteworthy data on seven kinds of berries which actually reduce tumors in the rat esophagus. Their latest paper, Multiple berry types prevent N-nitrosomethylbenzylamine-induced esophageal cancer in rats, published in Jun last year, found all seven inhibited tumor progression – black or red raspberries, strawberries, noni, acai and wolfberry.

Seven berry types were about equally capable of inhibiting tumor progression in the rat esophagus in spite of known differences in levels of anthocyanins and ellagitannins. Serum levels of IL-5 and GRO/KC (IL-8) may be predictive of the inhibitory effect of chemopreventive agents on rat esophageal carcinogenesis.

Such results need to be confirmed of course, but as the latest of a series of papers over the last 15 years it suggests that flavonoids – the phytochemicals associated with pigment, in this case red and purple – have great potential in rolling back esophageal cancer in people, whom it kills at the rate of over 14 thousand a year in the US.

Beneficial effects have also been found by the same group for red beetroot food color (Drinking water with red beetroot food color antagonizes esophageal carcinogenesis in N-nitrosomethylbenzylamine-treated rats, and for circumin, an ingredient of turmeric, which promotes apoptosis – cell suicide – in esophageal cancer cells in the lab dish, according to the University of Michigan Medical School last year (Curcumin promotes apoptosis, increases chemosensitivity, and inhibits nuclear factor kappaB in esophageal adenocarcinoma, and also kills them independently of apoptosis, according to the Cork, Ireland Cancer Research Centre two years ago (Curcumin induces apoptosis-independent death in oesophageal cancer cells.

Reasonable people may ask themselves -and the cancer establishment – whether it is possible that, rather than lose the invaluable mind of one of the most prominent public social critics of our time, it might have been that we were able to save him by getting him to drink copious beetroot pigment in his drinking water, or even his vodka, and to feast on black and red raspberries four times a day.

The point is, we have no certain idea, and it cannot be ruled out as an alternative to certain death through the treatment he did get. Presumably his diagnosis was typical in being late, the factor which keeps the five year survival rate in this country down at 15%. Most die painfully within the year. Anything which avoids this appalling fate is worth trying, especially for smokers and drinkers like Hitchens who refuse to reform.

There is even the possibility that the great heir to the tradition of articulate public comment founded by Samuel Johnson might never have contracted the illness in the first place, if only he had developed a taste for green tea.Urinary tea polyphenols in relation to gastric and esophageal cancers: a prospective study of men in Shanghai, China, the 2002 study from the University of Southern California which found

“direct evidence that tea polyphenols may act as chemopreventive agents against gastric and esophageal cancer development”

is one large piece of evidence for this, even though it was criticized along with 51 others involving 1.6 million participants by a German meta-review of green tea studies in 2009, Green tea (Camellia sinensis) for the prevention of cancer. Their objections to the procedures followed didn’t convincingly vitiate the many substantive results reported, including ones which appeared more recently which confirm anti cancer effect of green tea against esophageal cancer.

The reason for this was that, like other Cochrane metareviews it was premature – not to say absurd – in discounting lab evidence which was not yet confirmed by Phase III clinical trials. This is standard for the Copenhagen data base, which is international and contains much positive evidence from lab studies for the effectiveness of phytochemicals against cancer. But it notoriously lacks Phase III clinical trials, for the simple reason that these are virtually impossible to fund for unpatentable natural substances. Researchers producing positive results in the lab for green tea and other substances offered by Mother Nature frequently lament this omission, when such trials otherwise automatically follow promising lab studies for synthetic compounds.

We wonder for example whether they included the remarkable result achieved at the Mayo Clinic a couple of years ago, so far unreported by the mainstream media, where a tiny group of four, later expanded to a clinical trial of 24, was able to eradicate or shrink lymphomas apparently through (in one woman’s case) merely doubling the number of green tea bags she used.

So what does it all boil down to? Should Hitchens have woken up to flavonoids (phytochemicals found in fruits and vegetables, especially in their colorful skins)? Those interested might choose the following review for their bedtime reading:

Phytochemicals in cancer prevention and therapy: truth or dare?
Russo M, Spagnuolo C, Tedesco I, Russo GL.
Source
Institute of Food Sciences, National Research Council, 83100, Avellino, Italy; Email: mrusso@isa.cnr.it (M.R.); carmela.spagnuolo@gmail.com (C.S.); idolo@isa.cnr.it (I.T.).
Abstract
A voluminous literature suggests that an increase in consumption of fruit and vegetables is a relatively easy and practical strategy to reduce significantly the incidence of cancer. The beneficial effect is mostly associated with the presence of phytochemicals in the diet. This review focuses on a group of them, namely isothiocyanate, curcumin, genistein, epigallocatechin gallate, lycopene and resveratrol, largely studied as chemopreventive agents and with potential clinical applications. Cellular and animal studies suggest that these molecules induce apoptosis and arrest cell growth by pleiotropic mechanisms. The anticancer efficacy of these compounds may result from their use in monotherapy or in association with chemotherapeutic drugs. This latter approach may represent a new pharmacological strategy against several types of cancers. However, despite the promising results from experimental studies, only a limited number of clinical trials are ongoing to assess the therapeutic efficacy of these molecules. Nevertheless, the preliminary results are promising and raise solid foundations for future investigations.

In other words, eat colorful fruits and veggies (especially red, purple and black), and gird for political action to force the FDA to back off from discouraging or even blocking Phase 3 clinical trials and the NIH to fund Phase 3 clinical trials. As Hitchens himself might now say, if he has found to his surprise there is an after life, “Occupy FDA!”

Given that supplements may be needed to administer color phytochemicals in the dose required to have an effect in humans, the cry may be “Occupy Congress!” too. The alarm that supplements may be banned from being sold in retail stores without a prescription is raised by some, who point to legislation lurking in the background in Congress to enforce this rule.

Americans may be surprised to find themselves barred from freely buying vitamin and other supplements in the near future, they say, just as the British were caught off guard by a similar move a while back.

But more on this while topic – and other cancers – soon.

Clearsighted critic of standard evolutionary mechanism tried to complete it

Classic struggle of heretic to move mountain of prejudicial inertia (”we are not clumps of bacteria”)

Teresi achieved fine Discover interview to cap her legacy, ignoring 9/11 embarrassment

One of the most forceful personalities and minds in science was suddenly taken from us by a stroke today (Tues Nov 22 2011). Lynn Margulis was an unusually strong character and for a biologist she had an unusually muscular mind, and her early marriage to Carl Sagan was the least of her accomplishments. She was very young when she began to demonstrate the lameness of the standard idea of how evolution works and the origin of species, ie that random tiny mutations are converted by Darwininian competition to emerge as dominant features if these are advantageous to survival, and can even give rise to new major forms or species if they are particularly helpful.

Margulis was one of the few scientists who immediately see that this theory is conceptually inadequate at the fundamental level and not much more than a silly biological version of modern capitalist thinking a la Ayn Raynd, where nature is wholly a jungle where only the strongest survive, and that evolution at the level of creating new species (which standard Darwinism still utterly fails to explain) was far more likely a cooperative venture of some kind.

From single cells to humans

This revisionism took shape in her ideas about symbiogenesis where at the most basic stratum of life in which single celled forms existed at the beginning, it was likely that such cells merged, and that explained the appearance of cells with a nucleus of which most larger life forms are now made up, including ourselves. From the Margulis point of view we are all essentially agglomerations of cooperating bacteria, and that explains also how new species can arise – from the merging of disparate cells which thus form new living entities with more powerful survival processes than either progenitor.

This obituary in the Times suggests that the details of her thinking are still obscure to the average Timesman and other non specialists, but it is very clear in giving her the credit she deserved after years in the trenches fighting for her truths. No less a fellow heretic than Richard Dawking famously complimented her highly on her determined resilience in the fact of the standard hostility and envy of lesser minds who occupied higher positions in the ruling system when she started out as a young woman of originality and superior sense.

Seasoned skeptic

In other words, Margulis was a heretic of great ability who could be counted on to guide lesser mortals as to other heretics in science who were or are bone fide future Nobelists and who are fueled by too much skepticism and imagination for common acceptance. In this respect she was one of the first to recognize the distinction of one of the most eminent naysayers in science, Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, who has been subjected to political attacks for a quarter century for pointing out from the beginning that as the putative cause of AIDS HIV is in fact a non starter, as every year that passes confirms.

Margulis saw immediately that Duesberg’s analysis was correct and that HIV/AIDS is a nonsense from every point of view, and she had no compunction in saying so. How rare is her kind of unrestrained seeking after better truths in science and how sorely we need more of it was never better shown than in her life of great achievement in the face of mass conformity and political resistance, the new world of institutionalized and now corporate science that has grown into an almost immovable pyramid since the Second World War.

Now we have lost one more rare voice of skeptical creativity.

Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: November 24, 2011

Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.

She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Dr. Margulis had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988. She drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.

The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.

“She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.”

The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory — which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory — became her first book, “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.”

A revised version, “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution,” followed in 1981, and though it challenged the presumptions of many prominent scientists, it has since become accepted evolutionary doctrine.

“Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.

“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.”

Lynn Petra Alexander was born on March 5, 1938, in Chicago, where she grew up in a tough neighborhood on the South Side. Her father was a lawyer and a businessman. Precocious, she graduated at 18 from the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sagan as they passed each other on a stairway.

She earned a master’s degree in genetics and zoology from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, she taught for 22 years at Boston University.

Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself.

Dr. Margulis’s marriage to Dr. Sagan ended in divorce, as did a marriage to Thomas N. Margulis, a chemist. Dr. Sagan died in 1996.

In addition to her daughter and her son Dorion, a science writer with whom she sometimes collaborated, she is survived by two other sons, Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; three sisters, Joan Glashow, Sharon Kleitman and Diane Alexander; three half-brothers, Robert, Michael and Mark Alexander; a half-sister, Sara Alexander; and nine grandchildren.

“More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct,” Dr. Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in “Microcosmos,” a 1986 book that traced, in readable language, the history of evolution over four billion years, “but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, has continued for more than three billion years. And the basis of the patina, past, present and future, is the microcosm — trillions of communicating, evolving microbes.”

Humans are clumps of bacteria: Margulis’s ideas in a nutshell

Further reading: Dick Teresis (ex OMNI editor) talks to Margulis, a neighbor in:
Discover: April 2011 issue; published online June 17, 2011

The best brief guide to Margulis’ thinking in her own words came in April when her neighbor, ex-OMNI-editor Dick Teresi, captured an interview for Discover, almost the only mainstream outlet for material which even hints that the ideas of science heretics of stature like Margulis or Duesberg are worth considering (the other is Scientific American).

Anyone who wants to understand the direction in which smart evolutionary theory must go should read this:

Discover Interview:
Lynn Margulis Says She’s Not Controversial, She’s Right
It’s the neo-Darwinists, population geneticists, AIDS researchers, and English-speaking biologists as a whole who have it all wrong.
by Dick Teresi; photography by Bob O’Connor

A conversation with Lynn Margulis is an effective way to change the way you think about life. Not just your life. All life. Scientists today recognize five groups of life: bacteria, protoctists (amoebas, seaweed), fungi (yeast, mold, mushrooms), plants, and animals. Margulis, a self-described “evolutionist,” makes a convincing case that there are really just two groups, bacteria and everything else.
That distinction led to her career-making insight. In a 1967 paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Margulis suggested that mitochondria and plastids—vital structures within animal and plant cells—evolved from bacteria hundreds of million of years ago, after bacterial cells started to collect in interactive communities and live symbiotically with one another. The resulting mergers yielded the compound cells known as eukaryotes, which in turn gave rise to all the rest—the protoctists, fungi, plants, and animals, including humans. The notion that we are all the children of bacteria seemed outlandish at the time, but it is now widely supported and accepted. “The evolution of the eukaryotic cells was the single most important event in the history of the organic world,” said Ernst Mayr, the leading evolutionary biologist of the last century. “Margulis’s contribution to our understanding the symbiotic factors was of enormous importance.”
Her subsequent ideas remain decidedly more controversial. Margulis came to view symbiosis as the central force behind the evolution of new species, an idea that has been dismissed by modern biologists. The dominant theory of evolution (often called neo-Darwinism) holds that new species arise through the gradual accumulation of random mutations, which are either favored or weeded out by natural selection. To Margulis, random mutation and natural selection are just cogs in the gears of evolution; the big leaps forward result from mergers between different kinds of organisms, what she calls symbiogenesis. Viewing life as one giant network of social connections has set Margulis against the mainstream in other high-profile ways as well. She disputes the current medical understanding of AIDS and considers every kind of life to be “conscious” in a sense.

Margulis herself is a highly social organism. Now 71, she is a well-known sight at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she is on the geosciences faculty, riding her bike in all weather and at all times of day. Interviewer Dick Teresi, a neighbor, almost ran her over when, dressed in a dark coat, she cycled in front of his car late at night. On the three occasions that they met for this interview, Teresi couldn’t help noticing that Margulis shared her home with numerous others: family, students, visiting scholars, friends, friends of friends, and anybody interesting who needed a place to stay.
Most scientists would say there is no controversy over evolution. Why do you disagree?
All scientists agree that evolution has occurred—that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?
And you don’t believe that natural selection is the answer?
This is the issue I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural selection. If you want bigger eggs, you keep selecting the hens that are laying the biggest eggs, and you get bigger and bigger eggs. But you also get hens with defective feathers and wobbly legs. Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.
That seems like a fairly basic objection. How, then, do you think the neo-Darwinist perspective became so entrenched?
In the first half of the 20th century, neo-Darwinism became the name for the people who reconciled the type of gradual evolutionary change described by Charles Darwin with Gregor Mendel’s rules of heredity [which first gained widespread recognition around 1900], in which fixed traits are passed from one generation to the next. The problem was that the laws of genetics showed stasis, not change. If you have pure breeding red flowers and pure breeding white flowers, like carnations, you cross them and you get pink flowers. You back-cross them to the red parent and you could get three-quarters red, one-quarter white. Mendel showed that the grandparent flowers and the offspring flowers could be identical to each other. There was no change through time.
There’s no doubt that Mendel was correct. But Darwinism says that there has been change through time, since all life comes from a common ancestor—something that appeared to be supported when, early in the 20th century, scientists discovered that X-rays and specific chemicals caused mutations. But did the neo-Darwinists ever go out of their offices? Did they or their modern followers, the population geneticists, ever go look at what’s happening in nature the way Darwin did? Darwin was a fine naturalist. If you really want to study evolution, you’ve got go outside sometime, because you’ll see symbiosis everywhere!
So did Mendel miss something? Was Darwin wrong?
I’d say both are incomplete. The traits that follow Mendel’s laws are trivial. Do you have a widow’s peak or a straight hairline? Do you have hanging earlobes or attached earlobes? Are you female or male? Mendel found seven traits that followed his laws exactly. But neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change—led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
What kind of evidence turned you against neo-Darwinism?
What you’d like to see is a good case for gradual change from one species to another in the field, in the laboratory, or in the fossil record—and preferably in all three. Darwin’s big mystery was why there was no record at all before a specific point [dated to 542 million years ago by modern researchers], and then all of a sudden in the fossil record you get nearly all the major types of animals. The paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould studied lakes in East Africa and on Caribbean islands looking for Darwin’s gradual change from one species of trilobite or snail to another. What they found was lots of back-and-forth variation in the population and then—whoop—a whole new species. There is no gradualism in the fossil record.
Gould used the term “punctuated equilibrium” to describe what he interpreted as actual leaps in evolutionary change. Most biologists disagreed, suggesting a wealth of missing fossil evidence yet to be found. Where do you stand in the debate?
“Punctuated equilibrium” was invented to describe the discontinuity in the appearance of new species, and symbiogenesis supports the idea that these discontinuities are real. An example: Most clams live in deep, fairly dark waters. Among one group of clams is a species whose ancestors ingested algae—a typical food—but failed to digest them and kept the algae under their shells. The shell, with time, became translucent, allowing sunlight in. The clams fed off their captive algae and their habitat expanded into sunlit waters. So there’s a discontinuity between the dark-dwelling, food-gathering ancestor and the descendants that feed themselves photosynthetically.
What about the famous “beak of the finch” evolutionary studies of the 1970s? Didn’t they vindicate Darwin?
Peter and Rosemary Grant, two married evolutionary biologists, said, ‘To hell with all this theory; we want to get there and look at speciation happening.’ They measured the eggs, beaks, et cetera, of finches on Daphne Island, a small, hilly former volcano top in Ecuador’s Galápagos, year after year. They found that during floods or other times when there are no big seeds, the birds with big beaks can’t eat. The birds die of starvation and go extinct on that island.
Did the Grants document the emergence of new species?
They saw this big shift: the large-beaked birds going extinct, the small-beaked ones spreading all over the island and being selected for the kinds of seeds they eat. They saw lots of variation within a species, changes over time. But they never found any new species—ever. They would say that if they waited long enough they’d find a new species.
Some of your criticisms of natural selection sound a lot like those of Michael Behe, one of the most famous proponents of “intelligent design,” and yet you have debated Behe. What is the difference between your views?
The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or “God did it.” They have no alternatives that are scientific.
You claim that the primary mechanism of evolution is not mutation but symbiogenesis, in which new species emerge through the symbiotic relationship between two or more kinds of organisms. How does that work?
All visible organisms are products of symbiogenesis, without exception. The bacteria are the unit. The way I think about the whole world is that it’s like a pointillist painting. You get far away and it looks like Seurat’s famous painting of people in the park (jpg). Look closely: The points are living bodies—different distributions of bacteria. The living world thrived long before the origin of nucleated organisms [the eukaryotic cells, which have genetic material enclosed in well-defined membranes]. There were no animals, no plants, no fungi. It was an all-bacterial world—bacteria that have become very good at finding specialized niches. Symbiogenesis recognizes that every visible life-form is a combination or community of bacteria.
How could communities of bacteria have formed completely new, more complex levels of life?
Symbiogenesis recognizes that the mitochondria [the energy factories] in animal, plant, and fungal cells came from oxygen-respiring bacteria and that chloroplasts in plants and algae—which perform photosynthesis—came from cyanobacteria. These used to be called blue-green algae, and they produce the oxygen that all animals breathe.
Are you saying that a free-living bacterium became part of the cell of another organism? How could that have happened?
At some point an amoeba ate a bacterium but could not digest it. The bacterium produced oxygen or made vitamins, providing a survival advantage to both itself and the amoeba. Eventually the bacteria inside the amoeba became the mitochondria. The green dots you see in the cells of plants originated as cyanobacteria. This has been proved without a doubt.
And that kind of partnership drives major evolutionary change?
The point is that evolution goes in big jumps. That idea has been called macromutation, and I was denigrated in 1967 at Harvard for mentioning it. “You believe in macromutation? You believe in acquired characteristics?” the important professor Keith Porter asked me with a sneer. No, I believe in acquired genomes.
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“You know what the index fossil of Homo sapiens in the recent fossil record is going to be? The squashed remains of the automobile. There will be a layer in the fossil record where you’re going to know people were here because of the automobiles. It will be a very thin layer.”
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Can you give an example of symbiogenesis in action?
Look at this cover of Plant Physiology [a major journal in the field]. The animal is a juvenile slug. It has no photosynthesis ancestry. Then it feeds on algae and takes in chloroplasts. This photo is taken two weeks later. Same animal. The slug is completely green. It took in algae chloroplasts, and it became completely photosynthetic and lies out in the sun. At the end of September, these slugs turn red and yellow and look like dead leaves. When they lay eggs, those eggs contain the gene for photosynthesis inside. Or look at a cow. It is a 40-gallon fermentation tank on four legs. It cannot digest grass and needs a whole mess of symbiotic organisms in its overgrown esophagus to digest it. The difference between cows and related species like bison or musk ox should be traced, in part, to the different symbionts they maintain.
But if these symbiotic partnerships are so stable, how can they also drive evolutionary change?
Symbiosis is an ecological phenomenon where one kind of organism lives in physical contact with another. Long-term symbiosis leads to new intracellular structures, new organs and organ systems, and new species as one being incorporates another being that is already good at something else. This major mode of evolutionary innovation has been ignored by the so-called evolutionary biologists. They think they own evolution, but they’re basically anthropocentric zoologists. They’re playing the game while missing four out of five of the cards. The five are bacteria, protoctists, fungi, animals, and plants, and they’re playing with just animals—a fifth of the deck. The evolutionary biologists believe the evolutionary pattern is a tree. It’s not. The evolutionary pattern is a web—the branches fuse, like when algae and slugs come together and stay together.
In contrast, the symbiotic view of evolution has a long lineage in Russia, right?
From the very beginning the Russians said natural selection was a process of elimination and could not produce all the diversity we see. They understood that symbiogenesis was a major source of innovation, and they rejected Darwin. If the English-speaking world owns natural selection, the Russians own symbiogenesis. In 1924, this man Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky wrote a book called Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, in which he reconciled Darwin’s natural selection as the eliminator and symbiogenesis as the innovator. Kozo-Polyansky looked at cilia—the wavy hairs that some microbes use to move—and said it is not beyond the realm of possibility that cilia, the tails of sperm cells, came from “flagellated cytodes,” by which he clearly meant swimming bacteria.
Has that idea ever been verified?
The sense organs of vertebrates have modified cilia: The rods and cone cells of the eye have cilia, and the balance organ in the inner ear is lined with sensory cilia. You tilt your head to one side and little calcium carbonate stones in your inner ear hit the cilia. This has been known since shortly after electron microscopy came in 1963. Sensory cilia did not come from random mutations. They came by acquiring a whole genome of a symbiotic bacterium that could already sense light or motion. Specifically, I think it was a spirochete [a corkscrew-shaped bacterium] that became the cilium.
Don’t spirochetes cause syphilis?
Yes, and Lyme disease. There are many kinds of spirochetes, and if I’m right, some of them are ancestors to the cilia in our cells. Spirochete bacteria are already optimized for sensitivity to motion, light, and chemicals. All eukaryotic cells have an internal transport system. If I’m right, the whole system—called the cytoskeletal system—came from the incorporation of ancestral spirochetes. Mitosis, or cell division, is a kind of internal motility system that came from these free-living, symbiotic, swimming bacteria. Here [she shows a video] we compare isolated swimming sperm tails to free-swimming spirochetes. Is that clear enough?

And yet these ideas are not generally accepted. Why?
Do you want to believe that your sperm tails come from some spirochetes? Most men, most evolutionary biologists, don’t. When they understand what I’m saying, they don’t like it.
We usually think of bacteria as strictly harmful. You disagree?
We couldn’t live without them. They maintain our ecological physiology. There are vitamins in bacteria that you could not live without. The movement of your gas and feces would never take place without bacteria. There are hundreds of ways your body wouldn’t work without bacteria. Between your toes is a jungle; under your arms is a jungle. There are bacteria in your mouth, lots of spirochetes, and other bacteria in your intestines. We take for granted their influence. Bacteria are our ancestors. One of my students years ago cut himself deeply with glass and accidentally inoculated himself with at least 10 million spirochetes. We were all scared but nothing happened. He didn’t even have an allergic reaction. This tells you that unless these microbes have a history with people, they’re harmless.

Are you saying that the only harmful bacteria are the ones that share an evolutionary history with us?
Right. Dangerous spirochetes, like the Treponema of syphilis or the Borrelia of Lyme disease, have long-standing symbiotic relationships with us. Probably they had relationships with the prehuman apes from which humans evolved. Treponema has lost four-fifths of its genes, because you’re doing four-fifths of the work for it. And yet people don’t want to understand that chronic spirochete infection is an example of symbiosis.
You have upset many medical researchers with the suggestion that corkscrew-shaped spirochetes turn into dormant “round bodies.” What’s that debate all about?
Spirochetes turn into round bodies in any unfavorable condition where they survive but cannot grow. The round body is a dormant stage that has all the genes and can start growing again, like a fungal spore. Lyme disease spirochetes become round bodies if you suspend them in distilled water. Then they come out and start to grow as soon as you put them in the proper food medium with serum in it. The common myth is that penicillin kills spirochetes and therefore syphilis is not a problem. But syphilis is a major problem because the spirochetes stay hidden as round bodies and become part of the person’s very chemistry, which they commandeer to reproduce themselves. Indeed, the set of symptoms, or syndrome, presented by syphilitics overlaps completely with another syndrome: AIDS.
Wait—you are suggesting that AIDS is really syphilis?
There is a vast body of literature on syphilis spanning from the 1500s until after World War II, when the disease was supposedly cured by penicillin. Yet the same symptoms now describe AIDS perfectly. It’s in our paper “Resurgence of the Great Imitator.” Our claim is that there’s no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There’s no scientific paper that proves the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis [winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for DNA sequencing, and well known for his unconventional scientific views] said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, “There is no such document.”
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“Do you want to believe that your sperm tails come from some spirochetes? Most men, most evolutionary biologists, don’t. When they understand what I’m saying, they don’t like it.”
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Syphilis has been called “the great imitator” because patients show a whole range of symptoms in a given order. You have a genital chancre, your symptoms go away, then you have the pox, this skin problem, and then it’s chronic, and you get sicker and sicker. The idea that penicillin kills the cause of the disease is nuts. If you treat the painless chancre in the first few days of infection, you may stop the bacterium before the symbiosis develops, but if you really get syphilis, all you can do is live with the spirochete. The spirochete lives permanently as a symbiont in the patient. The infection cannot be killed because it becomes part of the patient’s genome and protein synthesis biochemistry. After syphilis establishes this symbiotic relationship with a person, it becomes dependent on human cells and is undetectable by any testing.
Is there a connection here between syphilis and Lyme disease, which is also caused by a spirochete and which is also said to be difficult to treat when diagnosed late?
Both the Treponema that cause syphilis and the Borrelia that cause Lyme disease contain only a fifth of the genes they need to live on their own. Related spirochetes that can live outside by themselves need 5,000 genes, whereas the spirochetes of those two diseases have only 1,000 in their bodies. The 4,000 missing gene products needed for bacterial growth can be supplied by wet, warm human tissue. This is why both the Lyme disease Borrelia and syphilis Treponema are symbionts—they require another body to survive. These Borrelia and Treponema have a long history inside people. Syphilis has been detected in skull abnormalities going back to the ancient Egyptians. But I’m interested in spirochetes only because of our ancestry. I’m not interested in the diseases.
When you talk about the evolutionary intelligence of bacteria, it almost sounds like you think of them as conscious beings.
I do think consciousness is a property of all living cells. All cells are bounded by a membrane of their own making. To sense chemicals—food or poisons—it takes a cell. To have a sense of smell takes a cell. To sense light, it takes a cell. You have to have a bounded entity with photoreceptors inside to sense light. Bacteria are conscious. These bacterial beings have been around since the origin of life and still are running the soil and the air and affecting water quality.
Your perspective is rather humbling.
The species of some of the protoctists are 542 million years old. Mammal species have a mean lifetime in the fossil record of about 3 million years. And humans. You know what the index fossil of Homo sapiens in the recent fossil record is going to be? The squashed remains of the automobile. There will be a layer in the fossil record where you’re going to know people were here because of the automobiles. It will be a very thin layer.
Do we overrate ourselves as a species?
Yes, but we can’t help it. Look, there are nearly 7,000 million people on earth today and there are 10,000 chimps, and the numbers are getting fewer every day because we’re destroying their habitat. Reg Morrison, who wrote a wonderful book called The Spirit in the Gene, says that although we’re 99 percent genetically in common with chimps, that 1 percent makes a huge difference. Why? Because it makes us believe that we’re the best on earth. But there is lots of evidence that we are “mammalian weeds.” Like many mammals, we overgrow our habitats and that leads to poverty, misery, and wars.
Why do you have a reputation as a heretic?
Anyone who is overtly critical of the foundations of his science is persona non grata. I am critical of evolutionary biology that is based on population genetics. I call it zoocentrism. Zoologists are taught that life starts with animals, and they block out four-fifths of the information in biology [by ignoring the other four major groups of life] and all of the information in geology.
You have attacked population genetics—the foundation of much current evolutionary research—as “numerology.” What do you mean by that term?
When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum. Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.
Do you ever get tired of being called controversial?
I don’t consider my ideas controversial. I consider them right.

Margulis’ solution to AIDS puzzle

Insofar as the so-called AIDS virus HIV has been shown by Nancy Padian to be utterly uninfectious, and yet HIV/AIDS researchers happily produce surveys and studies year after year which use infectiousness as a premise and seem to show it as a result, in changing rates of infection, Margulis is the only major HIV skeptic who has come up with a possibility in syphilis as a cause which accounts for this phenomenon, which otherwise has to be explained by the wide ranging cross reaction achieved by multiple versions of the HIV test.

But though everything else she believed about HIV/AIDS was quite right according to our own research in the literature over a quarter decade, we never quite saw her point on syphilis as being the best answer as to what causes AIDS, since although it might be sufficient it wasn’t necessary, ie the symptoms of syphilis were not as far as we know common to all or even many AIDS patients. Nor has AIDS ever shown any sign of being infectious in the general population. Now at least we have her public answer to this objection, in this exchange.

We congratulate Teresi on making sense of her ideas in his interview, which we would have liked to do ourselves, and planned to do, but Alas found Margulis too preoccupied with her current work when she visited New York, research which was changing biological theory as she did it. She preferred talking enthusiastically about the subtleties of her advanced investigations and wasn’t particularly keen on expressing herself in lay terms, which was why her many good introductory books relied on the writing abilities of her son Dorion Sagan.

Further reading: John Horgan at Scientific American:
R.I.P. Lynn Margulis, Biological Rebel:

Toward the end of our interview, I asked Margulis if she minded always being referred to as a provocateur or gadfly, or someone who was “fruitfully wrong,” as one scientist put it. She pressed her lips together, brooding over the question. “It’s kind of dismissive, not serious,” she replied. “I mean, you wouldn’t do this to a serious scientist, would you?” She stared at me, and I finally realized her question was not rhetorical; she really wanted an answer. I agreed that the descriptions seemed somewhat condescending.

“Yeah, that’s right,” she mused. Such criticism did not bother her, she insisted. “Anyone who makes this kind of ad hominem criticism exposes himself, doesn’t he? I mean, if their argument is just based on provocative adjectives about me rather than the substance of the issue, then…” Her voice trailed off. Like other mavericks I have met, Margulis could not help but yearn, now and then, to be a respected member of the status quo, whose work merely confirmed the prevailing paradigm. But without courageous rebels like her, science would never achieve any progress.

Rebels are lonely hunters

This view of heretics yearning for acceptance beneath it all is a common note sounded by journalists and bloggers, who may like to think that the comfort they find in going along with social norms and common assumptions is evidence of common humanity.

But we like to think that the reason that top level heretics “yearn” to be accepted members of the “status quo” is because they deserve higher standing than most of the members of the pyramid they are trying to move, including most if not all the ones at the tip.

It must be one of the great burdens for any human being to drag through life, the disrespect and antagonism of the great mass of their fellows who should know better, but don’t. Especially when they contemplate who does as a rule gain power in society, and in their fields, especially nowadays, when the scientist of great integrity who follows the most elemental rule of good science, to question yourself, seems to be becoming almost extinct among those that the media likes to celebrate.

A fine remembrance of Margulis as a friend has been written by Celia Farber, the noted literary journalist and science reporter celebrated for her coverage of the HIV/AIDS scientific boondoggle, at her personal blog The Truth Barrier: Lynn Margulis In Memoriam.

Her 9/11 embarrassment

Of course, outside her field of expertise Lynn was as vulnerable to superficially attractive skepticism (which on deeper inspection is probably flawed) as much as any other questioner in life who has learned how much of their own field is ill founded. We’d say that she was a prize specimen of this kind of slip in being overly impressed by 9/11 skeptic David Ray Griffin. There are unexplained anomalies in the 9/11 story, but none seem sufficient to justify an alternative to the core official story.

I arrive at this conclusion largely as the result of the research and clear writing by David Ray Griffin in his fabulous books about 9/11. I first met him when he was a speaker at a scholarly conference unrelated to 9/11. He immediately impressed me as a brilliant, outstanding philosopher – theologian – author, a Whiteheadian scholar motivated by an intense curiosity to know everything possible about the world.

Certainly we don’t agree with Margulis in saying “Certainly, 19 young Arab men and a man in a cave 7,000 miles away, no matter the level of their anger, could not have masterminded and carried out 9/11: the most effective television commercial in the history of Western civilization.” The low tech accessibility of the window the gang found into global attention was the key to their strategy, and they evidently did not expect such a catastrophic collapse of both towers.

Here is her written statement, and here is her video on the topic. Both suggest to us that her research on the topic was quite shallow and her judgment relied heavily on her personal impression of Griffin, a key figure in the field.

But this is understandable. The essential loneliness of heretics leads them to bond enthusiastically with any others they meet who are intellectually up to the mark, and thus they are quickly subject to exactly the same group psychology that glues together those who believe in conventional wisdom in the face of evidence that it flouts both common sense and scientific review.

Her main point seems to have been that Building 7 was brought down by explosives, but this lacks evidence as far as we know, though there were reports of police warning people to steer clear of it, standard procedure for a building which was threatening to collapse. For a list of 9/11 report omissions see Griffin’s list.

For a provocative list of early warnings of 9/11 see Did Some People Foretell the 9/11 Attack on America? at September11News.com

One time hippie acidhead said to have regretted delay in surgery

Prize conformist Walter Isaacson leads in owning Jobs story from inside vantage point

Sixty Minutes interview sketches outline of Jobs’ fate but more data needed

There is something predictable about the way journalists and people with an axe to grind on an issue glom onto the story of an individual hero’s life and death to confirm and promote their own cliched preconceptions, rather than seek the balanced truth.

On the questions surrounding Steve Jobs’ early departure from his very successful life, for instance, we have conventional doctors who are making him an example of someone who ruined his chances by avoiding their always ultimately hopeless ministrations for nine months versus those who appreciate the hitherto neglected but increasingly apparent advantages of nutritional weapons against cancer.

Steve Jobs Bad Boy

Among journalists, on the other hand, there is general agreement that Steve Jobs had a dark side which involved holding those he found lacking to account rather mercilessly, even in public. He typically tonguelashed them for not trying hard or long enough to meet the standards he set, it seems, when in fact they might have been trying very hard and despite themselves were simply not up to speed in skill or mental energy, or had other reasons not to have matched Jobs’ expectations.

But did Jobs’ have a mean streak? We doubt that, even though Steve Jobs didn’t suffer fools gladly. Was it because he wanted to frighten or hurt the objects of his wrath? Surely not. We’d guess he was actually respecting them by treating them as equals, speaking his mind honestly and indignantly, if far too forcefully for timid underlings.

Surely Jobs was too busy chasing the hare of actual achievement to indulge in power plays, particularly cruel ones. One of his most charming quotes has him saying after his first successful IPO for Apple, “I went from not caring about money and being poor to not caring about money and being rich.” Jobs’ visions were founded in reality not fantasy, and he took no pleasure in trappings.

We imagine that on the emotional level he probably couldn’t understand why they couldn’t get with the program, when he was devoting his life to it. It must be hard for a strong minded obsessive to realize that others might be very smart too and have great love and loyalty for him, but still not always be able to produce the goods demanded.

It must be doubly difficult for someone with abandonment issues, as so many detect in Jobs history and behavior, to be a temperate leader, and not see others failing him as abandonment in a life which was marked by other huge abandonments, most significantly after his adoption when Apple cut him loose in in the middle of producing the Lisa, but also his own perpetrated on his girlfriend when she got pregnant. He would be too deeply channeled into leftover infantile rage, would he not? And many ask if Apple would have ever be pulled back from ruin without his slave driving whip.

Noblesse oblige, please, Steve, for sure, but we don’t join the chorus who say you had a cruel streak, however devastating your tongue might have been to gentler souls.

Steve Jobs inventor par excellence

In the same line we also have tired of the incessant mantra of “genius” invoked in every contemplation of Jobs’ savvy of how to turn tangled techware into universal love toy. It was uniquely clever market ball gazing, but as Janet Maslin noted in the Times, it ain’t special relativity. It was invention of a high order typically drawing on ideas which others had left lying around for someone smart and purposeful to use, allied to a very sensible disregard for authority and convention in dreaming up the new and unique.

We believe that Jobs’ main secrets were a) his early intake of LSD, which seems to blast the cobwebs of convention out of the minds of all who try it, if they don’t kill themselves jumping out of a window to fly to the moon, and b) the Syrian carpet salesman gene he must have inherited from his father, who Jobs seems to have taken against for his later abandoning his (Jobs’) natural mother and her daughter, who turned out to be a respected novelist (Mona Simpson).

These factors – liberation from the unconscious authority of convention and the desire to sell to the whole world what he made – are what led to Jobs having the innate sense to try and make ideal products, good looking and usable, instead of the best effort successes made by ordinary tech mortals, and put these objets d’art-tech in the hands of consumers who had no previous idea they wanted them, until they saw their beauty and their simplicity with their own eyes and caressed it hands on.

How could a smart man be so dumb?

Be that as it may (and possibly none of the business of this researched based scientific blog), what of the strange partial record now available of the cause of his death?

With his biography of Steve Jobs hot off the presses tomorrow Walter Isaacson, biographer of Franklin and Einstein, and president of the Aspen Institute talkfest, is the current go to source on all things Jobsian.

He is peddling (as interviewed tonight on 60 Minutes) a fairly standard though well phrased and very full account of the way Jobs lived and behaved and why, one which doesn’t seem from tonight’s interview to vary much from the fairly mundane cliches of all the recent obituaries on Jobs in the New York Times, Time, New Yorker etc, though it does have the direct authority of the forty interviews Isaacson carried out wherein Jobs evidently spoke freely.

Isaacson witness to Steve Job’s surrender to docs

But his chosen biographer is more of a transcriber and reporter than deep thinker, it seems. As his Aspen Institute role indicates Walter Isaacson is a paid up member of the professional publishing elite as much as a mere author (he is also an ex-head of CNN and ex-managing editor of Time), and he has an amiable crowd pleasing mentality who has surely done a workmanlike job of knitting together all he finds out from not only from Jobs but exgirlfriends, employees, and rivals, but how deeply informative and insightful is his job going to be?.

He doesn’t seem to be the type who might have evoked a deep and sympathetic discussion with Jobs of any unconventional notions in medicine he might have tried. Instead Isaacson seems likely to have been an extension of all the family friends and colleagues who are now revealed to have put great pressure on Jobs to go the conventional route back to health as fast as possible, despite the familiarity he must have worked up in forty interviews listening to Jobs reminisce up till nearly his end.

We say that as a preamble to one key fact which has emerged which is that Isaacson is reporting in his book that Jobs avoided surgery at first for nine months in favor of treating his ailments with some kind of nutritional approaches and later said he regretted the delay in performing surgery to excise his pancreative cancer.

Sixty Minutes features Jobs on tape

This emerged tonight in the interview Isaacson gave Sixty Minutes tonight (Sun Oct 23) to promote what is surely going to be a blockbuster best seller. It follows the Times review of his book on Friday, headed as Making the iBio for Apple’s Genius, by Janet Maslin, who told us that Isaacson suggests that the cancer might have been better treated by earlier surgery:

“Of course the book also tracks Mr. Jobs’s long and combative rivalry with Bill Gates. The section devoted to Mr. Jobs’s illness, which suggests that his cancer might have been more treatable had he not resisted early surgery, describes the relative tenderness of their last meeting.”

That’s apparently what Isaacson concluded from what Jobs told him.

Now in the 60 Minutes interview voiceover Steve Kroft states that “the cancer which eventually killed him was discovered accidentally when he was checked in 2004 for kidney stones. The CAT scan showed a shadow in his pancreas which turned out to be malignant. ”

Isaacson says “they did the biopsy and it was very emotional but that turned out to be good actually they said it was a slow growing cancer one of the 5% of pancreatic cancers that can be cured. But he didn’t do it straight away. He tried to treat it with diet and he goes to a spiritualist. He goes to various ways of doing it macrobiotically and he doesn’t get an operation.”

“Why didn’t he get an operation straightway?” asks Steve Kroft.

“I asked him that and he told me “I didn’t want my body to be opened.” And soon everybody was telling him to quit trying to treat it with all these roots and vegetables and just get operated on. But he does it nine months later,” replies Isaacson with a slight grimace at the unfortunate mistake Jobs made.

“Too late?” asks Steve Kroft.

“Well I assume it’s too late because by the time it was operated on it had spread to the tissues around the pancreas.”

Was Jobs a fool for avoiding surgery?

“How could such a smart man do such a stupid thing?” asks Steve Kroft.

The answer, for Isaacson, is that Jobs believed too much in “magical thinking”:

“You know I think he kind of felt that if you ignore something if you don’t want something to exist you can have magical thinking. And it had worked for him in the past. He regretted some of the decisions he made and certainly he felt that he should have been operated on sooner.”

Clearly Isaacson has not the first clue that mainstream research is now continually justifying trying phytochemicals on cancers of all kinds including pancreatic, rather than going the conventional route, especially in pancreatic cancer, which is 95% fatal in nine months or less.

The voice over commentary by Steve Kroft goes on to say “Jobs continued to have cancer treatments even though he was telling everyone he had been cured. And that is what people believed until 2008.”

“All of a sudden” says Isaacson “people are gasping because he looks so frail and has lost so much weight. Suddenly people are realizing that he is very sick again. He denies it publicly. He puts out things that there is a hormonal imbalance which has a tiny kernel of truth to it because his liver was secreting the wrong hormones but it wasn’t just a hormonal imbalance it was that the cancer had gone to his liver. He was trying to deny it to himself and he was denying it to the public and this was a (business) problem of course.”

Steve Kroft goes on to note that Jobs finally took a leave of absence and in March of 2009 received a secret liver transplant in Memphis that wasn’t publicly acknowledged until three months later. “The doctors that did the operation could tell the cancer had spread.”

Isaacson says the last two and a half years were “a painful, brutal struggle and he would talk often to me about the pain.”

Given that his liver was a transplant after the first one was ruined by years of chemotherapy, and his immune system was switched off by immune suppressing drugs after that transplant, and that his pancreas was damaged, so his whole digestive system could hardly handle protein, it is painful to contemplate what Jobs must have gone through.

Steve Kroft ended this topic of discussion with these final lines before moving on: “Jobs survived nearly eight years with his cancer and in his final meeting with Isaacson in mid August still held out hope that there might be one new drug that could save him.”

Times’ earlier hints

That’s the last of the 60 Minutes material on Jobs’ illness and its treatment. A couple more points may be gleaned from the Steve Lohr Times piece on Friday based on their advance look at the book, however.

This is Jobs Tried Exotic Treatments to Combat Cancer, Book Says The subhead is “Steve Jobs’s early decision to put off surgery and rely on less conventional treatments angered and upset his family”.

Steve Lohr’s report centers on the news that Jobs’ attempt to use alternative nutritional treatment for his supposedly safer and slower moving version of the normal quickly fatal pancreatic cancer ran into heavy disapproval from his friends and colleagues, who mounted a continual barrage of advice to stop that nonsense (spelled “nonscience”) and undertake standard surgery and chemo sooner rather than later.

Both sides were presumably under-informed of the latest mainstream research on phytochemicals, even though Jobs is said to have researched the conventional techniques of intervention very intensively once he took them up, about nine months after his diagnosis, when he opted for surgery.

In the mind of mainstream medical science congregationist Timesman Steve the choice was evidently one between “exotic diets” and “cutting-edge treatments”, which betrays a fairly universal bias in medical reporting against alternatives in medicine and surgery, one very misleading to readers.

In his last years, Steven P. Jobs veered from exotic diets to cutting-edge treatments as he fought the cancer that ultimately took his life, according to a new biography to be published on Monday.

His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says. From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private — secret from Apple employees, executives and shareholders, who were misled….

He paid $100,000 for instance to have not only his genes sequenced but the genes of his cancer.

Although the broad outlines of Mr. Jobs’s struggle with pancreatic cancer are known, the new biography, by Walter Isaacson, offers new insight and details. Friends, family members and physicians spoke to Mr. Isaacson openly about Mr. Jobs’s illness and his shifting strategy for managing it. According to Mr. Isaacson, Mr. Jobs was one of 20 people in the world to have all the genes of his cancer tumor and his normal DNA sequenced. The price tag at the time: $100,000.

DNA sequencing to combat cancer to help target drugs? In this and other ways the piece suggests that misinformation and misunderstanding were rife in the thinking of Jobs and his advisers. Apparently none of them had ever heard of PubMed, let alone used it:

In October 2003, Mr. Jobs got the news about his cancer, which was detected by a CT scan. One of his first calls, according to the book, was to Larry Brilliant, a physician and epidemiologist, who would later become the head of Google’s philanthropic arm. The men went way back, having first met at an ashram in India.

“Do you still believe in God?” Mr. Jobs asked.

Mr. Brilliant spoke for a while about religion and different paths to belief, and then asked Mr. Jobs what was wrong. “I have cancer,” Mr. Jobs replied.

Mr. Jobs put off surgery for nine months, a fact first reported in 2008 in Fortune magazine.

The power of underinformed pressure

The pressure on Jobs from family and friends was unrelenting, it is clear. As usual, all those with unresearched faith in conventional medical treatment who had themselves fallen into its hands were utterly convinced of the futility of evading its clutches:

Friends and family, including his sister, Mona Simpson, urged Mr. Jobs to have surgery and chemotherapy, Mr. Isaacson writes. But Mr. Jobs delayed the medical treatment. His friend and mentor, Andrew Grove, the former head of Intel, who had overcome prostate cancer, told Mr. Jobs that diets and acupuncture were not a cure for his cancer. “I told him he was crazy,” he said.

Art Levinson, a member of Apple’s board and chairman of Genentech, recalled that he pleaded with Mr. Jobs and was frustrated that he could not persuade him to have surgery.

His wife, Laurene Powell, recalled those days, after the cancer diagnosis. “The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” she said. “It’s hard to push someone to do that.” She did try, however, Mr. Isaacson writes. “The body exists to serve the spirit,” she argued.

When he did take the path of surgery and science, Mr. Jobs did so with passion and curiosity, sparing no expense, pushing the frontiers of new treatments. According to Mr. Isaacson, once Mr. Jobs decided on the surgery and medical science, he became an expert — studying, guiding and deciding on each treatment. Mr. Isaacson said Mr. Jobs made the final decision on each new treatment regimen.

The DNA sequencing that Mr. Jobs ultimately went through was done by a collaboration of teams at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard and the Broad Institute of MIT. The sequencing, Mr. Isaacson writes, allowed doctors to tailor drugs and target them to the defective molecular pathways.

A doctor told Mr. Jobs that the pioneering treatments of the kind he was undergoing would soon make most types of cancer a manageable chronic disease. Later, Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson that he was either going to be one of the first “to outrun a cancer like this” or be among the last “to die from it.”

That is all we learn from the Times so far. Notice the implied definition of alternative treatment as nonscience that Steve Lohr slips in:

“When he did take the path of surgery and science, Mr. Jobs did so with passion and curiosity, sparing no expense, pushing the frontiers of new treatments. According to Mr. Isaacson, once Mr. Jobs decided on the surgery and medical science…..”

Was Jobs ever told of recent pancreatic cancer research?

So did Jobs ever learn of the simple edible and non toxic antidotes which the latest mainstream research points to?

All we know is that a knowledgeable colleague forwarded a piece on the topic, a column on mainstream studies of the potential of phytochemicals in medicine and in particular pancreatic cancer, to a family member who happened to be a photograph gallery owner who knew Jobs through selling him hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Ansel Adams and other prints, but never heard of any response to that overture. The column was forwarded in email and not marked up in red pencil which would have been ideal, so whether Jobs actually noticed the section referring to his specific ailment is unknown, since it was buried at the end of the piece.

More info needed for further analysis

Unfortunately therefore the discussion so far has to rest on speculation, but we are obtaining a copy of the book to see what more can be gleaned from Isaacson about how Jobs handled his treatment, secretive though he may have been.

In that further discussion we can review the prime specimen of establishment rationalization posted by a junior member of the Harvard Faculty on Quora, which blames alternative medicine as responsible for Jobs not getting ideal treatment.

However, the Quora piece is rife with what look to us to be logical inconsistencies so we look forward to deconstructing it and then summarizing what the universally neglected mounting current lab research on cells and mice has to offer on the topic of whether it could have saved Jobs from surgery, chemo and eventual death.

World changer, but his personal aim was simple

Make consumer tech beautiful and user friendly – and flawless

Alone amid the mediocrity of tech marketing, he led towards the future

Let’s hope that he wasn’t despatched early by medical myopia

Supersalesman and tech market seer Steve Jobs is, sadly and predictably, dead from pancreatic cancer, as long expected. Kept alive for seven years by the barbaric techniques of modern medicine when faced with a particularly difficult form of cancer – surgery, poison and eventually a liver transplant – he finally died under the assault. Let’s hope that the alternative that is increasingly pointed to by recent decades of stunningly promising research into how phytochemicals – plant chemicals – aid the body in fighting off cancer was not neglected by his doubtless expensive medical consultants.

Did Jobs benefit from phytochemicals?

One might expect it probably was, of course. Awakening the medical profession to what may be the most important modern trend in medicine – how a range of chemicals extracted from food have proven especially over the last five years to be strongly effective against human cancer cells in the lab and in mice – is proving an uphill battle, even though a flood of research has appeared in mainstream peer reviewed journals in the last ten years.

Perhaps, however, it wasn’t . Perhaps Steve Jobs was helped by his own core character as instinctive heretic, if not also by good advice from his wife and other people who can be wiser than the professionals. We understand that Jobs was interested in alternative medicine, and did take advantage of what some Chinese herbalists had to offer. This may have helped keep him alive far beyond the three to six months his doctors originally forecast that he had left of life when he was diagnosed. Luckily, it was a rare kind of pancreatic cancer which forms about five per cent of the cases of this terrible killer, one which responds to surgery. Surviving seven years is evidence that he benefited from good treatment, though, as well as luck.

The great heretic, flipping the world of personal tech into art

It’s not surprising if Jobs was one of the few to take a look at what alternative medicine might have to offer him when he fell sick. After all, Jobs spent his life trying to move beyond the norm, forcing the merely talented to craft the ideal consumer tool from the geek idea of computers as digital engineering incarnated. He made ugly and unreliable products user friendly, beautiful to look at and reliably useful in ways which seem beyond the engineering and technical talent to concieve, for some reason. Even the marketing arm of computer companies seemed to think of this aspect only after Jobs led the way, and only Sony and eventually HP seemed able to compete in looks, though, saddled as they are with Bill Gates’ atrocious mishmash of an operating system, never caught up to Jobs in the realm of reliable and easy use.

Why was this range of virtues mysteriously beyond the leaders of other technology companies and their marketing people before Jobs showed the way, and even after he did so? The source of this odd design blindness to what now seems so obvious remains a bit of a mystery, but it must reside somewhere in the blocked mental arteries of of the group mind. Jobs thought for himself, on behalf of the average user. People who think in group terms cannot think independently very well, it seems.

So it wasn’t surprising to hear Jobs at the 2005 Commencement at Stanford where he gave the address saying the following:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Jobs was not a genius in mind but in action

What kind of genius did this man have who changed the personal world of, ultimately, billions of people? The questions which Jobs asked were not after all rocket science. We remember ourselves asking them in print and on the Web as early as the mid nineties. Why shouldn’t computers be easy to use? Why shouldn’t they be reliable and easy to tinker with? Why shouldn’t their cases be colorful, chic and even simply beautiful in the manner desired, consciously or not, by all sane people, and most especially by women?

These are not difficult questions to pose and Steve Jobs was not a genius for asking them. What was unique was his strength of purpose in bringing them about. Like all pioneers and visionaries who try to move the mass of conventional me-too thought in any arena, he faced a great edifice of inertia born of lazy thinking, self-interest and the frequent assumption in a complex field that if consumers didn’t know better or demand better then there wasn’t any point in exerting oneself in one’s job to take the initiative and create something more attractive and usable. The problem is not only complacency but that most of us are sheep frightened by and antagonistic to change, which is a threat to established comfort.

Jobs knew how to put himself in the place of the buyer and work out what that buyer might grow fond of without that buyer telling him or even knowing what it was that he would learn to like, once he experienced it. Jobs spurned focus groups for that reason. He liked to say that “it is not the job of the consumer to tell us what he wants. He doesn’t know until he sees it.”

Or as Jobs explained to Fortune, as quoted by James Stewart in his fine Times piece today, How Jobs Put Passion Into Products:

Mr. Jobs made no secret of his focus on design; in a Jan. 24, 2000, interview, Fortune magazine asked if it was an “obsession” and whether it was “an inborn instinct or what?”

“We don’t have good language to talk about this kind of thing,” Mr. Jobs replied. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together. … That is the furthest thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started. This is what customers pay us for — to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.”

Jobs the supreme heretic

The trait that you believe you know exactly what the world needs and wants is of course is shared by many crackpot inventors who are sure they know what the world needs, even if they show no sign of wanting it when offered, so it was truly Jobs genius to be correct in his forecasts, especially, for instance, we think, in dreaming up a product such as the iPad when Microsoft’s clunky tablet computers had failed so dismally six or seven years earlier. Jobs must surely have recognised the future of the iPad notion once he encountered the touch screen, which makes all the difference. But why didn’t others? Incidentally, the capacitive touch screen was invented at CERN in 1976, and that home of the LHC also boasts that it was where Tim Berners Lee invented the Web – on a NeXT screen!

In fact there is a video that Apple produced in 1987 that shows that even then Jobs was mapping out a path to the iPhone, the iPad, and Siri, the voice activated personal assistant which is making a hit on the latest iPhone 4. It is quite remarkable to see how early Jobs envisaged what he brought about later.

The originator who could lead

Steve Jobs was a man who not only followed his own star, but brought the world along with him into a new era where the resources of the Web could be as portable as an iPhone. To us he is the epitome of the maverick, the heretic, the originator who comes up with something new because he has freed himself of the chains of group think.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

What was truly marvelous though was the fact that he could combine all the roles needed – not only the independent minded visionary, but the team player who could lead a talented group to win the marketing world series without losing sight of his personal dream.

Here is the whole of that speech which he gave at the Commencement at Stanford in 2005:

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I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

How a blatantly incorrect paradigm got to rule the world

The network utility of ideas is related to tribal markings, not truth

When the utility of truth approaches zero for all of us, don’t blame Larry

If anyone is still wondering what lack of logical acuteness, psychological bias, group emotion or other factor is at the root of this astonishing survival of a concept which amounts in so many ways to rank stupidity, and yet inhabits the minds of so many intelligent, informed and otherwise reliable people, let us offer yet one more way of accounting for the phenomenon.

It is this. In the realm of computer software, the rickety and patchwork monstrosity of the Windows OS rose to the top and roundly defeated the rival Mac OS, despite all the beauty, innovation, reliability and simplified design of the latter. That is, until Steve Jobs totally revamped the MacOS from the ground up, giving it a UNIX base and UNIX power. Nowadays the MacOS is regaining the ground it lost. But there is still a huge inherent advantage that the Windows OS still enjoys and which was the secret to its early success in the face of the superior system.

That advantage was what is called by computer experts “network utility” – simply the fact that as more people adopt the same OS, the more useful it becomes to each user. Windows achieved an early advantage over Apple in terms of the number of users, since it was more attractive to business, and its network utility rose steeply accordingly, eventually to a height that Apple could not match. Only the enormous advantages of the new Mac Unix based system turned the tide, combined with the introduction of the iPod which made Apple newly fashionable in style and reputation.

Similarly, in the HIV/AIDS world, the network utility of the HIV/AIDS paradigm achieved rapid dominance because its advantages in terms of ease of funding and institutional backing soon outdid any alternative, whether it made complete sense or not.

The belated attempts of highly accurate reviewers to turn the tide were soon completely ineffectual, and like steel balls rolling down a seesaw plank when the incline becomes steep, the numbers of believers soon overwhelmed the number of skeptics.
Soon HIV/AIDS became as globally dominant as Windows.

The network utility of truth in HIV/AIDS: zero

When everybody settled on HIV as the cause of AIDS, and funding poured in to expand research on this basis, the network utility rose to heights which the network utility of truth could not match. In fact, the network utility of truth dwindled in about a year to zero, where it has stayed ever since.

Thus Peter Duesberg, the leading mind in the field who used his scalpel-sharp intellect and literary flair to eviscerate this comically fatheaded claim, was as noted, ostracized to an almost lethal extent for his trouble, and those who support him experienced the same response on all levels.

Professionals journalists were cut off from NIH scientists if they raised the topic of Duesberg by order of Anthony Fauci, who wrote in a newsletter than he had ordained that any such initiative would simply prove to him that the science reporter in question was incompetent, which on a political level was surely true.

For the NIH stance was matched throughout the field by everybody from scientists to health workers to gay activists. One of the latter when he learned that this writer viewed Duesberg’s science as impeccable and his rejection of the HIV/AIDS paradigm as completely authoritative broke off the conversation and retreated to a distance of some fifteen feet, in a physical demonstration of the psychology involved.

Such statements mark you as a member of a different and hostile tribe, and if you are within the system you will be marked as a black sheep if not a pariah, beyond the pale of respectability. If you wish to remain an insider, you must keep your true opinion to yourself and risk voicing it to only a few trusted longtime colleagues.

In such an atmosphere truth has much the same effect as informing an attractive member of the opposite sex who is waving a placard at OccupyWallStreet that you work for the Federal Reserve.

Integrity will get you nowhere

However one analyzes the failings of individuals in this arena – whether one blames them for confirmation bias and other scientific failings, or imagines them influenced, consciously or not, by group psychology, money, fear or power, this one fact remains.

The utility of believing in the paradigm HIV=AIDS is geometrically larger than challenging it in almost every situation, whether lab, conference. career interview or publishing a paper. On the one hand, the audience is global. On the other, a handful of insightful people, admirable in character and intent, hoping to promote truth, and save the lemmings from rushing to their doom.

None of the latter holdouts are employed by the New York Times. Whom, if you were Larry Altman, their chief reporter and adviser on HIV/AIDS, would you choose to throw your lot in with?

Times’ AIDS guru, not yet out to pasture, recycles confused rubbish peddled by NIAID chief

Blind to their destruction of objective research, he still praises gay activists as positive influence on AIDS drugs pipeline

Even lack of a vaccine after 30 years doesn’t tell Larry anything

Larry Altman, who we mistakenly thought would have been let loose by now in a grassy meadow far away from the New York Times, that key center of influence on the opinions of the complacent, has apparently offered or been asked to mark the 30th anniversary of AIDS by writing up his resolutely incurious understanding – actually his ludicrous misunderstanding – of what we have found out over three decades of research about the dread disease.

This effort at reconciling the gross inconsistencies of the HIV/AIDS fable ran today in the Science section, as follows. It is accompanied by an unhappy photograph of an early gay victim in a wheelchair covered with purple Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions (we use the word ‘victim’ advisedly, see below):

30 Years In, We Are Still Learning From AIDS

May 30, 2011
30 Years In, We Are Still Learning From AIDS
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.
At first it seemed an oddity: a scattering of reports in the spring and early summer of 1981 that young gay men in New York and California were ill with forms of pneumonia and cancer usually seen only in people with severely weakened immune systems.

In hindsight, of course, these announcements were the first official harbingers of AIDS — the catastrophic pandemic that would infect more than 60 million people (and counting) worldwide, killing at least half that number.

But at the time, we had little idea what we were dealing with — didn’t know that AIDS was a distinct disease, what caused it, how it could be contracted, or even what to call it.

As AIDS has become entrenched in the United States and elsewhere, a new generation has grown up with little if any knowledge of those dark early days. But they are worth recalling, as a cautionary tale about the effects of the bafflement and fear that can surround an unknown disease and as a reminder of the sweeping changes in medical practice that the epidemic has brought about……..

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Reports of the initial cases were confusing. The first federal announcement, 30 years ago this week, concerned “five young men, all active homosexuals,” with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, or P.C.P., a disease “almost exclusively limited to severely immunosuppressed patients.” Initial suspicion fell on a known infectious agent, cytomegalovirus.

A month later, on July 3, 1981, I wrote The New York Times’s first article about AIDS, this one headlined “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” (“Gay” had yet to be accepted by The Times’s style manual.) The cancer was Kaposi’s sarcoma, and until then it had seldom been seen in otherwise healthy young men.

As it gradually became clear that the underlying illness was neither pneumonia nor cancer but a sexually transmitted disease that was profoundly damaging the immune system, experts argued their many theories about the cause. A popular one held that the impact of combinations of microbes overwhelmed the immune system. Other theoretical causes included sperm deposited in the bowel, or some chemical that would damage the immune system.

It took three years to conclusively identify H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and longer to settle disputed claims for the discovery. When doctors learned that it took about a decade to get sick from AIDS after H.I.V. first entered the body, they realized that people had been unwittingly transmitting the virus for years, spreading it to thousands of people in many countries, who in turn spread it to thousands and ultimately millions more.

Epidemiologists quickly showed that H.I.V. could be transmitted through heterosexual sex; from infected women to their newborns; in transfusions of blood and blood products; and via contaminated needles.

Patients and doctors feared the disease, often for different reasons.

Many doctors, uncertain whether AIDS was an infectious disease, refused to do essential procedures on their patients; sometimes superiors had to order them to. And while most doctors did treat their patients professionally and compassionately, they did fear they might catch the disease because no one knew how it was communicated. A few health care workers were infected when they accidentally stuck themselves with contaminated needles.

Compassionate care for the dying has always been a difficult issue for doctors of any age. But in the AIDS epidemic, many medical students and doctors in their 20s and 30s suddenly had to cope with dying patients their own age. Many senior medical school professors were ill prepared to advise them.

For doctors, nurses, patients and anyone who might be deemed at risk, the anxiety was pervasive. Might the first coughs or sneezes from a common cold or some other respiratory infection actually be a sign of P.C.P.? Might a small skin blemish represent Kaposi’s sarcoma?

Federal health officials and experts came up with a succession of names for the disease before they settled on acquired immune deficiency syndrome in 1982. (Some of the early efforts smacked of discrimination, like GRID, for gay-related immune deficiency.) But whatever it was called, it carried a bitter stigma.

Some patients were shunned by friends and relatives. Customers avoided restaurants for fear that gay waiters would spread the virus. Some parents, fearing their children might catch AIDS from infected classmates, kept them out of school. Ryan White, a teenager with AIDS in Indiana, spoke up for all infected children and became a national hero before his death in 1990. His case also helped the medical profession address its obligation to care for all patients.

Communications to the public often lacked clarity. Because health officials and journalists used the phrase “bodily fluids” instead of specifying semen, blood and vaginal secretions, many people feared they could contract AIDS from toilet seats or drinking fountains.

AIDS appeared shortly after the eradication of smallpox, which had renewed declarations of the demise of infectious diseases. As a result, public health leaders were not well prepared to deal with a newly recognized deadly disease.

A common attitude was that all diseases were known, and all that remained for scientists was to fill in the blanks. For example, a newly recognized condition like Legionnaires’ disease was really a form of pneumonia. Yet it did not seem to occur to many scientists that novel agents might also be at work — even though viruses like Ebola, Lassa and Marburg, which cause hemorrhagic fever, had been discovered in just the past decade or so.

In covering the emerging AIDS epidemic along with developments like these, I tapped my training in infectious diseases and epidemiology. I joined my doctor friends in late-night telephone bull sessions to discuss the mysteries of AIDS. Some experts thought the agent must be a drug or chemical because no infectious agent fit. (The closest was hepatitis B, which became a model for research and precautions to protect people.) And some toxicologists used similar exclusionary reasoning to say no known drug or chemical could be responsible, so the cause must be an infectious agent.

Many published papers were flawed, despite leading medical journals’ sometimes arrogant insistence on a high standard of peer review. In December 1981, The New England Journal of Medicine published a long editorial exploring possible causes of AIDS. It never considered the possibility of a previously unknown microbe — a glaring omission and a leading example of scientists’ widespread failure to think outside the box.

Not long after, AIDS was finally linked to a relatively novel class of infectious agents called retroviruses. But the name, HTLV-3, placed it in the wrong category, and the incorrect classification caused confusion until the agent was correctly identified as H.I.V.

Discoveries of AIDS and H.I.V. were greatly aided by newly developed laboratory tests. One test provided the crucial clue that the virus that caused AIDS was a retrovirus.

At the time, use of the CD4 blood count to detect serious abnormalities of the immune system was limited to a few research centers. Now, the CD4 and similar blood tests are standard in monitoring the treatment and severity of H.I.V.

Soon after the discovery of AIDS, scientists developed a molecular technique called P.C.R., for polymerase chain reaction, that can copy a single piece of DNA and multiply it countless times. P.C.R. has become a standard in monitoring an infected patient’s response to antiretroviral therapy.

In 1981, drugs against any virus were rare, and none were available for H.I.V. Now, more than 30 licensed drugs widely available in the developed world have turned AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic disease, though not necessarily an easy one to live with.

For several years, infected patients had to adjust their activities to the frequency and time of day they needed to take their medications. Now, only one multidrug pill each day may suffice for many. These antiretrovirals keep the infection in check, but do not cure it, and must be taken for a lifetime. New research shows that the drugs not only are therapeutic but also greatly reduce H.I.V. transmission.

For the patients who died in the early years, the wait for effective treatments — a decade or so after the first reports of the disease — was far too long. But that is a relatively short time in the history of medicine to develop treatments and preventions; after all, many incurable cancers and other diseases have been known for centuries.

The relative speed with which the therapies were developed owes much to the efforts of cadres of activists who demanded that the Food and Drug Administration loosen the rules for clinical trials and speed its drug approval process.

Efforts to develop anti-H.I.V. drugs have paid handsome dividends by leading to development of other drugs to treat other viral infections, like the liver diseases hepatitis B and C and certain types of herpes viruses.

Also, AIDS advocacy has spurred leaders of campaigns against breast cancer and other diseases to adopt similar strategies.

Soon after the discovery of AIDS, health officials mandated infection-control measures for health care workers — wearing gloves and sometimes masks, gowns and other gear — to reduce risks from examining patients and handling blood and other specimens.

The AIDS epidemic also has put new emphasis on widespread public education, in schools and elsewhere, about sexually transmitted diseases. It has helped change medical practice by alerting doctors to the importance of asking about a patient’s sexual orientation and sexual history, matters not previously part of routine patient-doctor discussions.

The epidemic has brought a new focus on the power of epidemiology to identify a disease’s transmission patterns long before discovery of its cause. In the early days, epidemiologists provided the evidence to show that AIDS could be transmitted through contaminated blood transfusions, a fact many blood bank officials initially refused to accept. Later, lessons learned from AIDS were instrumental in helping control tuberculosis and curbing the spread of SARS.

Yet AIDS still presents extraordinary challenges — not least to journalists trying to chronicle the epidemic’s unfolding story, to remind a new generation of the importance of safe sex, and to follow the sometimes halting effort to make effective drugs available to all who need them.

One of the most daunting challenges is to stay vigilant until AIDS is at last conquered. Consider that it has been almost a quarter century since federal health officials confidently predicted that a vaccine would be available in the late 1980s — a promise that has yet to be fulfilled.

——————————

Reporting without checking

This bundle of misinformation is what results when a reporter won’t question his sources, and assumes that those in high position must be informing him accurately, when in fact they are selling him a bill of goods. Surely only those who can no longer think for themselves could read this piece of propaganda without being roused to ask questions about the inconsistencies with conventional science, let alone common sense, which plague every part of it.

But of course a well known effect is at work. That Larry Altman after a quarter century of retailing this twaddle is still incapable of questioning himself as he offers the same old junk food to unsuspecting Times readers is a testament to how powerfully confirmation bias works its wonders even in the brain of a reporter specially assigned by Times editors to tease out the true story of AIDS for nearly three decades. If Altman ever did question any of the pap that serves as the comforting but ridiculous paradigm in this field, where all AIDS=HIV/AIDS by definition, none by proof, he has long lost that power to contemplate any alternative.

So blatant is his incapacity to assess what he writes as he writes it that his piece boasts holes big enough for an elephant to pass through them untouched. The holes represent the complete absence of any good reasons to suppose that HIV causes AIDS. Yet in the Alice in Wonderland world of HIV/AIDS, where this still utterly unproven paradigm rules, and where patients are eager to take drugs of no proven benefit that will harm them potentially fatally in the long run, and where all research assumes truths that no research has ever tested, or if it ever has tested them has found the opposite, Larry still cannot see how often his own story contradicts its own assumptions within the space of two sentences.

Let’s deconstruct what he has written, and see if any of it makes sense:

Why US AIDS was no surprise at all

May 30, 2011
30 Years In, We Are Still Learning From AIDS
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.
At first it seemed an oddity: a scattering of reports in the spring and early summer of 1981 that young gay men in New York and California were ill with forms of pneumonia and cancer usually seen only in people with severely weakened immune systems.

What, the reader may well ask, is odd about the fact that gay men newly liberated from oppressive public prejudice and celebrating that freedom with wild, prolonged and incessant sex parties in clubs mightily fueled by novel pills (”poppers” of amyl nitrite and butyl nitrite) known to cause cancerous lesions and by other stimulants, along with a lowered appetite for nutritious food providing trace elements crucial to immunity, should come down with crashing immune systems?

Hot air statistics

In hindsight, of course, these announcements were the first official harbingers of AIDS — the catastrophic pandemic that would infect more than 60 million people (and counting) worldwide, killing at least half that number.

Larry, lacking, as far as we know, any training as a journalist per se but having won at least one award for learning on the job, is oddly, at this advance stage of his illustrious career, still not professionally inclined to question authority, let alone read academic studies and reviews of how untrustworthy official statistics from the UNAIDS and the CDC have always been, and how these impressive global numbers, especially in Southern Africa, blatantly contradict national statistics which record burgeoning population growth that shows no sign of any HIV/AIDS epidemic slowing it down.

More crucially, in trumpeting this claimed huge expansion in a supposed global AIDS epidemic, he is still blind to the singular fact that there has not ever been any expansion of the number of Americans infected by HIV during the entire period of the supposed epidemic here in the US. The number of HIV positives in the US remains roughly one million, as it was over twenty five years ago when first estimated. There has been no expansion of HIV infection here for the entire duration of the HIV/AIDS scare.

In this United States, clearly, there is something entirely different going on, compared with what is supposedly detected in Africa and Asia, a huge discord which Altman never mentions. Here, AIDS is overwhelmingly confined to gays, and quite visibly not an infectious epidemic. Elsewhere, it is supposedly a rampantly infectious epidemic and wholly heterosexual. To imply that all of it is global HIV/AIDS is clearly not credible, on this basis alone.

Baffled by the obvious

But at the time, we had little idea what we were dealing with — didn’t know that AIDS was a distinct disease, what caused it, how it could be contracted, or even what to call it.

Yes, it is true, all of these things remained to be imagined, claimed, consolidated and enshrined as a new, unproven but globally accepted paradigm, then rendered politically armor plated, and impervious to full dress expert reviews in the most reliable peer reviewed journals which rejected them utterly.

These damning reviews were written by the best scientist in the field. Having passed exceptionally hostile peer review they were published and were evidently reckoned overwhelming enough that no reply was ever attempted by defenders of the HIV=AIDS faith in the same journals. Instead, as funding of HIV/AIDS research quickly ballooned to very generous levels, they and their unfortunate author were ignored, derided, badmouthed to the media, and set aside, without actual refutation, but with intense personal hostility to those who even mentioned any of this doubt, especially at NIAID.

Meanwhile the historical and scientific novelty of the AIDS paradigm in almost every respect was and still is a clear signal that the sickness was being misinterpreted, and that the critics who urge a return to a less fantastic story more in line with history and standard medicine should have been and should even now be listened to.

All of this has been largely missing from the work of Larry Altman and the reporters and commentators on AIDS at the New York Times for two decades. There has never been a single investigative inquiry by them into the validity of HIV=AIDS and the debate and politics surrounding the issue. The editors of the Times, and its reporters, have all taken their lead from Larry Altman, who has in parallel with the attitude of the scientists and bureaucrats who lead the field, has always virtually ignored it.

How scientific nonsense endures

As AIDS has become entrenched in the United States and elsewhere, a new generation has grown up with little if any knowledge of those dark early days. But they are worth recalling, as a cautionary tale about the effects of the bafflement and fear that can surround an unknown disease and as a reminder of the sweeping changes in medical practice that the epidemic has brought about.

A cautionary tale indeed, but one we’d unreservedly characterize as a scientifically shameful cautionary tale of how the politics of funding and pressure from activists can enable a prima facie ridiculous and scientifically implausible solution to the mystery of a novel disease phenomenon first named “GRID” (Gay Related Immune Deficiency”, renamed AIDS, renamed HIV/AIDS) to become a global paradigm, immune to one of the most powerful scientific critiques ever mounted in the biology of disease, an intellectually irresistible critique incessantly explained in the scientific literature, in the media, on the Web, and in over 30 books, over 24 years, to no avail whatsoever.

There is no more impressive example we know of in science of how paradigm politics can defend a bad idea and exhaust endless intelligent rebuttal of it.

And here we must point out one relevant aspect of this successful repression of skeptical opposition to the HIV=AIDS claim. Larry Altman himself must take much responsibility for the enduring lack of public debate on this issue, since he is primarily responsible for allowing the phrase “HIV, the cause of AIDS”, to replace “HIV, a probably cause of AIDS”, and to become standard boilerplate in every Times article on AIDS only a few weeks after the notion was suggested by Dr Robert Gallo, then of NIH, at the famous press conference Margaret Heckler, Reagan’s Health Secretary, held in 1984 to celebrate his four upcoming Science articles which suggested this “probability” on the basis of data which indicated precisely the opposite.

This misleading “fact”, a phrase by which the Times takes sides in an ongoing debate in the scientific literature that has not been settled there at all except by sweeping it under the carpet, should properly have been stated as “HIV, the virus claimed to be a cause of AIDS”. But because Altman and his editors soon adopted the boilerplate phrase “HIV, the cause of AIDS”, they enabled one side of a scientific issue – in which their own expertise was limited, and which had no answer to its scientific critics – to prevail politically, and for ignorance to triumph and rule a medical field for decades, ruining lives and often taking them.

The newspaper’s editors and reporters were not qualified to take a position on an issue that the best minds in the field could not agree upon. Yet this partiality has infested the newspaper’s columns ever since a week or two after that 1984 NIH press conference of Robert Gallo, whose claim that HIV was “a probable” cause did not go as far for very good reason. One of them is that he had found evidence of it in barely one third of the patient blood samples he tested.

Altman’s dereliction of reportorial duty is that he has never made clear the manifold problems with this scientific belief, which is still completely unproven and remains a claim on the order of superstitious group fantasy, without any more evidence for it than it had originally, and a continually gathering pile of evidence against it

Thanks to Larry Altman and his obsequious fellow traveling with Anthony Fauci of NIAID, and Nobel prize winner David Baltimore, the notoriously scientifically and morally questioned ex President of Rockefeller University and more recently of CalTech, however, this fact, the blatant scientific fact that HIV=AIDS is a notion which has nothing scientific yet to recommend it, remains wholly unknown to the many members of the media and general public that rely on the Times as their filter for acceptable wisdom.

Why AIDS just had to be infectious

Reports of the initial cases were confusing. The first federal announcement, 30 years ago this week, concerned “five young men, all active homosexuals,” with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, or P.C.P., a disease “almost exclusively limited to severely immunosuppressed patients.” Initial suspicion fell on a known infectious agent, cytomegalovirus.

Heralding things to come, the built in bias of career disease specialists – and gay activists, as it happened – toward a solution involving an infectious agent showed itself very early. Toxic agents, such as the recreational drugs widely used in the new gay night club culture that mushroomed in the early 80s, should have been the first candidates that they might have considered responsible for wrecking immune systems.

But a solution for GRID blaming drug overdosing would not enhance the careers of either group. Drugs were also unpopular culprits because they would not attract funding for research by suggesting AIDS threatened the general public, and might reinforce prejudice against gays for a small sub group’s “life style” excesses and self-damaging behavior.

Why US AIDS is not infectious

A month later, on July 3, 1981, I wrote The New York Times’s first article about AIDS, this one headlined “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” (“Gay” had yet to be accepted by The Times’s style manual.) The cancer was Kaposi’s sarcoma, and until then it had seldom been seen in otherwise healthy young men.

As it turned out, drugs such as amyl nitrite (mentioned in the piece, which is worth rereading today) were very much linked to Kaposi’s sarcoma. “Poppers” were a new club drug then, and whole books were soon written about how they could account for the expansion of Kaposi’s sarcoma. In fact, the eventual decline of popper sniffing in gay clubs correlated with a decline in Kaposi’s sarcoma in patients presenting AIDS symptoms, and it has not since been a leading marker for AIDS.

Nothing could signal more clearly that the ailments of GRID and US AIDS arose from drug use by gays, and explain why it has always been a gay disease in the US, despite continuing failed efforts to find it in significant numbers of women and blacks, however artificially blown up by HIV/AIDS propagandists like the nattily dressed and always friendly Anthony Fauci, director of NIAIDS since 1984. As noted above the number of HIV positive people in the US has remained steady at around a million for the duration of the supposed “epidemic”.

Turning a blind eye to drugs as cause

As it gradually became clear that the underlying illness was neither pneumonia nor cancer but a sexually transmitted disease that was profoundly damaging the immune system, experts argued their many theories about the cause. A popular one held that the impact of combinations of microbes overwhelmed the immune system. Other theoretical causes included sperm deposited in the bowel, or some chemical that would damage the immune system.

The reason experts argued so much was because the evidence that it was an infectious disease was so unconvincing. In fact it became clear soon enough that AIDS was not a heterosexually transmitted disease, and that is why the much publicized fear of a heterosexual epidemic in the US never transpired.

The rage for drugs in gay clubs sufficed to account for what was evidently (to any objective outside observer uninvolved in the politics and economics of the new AIDS health industry) a behavior based phenomenon, which now explains without difficulty why it has remained for a quarter century overwhelmingly confined to gays in the US, despite the best efforts of paradigm propagandists to extend it to more women and blacks.

To President Clinton: Why the drugs don’t in fact “work”

Of course, anyone gay or straight who was or is reckoned HIV positive is liable to be given AIDS drugs which were then quickly fatal in themselves, though less rapidly as time wore on, because AIDS have been reduced in dose and lethality, so patients with strong constitutions have been able to live much longer. Those with the strongest constitutions, such as Magic Johnson, have survived indefinitely, often helped by quietly taking “drug holidays” when the side effects become too drastic.

The continuing change to less deadly drugs has resulted in patients doing better, and thus been hailed by all as proof that it must be HIV that causes AIDS and that “the drugs work, don’t they?” (as President Clinton famously remarked to us at Science Guardian when told that he should know that Thabo Mbeki was right). But all it shows is that people live longer on smaller doses of less lethal medications.

This mistake is global, but still rather foolish. Give people weaker medications with fewer side effects, and naturally they are going to do better, even where the feared disease agent in fact does nothing at all injurious.

Contradicting their own findings

It took years to conclusively identify H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, and longer to settle disputed claims for the discovery. When doctors learned that it took about a decade to get sick from AIDS after H.I.V. first entered the body, they realized that people had been unwittingly transmitting the virus for years, spreading it to thousands of people in many countries, who in turn spread it to thousands and ultimately millions more.

Sorry to say it, but if Altman really believes in this fairy tale this is schoolboy level gullibility on the part of the Times’s medical correspondent on HIV/AIDS. Having looked and looked for a microbe that might be causing the radical immune collapse of AIDS, ambitious and underfunded scientists finally had a candidate in a species of virus (a wisp of RNA called a retrovirus) which had not been know to cause anything in anybody to that date (except that only after manipulation in the lab a scientist named Peyton Rous had succeeded in causing cancer in chickens in 1910).

There was evidence of a retrovirus discovered in the blood of AIDS patients in France and in the US, but in too few of them (one third) to make it the candidate agent for causing AIDS. That is why the original discoverer, Luc Montagnier, never made the causaL claim, and why even his rival Robert Gallo at the NIH never made it as forthrightly in his press conference or in the four papers he was about to publish in Science.

In fact, it was none other that Lawrence Altman himself who decided early on to represent HIV as “the cause of AIDS” in covering the topic, though he was not quite the first reporter to do so. In other words, it was Altman who led the media and thus even the scientific community into believing HIV was the newly discovered cause of AIDS, allowing Robert Gallo to clinch the deal.

When Luc Montagnier finally won the Nobel two years ago for discovering “HIV, the cause of AIDS”, the dispute over who discovered the notorious virus was indeed finally settled, and the unfortunate Gallo, snubbed in his long campaign to rob Montagnier of his glory by sharing it with him for discovering it as well (in two Federal Express packages Montagnier sent him, as it happens), humiliated – but not yet for backing entirely the wrong horse as the cause of AIDS, which will be the final outcome of this grotesque story. When that happens, at least he will have the satisfaction of pulling down Montagnier with him, though it has always been clear that Montagnier has never believed in the status of HIV as the sole cause of AIDS, since he has always said that cofactors were needed.

In fact, in a recent unusually revealing documentary, House of Numbers, he was recorded helpfully informing the director, Brent Leung, that by itself HIV should be conquered and disposed of by the immune system of a healthy person in a few weeks.

Altman does not read PubMed, it seems

Epidemiologists quickly showed that H.I.V. could be transmitted through heterosexual sex; from infected women to their newborns; in transfusions of blood and blood products; and via contaminated needles.

More evidence that Lawrence Altman is unfamiliar with the basic journal literature in the field. The largest study in HIV/AIDS on transmission rates was famously carried out by HIV/AIDS research general Nancy Padian over six years with 250 “discordant” (one HIV positive) heterosexual couples, nearly fifty (47) of which took no precautions of any kind, found not a single case where transmission occurred. Not one. Contrary to all the false denials that have been mounted since by paradigm propagandists, including rather sadly the author of the study, Padian herself, who was apparently was later persuaded by John Moore of Cornell and other administrators of the egregiously misnamed site AIDStruth.org, to try and fudge her embarassing conclusion even more awkwardly than she normally does.

This powerfully suggests that all studies showing changing heterosexual transmission are also “flawed” in some way, presumably as a result of the confirmation bias shared by all HIV/AIDS researchers, protecting the standard assumptions that heterosexual transmission is often seen and that the transmitted agent for AIDS is HIV. The first is disproved by Padian and the second lacks any proof at all, after a quarter century of multi billion dollar research.

How public alarm abated despite Times’ tale

Patients and doctors feared the disease, often for different reasons.

Many doctors, uncertain whether AIDS was an infectious disease, refused to do essential procedures on their patients; sometimes superiors had to order them to. And while most doctors did treat their patients professionally and compassionately, they did fear they might catch the disease because no one knew how it was communicated. A few health care workers were infected when they accidentally stuck themselves with contaminated needles.

Fear ruled, powerfully reinforcing the superstition of infectious AIDS. But none of those health workers got AIDS symptoms aside from the effects of taking AIDS drugs, which as noted were and still are eventually lethal to all but the strongest constitutions. Instead, it soon became clear that HIV was not transmitted by any behavior short of mingling certain bodily fluids.

Some patients were shunned by friends and relatives. Customers avoided restaurants for fear that gay waiters would spread the virus. Some parents, fearing their children might catch AIDS from infected classmates, kept them out of school. Ryan White, a teenager with AIDS in Indiana, spoke up for all infected children and became a national hero before his death in 1990. His case also helped the medical profession address its obligation to care for all patients.

Communications to the public often lacked clarity. Because health officials and journalists used the phrase “bodily fluids” instead of specifying semen, blood and vaginal secretions, many people feared they could contract AIDS from toilet seats or drinking fountains.

AIDS appeared shortly after the eradication of smallpox, which had renewed declarations of the demise of infectious diseases. As a result, public health leaders were not well prepared to deal with a newly recognized deadly disease.

In fact, fear of AIDS as a readily transmissible disease soon gave way to the opposite idea, that it is very difficult to transmit, because experience taught that it didn’t seem to transmit at all outside of sex and blood transfusions (and eventually Nancy Padian showed it didn’t transmit at all within heterosexual couples). Despite the expensive barrage of leaflets and advertisements kept up by HIV/AIDS promoters in government and NGOs for twenty four years, the public fear of AIDS transmission seems to have dwindled to very low levels as a result, possibly an instance where the ordinary American is better taught by social gossip than by medical authorities.

In fact Ryan White did not die of AIDS symptoms, but of symptoms associated with his hemophilia, worsened by the assault of AIDS drugs, which at the time consisted of heavy doses of AZT, a DNA chain terminator which kills all dividing cells it comes into contact with, and which in the doses given then reliably killed almost all patients within three or four years, in a period where HIV was acknowledged to take on average ten years before mysteriously becoming active. What logic impelled giving people medications that killed them faster than the supposed disease agent was never explained.

How Larry helped fuel disease alarm

A common attitude was that all diseases were known, and all that remained for scientists was to fill in the blanks. For example, a newly recognized condition like Legionnaires’ disease was really a form of pneumonia. Yet it did not seem to occur to many scientists that novel agents might also be at work — even though viruses like Ebola, Lassa and Marburg, which cause hemorrhagic fever, had been discovered in just the past decade or so.

It certainly occurred to the new breed of retrovirologists, like Robert Gallo of NIH, who after the failure of the War on Cancer to find a link between retroviruses and cancer were left without any funding leverage unless they could find another culprit supposedly responsible for a public threat. Gallo was so keen to find a retrovirus that caused harm to the general public that he discovered one that he claimed (to this reporter) caused leukemia in one in 100 carriers in fifty years, and having devised a test for this (HTLV-I) has reportedly enjoyed $100,000 annually in royalties for it ever since, after his earlier discovery of a human retrovirus turned out to be an embarrassing mistake involving contamination of his samples with monkey and baboon virus.

In covering the emerging AIDS epidemic along with developments like these, I tapped my training in infectious diseases and epidemiology. I joined my doctor friends in late-night telephone bull sessions to discuss the mysteries of AIDS. Some experts thought the agent must be a drug or chemical because no infectious agent fit. (The closest was hepatitis B, which became a model for research and precautions to protect people.) And some toxicologists used similar exclusionary reasoning to say no known drug or chemical could be responsible, so the cause must be an infectious agent.

Altman is referring to his training bout with the CDC, which evidently left him with a bias toward infectious disease as a solution to a new outbreak of spreading symptoms, rather than toxic substances habitually imbibed by a sub group, the more obvious fit in this case.

Some day Altman should let us know what this marvelous exclusionary reasoning was that decided toxicologists to rule out drugs. Sometimes it seems that to prove points against HIV/AIDS is rather like the train that runs through a district in Bangkok where the tents and stalls mounted on the tracks are quickly removed for its passing, and as quickly replaced. You can find this remarkable little video at this link.

Why does this remind us of the effort to prove points against HIV/AIDS? Because the removal of the tents and stalls seems the perfect metaphor for the removal of HIV/AIDS claims in the face of logical challenges which cannot be answered, after which they are replaced once the challenger moves on.

So how come you think they became less flawed later, Larry?

Many published papers were flawed, despite leading medical journals’ sometimes arrogant insistence on a high standard of peer review. In December 1981, The New England Journal of Medicine published a long editorial exploring possible causes of AIDS. It never considered the possibility of a previously unknown microbe — a glaring omission and a leading example of scientists’ widespread failure to think outside the box.

Here Altman acknowledges that many published papers in early AIDS were flawed. Congratulations are due! This unusual admission is a graceful concession to those who worry about the flaws in almost all the major papers backing the paradigm wisdom that HIV=AIDS. There is nothing in HIV=AIDS publishing that does not have to be carefully examined, even though it is all labeled peer-reviewed. Confirmation bias has probably piled higher in HIV/AIDS that any other field of science.

But was it a “glaring omission” to doubt that a new microbe had emerged? We would say it was not a glaring omission at all, but a very reasonable view that a new microbe unknown to history is unlikely to appear suddenly in an urban US group known for its attention to health care and high standards of self-presentation.

Renamed is not the same as correctly identified, Larry

Not long after, AIDS was finally linked to a relatively novel class of infectious agents called retroviruses. But the name, HTLV-3, placed it in the wrong category, and the incorrect classification caused confusion until the agent was correctly identified as H.I.V.

In fact, the initial name and classification reflected Robert Gallo’s desperate effort to adopt Luc Montagnier’s discovery as his own, and the final nomenclature – Human Immunodeficiency Virus – was simply a successful political move to forestall any further questioning of HIV as the cause of Human Immunodeficiency. The walling off of any skeptical inquiry was clinched when AIDS was renamed HIV/AIDS. It is hard to question HIV is the cause of HIV/AIDS, since it is by definition.

The correct question which is rarely asked, as a consequence of this smart maneuver, is what causes AIDS which is not HIV/AIDS, ie AIDS symptoms which are shown without HIV being detectable. There is an awful lot of this – HIV is not detectable in almost all cases of AIDS, even patients who are at death’s door (when it supposedly rises in level somewhat, though we have yet to encounter a peer reviewed journal paper which shows this. In fact, it appears to be an invention). There is on the other hand virtually no HIV detectable in HIV/AIDS, either. As you may recall, the HIV test is for the antibodies to HIV, not for HIV itself.

This reality has a kind of fairy tale absurdity which paralyzes the critical faculty and prevents people from moving to the obvious conclusion, which is that all AIDS is not HIV/AIDS but caused by something else – most obviously in this country, where it is effectively confined to gays, by the excessive drug taking of gays who like to go to extreme night clubs and “party” all night, which eventually resulted in Kaposi’s sarcoma from the nitrites and immune crashes from the drug overloads.

If you are wondering what this has to do with African “HIV/AIDS”, the answer, Larry, is nothing. African AIDS is nothing but an entire rewriting of other diseases and malnutrition or both so they are umbrella-ed under the rubrick “HIV/AIDS”, objective analysts which results in statistics reaching into the scores of millions and the massive release of funding from the US government and other misled organizations, as against the relative trickle available for the diseases they really represent. The relevant HIV/tests on which these helpful statistics are based cross react with the virulent TB epidemic now scouring Africa and many other less fantastic threats than HIV/AIDS, if they are done at all.

What’s in a name? In this case, unfortunately, nothing but naming makes it so.

No, Gallo did NOT show HIV the cause

Discoveries of AIDS and H.I.V. were greatly aided by newly developed laboratory tests. One test provided the crucial clue that the virus that caused AIDS was a retrovirus.

And whose test was that, pray? The HIV blood test developed by none other than Robert Gallo of the NIH? Robert Gallo, having successfully fought for a share of the credit for discovering HIV with Luc Montagnier, became the most referenced man in science for a time. But Gallo lost out in the end, it may be noted. Not only was his lab work discredited in an official inquiry, but he was passed up for the Nobel prize for discovering the “AIDS virus” which was awarded only to Montagnier two years ago.

More specifically to your sentence, which is misleading to an extent which shames the respectable newspaper to which you are consigning this balderdash, the test proved nothing of the sort. Gallo was able to get a positive reaction in only one third of the samples he tested from AIDS patients, and his four papers making this claim in Science, which were published well after his press conference announcing his discovery of “a probable cause of AIDS”, thus provided conclusive proof that a retrovirus was NOT the cause of AIDS.

Trumpeting a questionable measure

At the time, use of the CD4 blood count to detect serious abnormalities of the immune system was limited to a few research centers. Now, the CD4 and similar blood tests are standard in monitoring the treatment and severity of H.I.V.

A much questioned test of health, that CD4 count, let alone the body’s response to HIV, with very good reason. After all, the impact of HIV on CD4 cells was established early on by lab research as nil, since active HIV could only be found in as few as one in 10,000 CD4 cells in AIDS patients. Indeed, it is very difficult to find any HIV in the blood of AIDS patients, even dying ones. It is antibodies, rather than HIV, which are found in AIDS patients. That CD4 count reflects any influence of HIV is scientifically absurd, and any reporter should have noticed this, let alone the Times advisor on HIV/AIDS for 27 years.

PCR is not a quantifiable measure, Larry

Soon after the discovery of AIDS, scientists developed a molecular technique called P.C.R., for polymerase chain reaction, that can copy a single piece of DNA and multiply it countless times. P.C.R. has become a standard in monitoring an infected patient’s response to antiretroviral therapy.

Here, Larry, you contradict yourself in the two sentences. A means of multiplying the tiniest amount of DNA into a substantial volume overnight, PCR is not a quantitative measure, but one which involves establishing the presence of any piece of DNA by multiplying it countless times, until there is enough, for example, to test and prove the guilt or innocence of an accused or convicted rapist or murderer. By last count, in fact, the Innocence Project by using PCR has sprung more than 263 innocent prisoners, some of them from Death Row and often after decades of false imprisonment.

Thus PCR is by definitionin effect useless in monitoring a patient’s response to therapy since it is capable of answering only the question of presence or absence of the relevant item, not how much of it.

More problematical is the simple fact that there is never enough HIV in any patient to cause their AIDS related problems – only PCR will find any in even dying patients. That is why the “AIDS test” is for HIV ANTIBODIES, which are held to be an indication of how the 9 kilobase HIV will somehow rise up from nowhere and decimate your immune system after as long as ten or even twenty years, a prima facie absurdity given that there is no HIV present to do this trick.

This is the first time in the history of disease where the presence of antibodies is taken to be a threat, rather than proof that the invasive agent has been defeated by the immune system for good. If you carry antibodies to a common cold, it is because you have conquered it and it will never threaten you again.

But the scientists of HIV/AIDS claim that in the case of antibodies to HIV, they will eventually rise up and kill you, and they are transmissible in gay sex or via shared needles. On this blatantly fallacious idea, the entire HIV/AIDS scheme now rests.

That the general public, let alone scientists, officials, healthworkers, patients, and the renowned if aging New York Times AIDS medical science guru, have been sold this bill of goods so easily by a small pack of analytically not very bright purported professional scientists is one of the marvels of confidence tricksterism of the past century, dwarfing the achievement of Bernard Madoff by several dozen times.

Weaker drugs are less lethal, not more effective

In 1981, drugs against any virus were rare, and none were available for H.I.V. Now, more than 30 licensed drugs widely available in the developed world have turned AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic disease, though not necessarily an easy one to live with.

A feast for drug companies indeed, but what has really happened? AZT was the first drug applied to HIV/AIDS victims, and it was so effective in killing them off faster than HIV supposedly did ie in two or three years rather than up to twenty, it was reduced as a part of the new cocktails which were introduced in the mid 1990s. But 2006 it was removed from the standard regimen. Meanwhile, the drugs added – protease inhibitors – were less toxic, so the natural result was that the patients did better, although in the end the numbers that die is currently 17,000 in the US, according to the CDC , not much fewer than the peak.

In other words, a lethal drug was replaced by less toxic onslaughts on the body which allowed patients to live longer and better – before they died.

Why did this happen? A prime cause was gay politics where a cause for AIDS which also threatened the straight population took gays off the hook for their extreme clubbing and triggered massive federal funding, which afterwards reached colossal heights domestically and internationally before a recent retrenchment.

By the late 1980s, AZT studies had been cut short by gay activists on the supposition, never demonstrated, that AZT would slow the onset of AIDS in an HIV positive person. If anything, AZT in standard dose guaranteed AIDS symptoms and an early death.

The great drug illusion in AIDS

Their clamor for the drug, which must have pleased its suppliers when it allowed them to abandon the expensive studies to see if it really worked, was appeased by prescribing it in quantities which killed the typical patient in three years or less, rather than the ten years or more they could look forward to from HIV alone. Reporters were never told why this was a worthwile tradeoff.

The damage it did in its own right was so obvious – even though patients would take “holidays” from the unbearable regime – that when David Ho came up with the idea of combining (other) protease inhibitors with AZT, and the effect was to lower the dose and the damage wrought by AZT, he was celebrated with a Time cover.

Ever since, the proportion of AZT included in the cocktail has been lowered as other drugs have come in, and in 2006 AZT was removed from the standard advised regimen completely. The result is that the drugs have done less and less damage, and this has been taken as proof that they “work, don’t they?”.

Here at Science Guardian this is known as “President Clinton reason” for still believing, in the face of all the evidence, that HIV is the cause of AIDS. For this is how he put it to us in 2007, when we met him briefly in person at CGI and had a chance to tell him that Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa, was right to question the cause of AIDS, according to the relevant scientific literature.

Told that the drugs worked, he naturally concluded that their supposed target, HIV, was thus proven to be the cause of HIV/AIDS. Given that his political image is so tautly tied to bringing drugs to African AIDS victims to supposedly cure them, we haven’t attempted to enlighten him since.

But the truth seems to be that, given that there is no reason yet proved and demonstrated in reputable scientific journals to believe that HIV is the cause of any AIDS symptoms of any kind, the beneficial effect of drug cocktails and new AIDS drugs is simply a result of the fact that they are less harmful than before, so those who take them survive longer than they did.

They die in the end, however, as is shown by the CDC figure for deaths annually from AIDS: 17,000 in the US (the WHO estimates 22,000). And what are the symptoms they die from? In half the cases, they are liver and kidney damage, which is caused by drugs, and is not on the list of HIV/AIDS symptoms.

Same number dying, Larry

For several years, infected patients had to adjust their activities to the frequency and time of day they needed to take their medications. Now, only one multidrug pill each day may suffice for many. These antiretrovirals keep the infection in check, but do not cure it, and must be taken for a lifetime. New research shows that the drugs not only are therapeutic but also greatly reduce H.I.V. transmission.

Like so many studies in HIV/AIDS this latest result runs contrary either to scientific sense or previous research, in this case that HIV heterosexual transmission has been proven to be effectively nil by Nancy Padian, as noted above, and there is very little actual HIV in anyone with HIV antibodies in the blood, which is what the tests look for. Even Anthony Fauci would not, one presumes, claim that HIV antibodies are transmitted from one person to another.

How lazy reporters helped patients die

For the patients who died in the early years, the wait for effective treatments — a decade or so after the first reports of the disease — was far too long. But that is a relatively short time in the history of medicine to develop treatments and preventions; after all, many incurable cancers and other diseases have been known for centuries.

In the absence of a paradigm which according to unrefuted reviews in the scientific literature superstition rather than science, they could have received appropriate treatment; they could have been weaned from drugs and given appropriate natural remedies to boost their failing immune systems with the many constituents of good food now indicated from copious mainstream studies in the past decade to improve health and bodily processes without the harmful side effects of artificial commercial drugs.

They could have been well treated and cured by following this path if reporters such as yourself, Larry, had developed the minimal investigative critical faculty called for in a period where huge sums in the hundred of billions have distorted thinking in AIDS science and medicine to an extent that the rest of the media and the world join them in blindly following the self serving claims of Anthony Fauci of the NCI and other AIDS scientists whose careers are invested in HIV.

Praising activists for pushing poison

The relative speed with which the therapies were developed owes much to the efforts of cadres of activists who demanded that the Food and Drug Administration loosen the rules for clinical trials and speed its drug approval process.

In other words, loosening the rules requiring proper evidence for public policy, and valid research to justify dangerous medication. Thus the paranoia of gay activists fearful that officials were slow to come to their aid and complete the studies needed to protect them against wrongly targeted medicine that does them real harm led to the triumph of ignorance, and the enthronement of error, guaranteeing their illnesses and death.

They speeded up the safe release of therapies, you think? On the contrary, it is activists who blocked the research needed to check the real effects of AZT on AIDS patients and battled against the skeptics who wanted real answers to the unrefuted reviews in the top peer reviewed literature which rejected HIV as the cause of AIDS. They were never answered let alone refuted on the same level in the same journals, despite promises to do so, but instead were argued against in other journals and on the Web without peer review, and the debate quickly silenced with great political hostility and ostracism.

The age of ignorance victorious – and dead

Efforts to develop anti-H.I.V. drugs have paid handsome dividends by leading to development of other drugs to treat other viral infections, like the liver diseases hepatitis B and C and certain types of herpes viruses.

Also, AIDS advocacy has spurred leaders of campaigns against breast cancer and other diseases to adopt similar strategies.

Soon after the discovery of AIDS, health officials mandated infection-control measures for health care workers — wearing gloves and sometimes masks, gowns and other gear — to reduce risks from examining patients and handling blood and other specimens.

The AIDS epidemic also has put new emphasis on widespread public education, in schools and elsewhere, about sexually transmitted diseases. It has helped change medical practice by alerting doctors to the importance of asking about a patient’s sexual orientation and sexual history, matters not previously part of routine patient-doctor discussions.

Matters not previously part of routine patient-doctor discussions for good reason. Whether an AIDS candidate is reckoned HIV positive following a test is now often contingent on answers to questions on his race, sexual orientation and economic and social status. Which is prima facie absurd, as if the 9 kilobase virus could know what sex it was inhabiting, and how rich and educated the body was. This is just one of the unscientific absurdities of HIV/AIDS lore, practiced without self-consciousness by the medical profession, which somehow fails to alert the public to the specious nature of the ruling paradigm.

Certainly the development of anti-HIV drugs sparked a rush to produce drugs for other, less fantastic viral diseases, effective or not, and advocacy for breast cancer and other causes, well informed or not. Public education efforts in HIV/AIDS currently just demonstrate that a false paradigm led by scientists can be fully propagandized without leading to any criticism that might question it, let alone threaten its dominance.
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Empowering bad epidemiology

The epidemic has brought a new focus on the power of epidemiology to identify a disease’s transmission patterns long before discovery of its cause. In the early days, epidemiologists provided the evidence to show that AIDS could be transmitted through contaminated blood transfusions, a fact many blood bank officials initially refused to accept. Later, lessons learned from AIDS were instrumental in helping control tuberculosis and curbing the spread of SARS.

The statement that AIDS, rather than HIV, could be transmitted through blood transfusion, is exactly what did not ever prove out in studies, which were also logically adulterated by the assumption that HIV caused AIDS symptoms.

The new focus that AIDS has brought to epidemiology is that its practitioners are not always qualified by analytical skill even to detect the difference between an infectious epidemic and the results of taking toxic drugs for recreational or medical purposes by a sub group.

The real challenge is for reporters to think

Yet AIDS still presents extraordinary challenges — not least to journalists trying to chronicle the epidemic’s unfolding story, to remind a new generation of the importance of safe sex, and to follow the sometimes halting effort to make effective drugs available to all who need them.

The extraordinary challenge to journalists from Altman to the least influential science writer in HIV/AIDS is primarily to retain their objectivity and not take sides in a scientific debate on the cause of AIDS which is beyond their expertise or analytical skills. And to study and understand the objections raised to the standard wisdom and why they deserve respect, rather than ignore or dismiss them simply because those at the top of the field that deny them vociferously.

In particular, there is no excuse for Altman to assume that the unproven claims of the ruling clique in HIV/AIDS are valid. His reason, presumably, is that his job is in effect in their hands, since Anthony Fauci at the NIH is his prime source on the state of established AIDS science and he cannot afford to offend him by respecting even the published, peer reviewed papers objecting to what the NIH tells the general public about HIV/AIDS. Fauci has famously added to this caution by noting in an in house NIH publication early on in the epidemic that any mention of the alternative or dissident view of HIV/AIDS would not be countenanced by the NIH, which would view the culprit as journalistically unqualified. In other words, never return his or her calls.

Altman has no right to endorse the drugs as “effective”, in fact. This growing enthusiasm to provide AIDS drugs with acknowledged damaging side effects to wider and wider groups of HIV positive people – not only to more and more blacks found with wider testing, but also to all HIV positive people now, on the new theory that it cuts down on the spread of the virus to others – should be tempered by first establishing that the target is valid. HIV is still unproven as the cause of AIDS symptoms, as well as being subject to a host of counter arguments which have never been properly addressed, let alone refuted.

In fact, currently the single remaining basis for assuming that HIV is the cause of AIDS, let alone the proven cause of AIDS, is the supposed fact that “the drugs work, don’t they?” as Clinton asked. As noted, however. this “President Clinton” factor is merely an illusion which comes from the reduction in dosage and side effects over the years. The truth according to the serious literature of the scientific field of HIV/AIDS is that they have not been proved to work to any benefit of the patient, while producing serious side effects (though we should note that there are minor oddities in the effect of protease inhibitors, which according to some papers do actually achieve small short run benefits in enhancing trace elements useful to the immune system, as well as having an initial cleansing effect, but that is all, studies show.)

Wake up, Larry, the vaccine is HIV itself

One of the most daunting challenges is to stay vigilant until AIDS is at last conquered. Consider that it has been almost a quarter century since federal health officials confidently predicted that a vaccine would be available in the late 1980s — a promise that has yet to be fulfilled.

This is one of the most specious, if not downright silliest statements in the AIDS canon, which Larry parrots thoughtlessly. Even though a moment’s thought reveals to any outside observer why no vaccine against HIV has emerged in 27 years of expensive research (the HIV vaccine is one of the greatest arms of this boondoggle). HIV already vaccinates any individual exposed to it!

This is obvious from the simple fact that HIV is virtually undetectable in the human body after one has been exposed to it, even when one is near death supposedly from “HIV/AIDS”. As noted several times above, the test is for the antibodies to HIV, not HIV itself, and its minimal presence or even absence in patients is why.

Since HIV already engenders antibodies to itself invariably and reliably, it is undoubtedly the most effective vaccine against HIV that is scientifically possible. Any search for a vaccine is either stupid or calculatedly venal, at the expense of the public purse and health, and should be the first budget item removed from the NIH accounts.

How Larry could conquer his AIDS challenge

The daunting challenge to journalists covering HIV/AIDS is actually a rather simple one: To consider the alternative.

The duty of any science or medical writer in covering HIV/AIDS is to report both sides of theory, not promote one side by ignoring the other. To be, in fact, objective.

If Altman would be objective, as is his duty, he might see the elephant in the room, and others might see it too.

The elephant is this: It has apparently not yet occurred to this otherwise thoughtful medical writer that the instant resolution of all the paradoxes and prima facie absurdities in the HIV/AIDS scheme lies in simply rejecting the supposedly essential premise that HIV=AIDS, which is nothing more than a cause by definition.

Among the absurdities that would be instantly resolved is the problem in finding a vaccine. Since AIDS patients do not test positive for HIV (except with the magnification of PCR) but for HIV antibodies, we would not be trying to find a substance that would cause antibodies to be created against HIV by an immune system that has already created so many antibodies against HIV that HIV cannot be detected in any patient except with PCR.

In other words, it has already made plenty of the very antibodies which a vaccine would provoke, and they have proved very effective. The best vaccine against HIV, in fact, is none other than HIV.

Of course, a vaccine may create antibodies in people who have not been exposed to HIV at all. The drug companies should find this result very attractive. For then of course the subjects could be counted as HIV/AIDS patients and given expensive AIDS drugs, currently running in the US at about $15,000 a year.

But we are sure that even the challenged critical faculties of the man who instructs the editors of the New York Times in the mysteries of HIV/AIDS would not accept that notion. Right, Larry? Larry?

A very sorry performance

All in all, a very sad demonstration that in 27 years, the sheer twisted absurdity of the HIV=AIDS paradigm has not been made manifest to the renowned medical reporter on the leading print and Web news platform in the world. So much for all the often superbly written articles and more than thirty books, and Web sites, published on the enlightened side of this issue, not to mention our own brief attempt to warn Altman at the Montreal AIDS Conference that he should pay more attention to the leading reviewer of HIV and AIDS, Peter Duesberg of Berkeley.

Apparently, none of this has engaged the curiosity of Lawrence Altman, the highest placed reporter in AIDS, whose chief source on the topic is evidently none other than Anthony Fauci, along with his CDC friends, and perhaps even the redoubtable Robert Gallo.

One might say that this cooperation with falsity, with a lethal scam in the field of public health that has cost so many human lives, is a disgrace to any reporter, let alone one in high position, and one with training in medicine and epidemiology. It is certainly an embarrassment to the Times which, when the truth is finally out at some uncertain point in the future, will have this blot on its record forever, a stain to match or even outdo its failure to report on the true state of the USSR under Stalin.

Why it isn’t wholly Larry’s fault

But this would overlook the many social pressures and human frailties which combine to produce such a dismal outcome, which we suppose would undoubtedly produce it in any other human being who gained such a position.

One social mechanism which we feel is at the root of the problem and generally overlooked is the topic of our next post, which we promise will be as unsually short as this one is unusually long.

Denials of danger depend on obsolete cosmic ray argument peddled shamelessly by top physicists

Treating the public as children, with swift change of ground if challenged

Could it be that safety arguments have all but expired, but no one cares that Earth could go pfft!?

Like all well informed supporters of progress in science for the benefit of humanity we normally trust and celebrate the highly intelligent, benignly motivated and often extremely personable (Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Brian Cox) physicists who lead the charge to uncover the truth at the core of physical reality as we know it.

From long experience in uncovering the truths found at the core of human nature, however, at least as exhibited by leading scientists in fields vexed by a mismatch between their claims and their published literature (HIV/AIDS and cancer, for example), we are sorry to see signs of public irresponsibility in the actions of the 3000 or more fine men and women in charge of the LHC and its pioneering research.

To be more specific, to ward off public scrutiny and the danger that the LHC might be put on hiatus while its safety is independently reviewed, top physicists, we have found, habitually reply to public safety concerns by quoting an argument which they know not to be true – for when challenged, they immediately admit it.

The well known argument we have in mind is what was helpfully labeled “Cosmic Ray 1″ by Brian Greene, famed string theorist and popular author, when we asked him at Philoctetes about the safety of the LHC two years ago at the session on Mathematics and Beauty on November 14, 2009. (The Philoctetes Center is a distinguished platform for discussion of creativity and the imagination in Manhattan). “Do you mean Cosmic Ray 1, ” he asked, “or Cosmic Ray 2?”

What’s wrong with Cosmic Ray 1?

Cosmic Ray 1 is simply the idea that cosmic rays of subatomic particles generated by supernovae have been whizzing at the Earth for aeons and if their impact on any particles they encounter had created planetivorous black holes we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. This implies therefore that there won’t be any such danger from similar collisions within the Large Hadron Collider.

Unfortunately this overlooks a very simple difference between conditions of such collisions in Nature and those inside the Large Hadron Collider. The first will give rise to particles which will fly away at speeds far in excess of the escape velocity of the Earth, so even if they include mBHs (mini Black Holes) or other fearsome entities they won’t linger to do any damage here. In the collider, however, the collisions between protons or lead ions are head on, like those of cars when one crosses the divider on a highway and smashes into another. So the debris may well be ejected at speeds well below terrestial escape velocity (25,000 mph) all the way down to nil, and thus any tiny black holes, strangelets etc will linger to cause whatever havoc they might be capable of.

In fact, this problem with the logic of Cosmic Ray 1 was noticed as early as 2003 by the celebrated British astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees in his doomwarning book “Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future In This Century–On Earth and Beyond”.

In other words, despite lay defenders of the LHC in Web discussions jumping to quote it as the decisive rebuttal to conCERN about the LHC, the argument has been dead at the starting gate for a decade.

The three card monte physicists play

But this drawback has not stopped Greene and others cheerfully telling the public that they can forget any worries about micro Black Holes being generated by the LHC on this basis. In his Op Ed piece for the New York Times on September 11, 2008 The Origins of the Universe: A Crash Course Green wrote:

The collider’s workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light — fast enough so that every second the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.

And why wasn’t this effort to penetrate to the very edge of speed and the conditions at the beginning of the universe dangerous? Why? Cosmic Ray 1, of course!:

Micro Black Holes

Now for the possibility that’s generated the fuss.

Recent work in string theory has suggested that the collider might produce black holes, providing physicists with a spectacular opportunity to study them in a laboratory.

The common conception is that black holes are fantastically massive astrophysical bodies with enormous gravitational fields. But in reality, a black hole can have any mass. Take an orange and squeeze it to a sufficiently small size (about a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a meter across) and you’d have a black hole — with the mass of an orange.

Physicists have realized that the collider’s proton-proton collisions might momentarily pack so much energy into such a small volume that exceedingly tiny black holes may form — black holes even lighter than the one theoretically created by the orange, but black holes nevertheless.

Why might one worry that this would be a problem? Because black holes have a reputation for rapacity. If a black hole is produced under Geneva, might it swallow Switzerland and continue on a ravenous rampage until the earth is devoured?

It’s a reasonable question with a definite answer: no.

Work that made Stephen Hawking famous establishes that tiny black holes would disintegrate in a minuscule fraction of a second, long enough for physicists to reap the benefits of having produced them, but short enough to avoid their wreaking any havoc.

Even so, some have worried further that maybe Dr. Hawking was wrong and such black holes don’t disintegrate. Are we willing to bet the fate of the planet on an untested insight? And that question takes us to the crux of the matter: the collisions at the Large Hadron Collider have never before occurred under laboratory settings, but they’ve been taking place throughout the universe — even here on earth — for billions of years.

Cosmic rays — particles wafting through space — constantly rain down on the earth, the other planets and the wealth of stars scattered throughout the galaxy, with energies far in excess of those attainable by the Large Hadron Collider. And since these more powerful collisions haven’t resulted in astrophysical calamities, the collider’s comparatively tame collisions most assuredly won’t either.

So if the Cosmic Ray 1 argument is wrong, it reduces Greene by his own admission to betting the fate of the planet and the entire human race on an untested insight of the renowned Stephen Hawking, which is something of a responsibility for the wheelchair bound physics genius, especially since he has been wrong about major cosmological matters before, by his own admission.

A sop to the public

This brazen use of an argument which has already been exploded as a sop to the public is standard practice among leading physicists, as it happens. We have found it is shamelessly produced at every event where conCERN is expressed.

For example, just before being instructed by Professor Greene at Philoctetes (on November 14 2009 Sat) we had encountered two other very distinguished young physicist-astronomers, Gregory Gabadadze and David Hogg, at their own New York University, just after they had briefed a very large packed hall on the wonders of black holes and other galactic phenomena in a lecture (on September 29, 2009), labeled Hubble Trouble: The Expanding Universe and the Dark Energy Enigma. Both gave extensive replies to us and a small group of attentive listeners after their lectures, when we raised the topic of CERN’s dangers, dismissing them on the basis of Cosmic Ray 1.

David Hogg held forth gladly for several minutes as a group of listeners gathered round us at the post lecture reception, along these lines, until when he finished we asked gently if it was not true that that rationale had been debunked. Without a moment’s hesitation he acknowledged that indeed it had already been exploded, and without any sign of embarrassment went on smartly to invoke a quite different reassurance (what Brian Greene called “Cosmic Ray 2″, to be explained below) which has lately become almost as questionable.

Michael Tuts too

The pattern of fobbing off public doubt by invoking a spurious rationale – in the manner of parents reassuring a child that everything will be alright as the plane heads for a dicey winter landing amid less than perfect visibility, if any at all – seems to be standard. Only the other week the handsome Columbia physicist Michael Tuts spoke at the Guggenheim. Tuts has an important role at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. As the US ATLAS Operations Program Manager he is the titular head of a pack of 400 scientists who are helping to spend $40 million a year in US tax dollars running the world’s greatest “scientific instrument”, as he calls it.

When the Guggenheim Work and Process series invited him to explain all to their arts audience recently, an unusual double header resulted. On a Sunday evening, he explained the Standard Model and the next evening (Feb 7 Mon, which we attended in the front row) he explained to his second packed house the exciting prospect that the LHC might complete the Standard Model by finding the Higgs boson, the final piece of the theoretical jigsaw, not to mention confirming the possibility of additional dimensions and bringing gravity into the fold to pair it with quantum physics for the ultimate “theory of everything”.

We were lucky enough to get to ask the last question. “Given the stature of at least one of the critics of the safety review of the LHC, isn’t there at least a tiny risk of major catastrophe in its operation at peak energies?” Needless to say, Dr Tuts confidently reassured us that there wasn’t, and the chief reason he produced upfront was none other than …. Cosmic Ray 1! And the meeting broke up.

Since there were then refreshments in the Guggenheim museum ground floor, however, where Tuts was surrounded by admirers, we were able to follow up by asking him there whether Cosmic Ray 1 had not been busted long ago by Martin Rees in 2003, if not earlier. To which he replied with admirable frankness, Yes, indeed, and he then proceeded to expound Cosmic Ray 2, that the existence of neutron stars and white dwarfs served the same purpose, to show that cosmic rays flying at heavenly bodies did not generate black holes to eat them up.

Why do they do it?

So we do have a pattern here. The only safety argument physicists use in public until it is challenged is Cosmic Ray 1, and they know it is invalid. Since Cosmic Ray 2 is their fall back position, it is now the sole safety argument they still have for stating that any black holes that are generated will not consume the planet. Why don’t they tell the truth, and state the neutron-white dwarf rationale straight off? Could it be because that justification is crumbling also?

We suspect that this may the case, because the Cosmic Ray 2 argument is indeed crumbling, for different reasons. But since this post is already too long for comfort, we will go over that ground in a later installment, which will deal with the risk of the LHC creating strangelets, which might turn our planet into a small asteroid of strange matter.

Let us simply end here by noting that CERN physicists are so determined to avoid interference from outside with their marvelous project that they use every propaganda tool they can to allay doubt and evade having to account for themselves.

Including asking us to bet on a horse that is dead at the starting gate, and they know it.