Science Guardian

HIV hides in guts, immune to expensive ARVs

Years of hideous side effects for nothing?

“I thought you would be interested to read this article from The Times”, writes a thoughtful correspondent, MG, and indeed the latest effort by Sam Lister, the health correspondent of the Times of London, seems worth noting.

According to his story yesterday (Sat Jul 29) HIV hides itself in the intestines to beat drugs, ARVs (antiretrovirals) are now shown to have no effect on HIV in the guts, where the nightmare virus establishes itself securely to attack the 70% of the immune system located there.

The scientists found that the virus that causes Aids took hold in intestinal tissue of patients receiving antiretroviral therapy (ARV). There it continued to replicate and suppress the immune system even though blood samples showed that the drugs were working.

Professor Satya Dandekar, who led the study, said that, while ARV could be quite successful in reducing HIV’s presence in the blood, the virus still thrived. “The real battle between the virus and exposed individuals is happening in the gut immediately after viral infection,” she said. “We need to be focusing our efforts on improving treatment of gut mucosa, where massive destruction of immune cells is occurring.”

Professor Dandekar, head of the university’s department of medical microbiology and immunology, said that gut-associated lymphoid tissue accounted for 70 per cent of the body’s immune system, and that restoring its function was crucial to destroying the virus.

So why take ARVs at all, then, if HIV can and will easily hide out in the guts and do its dirty work on 70% of the body’s immune system cells there?

That’s too simple, according to the study authors at Davis, whose research is supported by the NIH. They do not come to this obvious conclusion. On the contrary, their prescription is to start treatment earlier.

Thomas Prindiville, the study’s co-author, said that starting treatment earlier significantly improved the chances of restoring immune function.

“If we are able to restore the gut’s immune response, the patient will be more likely to clear the virus,” Professor Prindiville said. “You can’t treat any infectious disease without the help of the immune system.”

How early is early? Judging from the monkey studies a year ago April that first suggested this line of thinking, because they found that simian immunodeficiency virus decimated immune cells in the guts of monkeys within days, early means patients should receive ARVs within a few days.

Those who keep up with the newsflow of this paradigm will recognize this as a contribution to the current campaign to expand testing to the entire population of the United States as soon as possible.

In fact, it takes us one step closer to justifying prophylactic medication for everyone “at risk” in the US. Except for one thing - the mysterious fact that this wholesale destruction within days of the 70% of our CD4 cells in our gut doesn’t seem to have any long term effect. Everything soon goes back to normal for as long as twenty or thirty years - however long the “latent” period is.

Granted that the report may be garbled but the item seems to show that there is no limit to how new findings can be twisted to serve the cause of what is no longer a scientifically based enterprise in any meaningful way.

Here’s a more informed report from RxPG News:

Utilities pony up for Michaels, who resists consensus

Which paradigm is most distorted by money?

Tucked away on page 26 of the Times today, this AP report: Utilities Pay Scientist Ally On Warming. It raises the age old question, can scientist accept funding from industry without being compromised, at least in reputation, and is that stain justified?

On reputation the answer seems to be, no. As soon as the Times carries the story, the typical reader will reject him as one of the bad guys. Whether this is justified or not, however, is not so easy to decide.

In a nutshell: Virginia’s state climatologist, Patrick J. Michaels, is a fellow of the Cato Institute and a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. He doesn’t agree with the consensus on global warming and has a staff who analyse other scientists’ global warming research. After he complained in public to “Western business leaders” about running out of money, a utility company passed the hat and raised $250,000 so far in pledges and contributions.

WASHINGTON, July 27 — Coal-burning utilities are contributing money to one of the few remaining climate scientists openly critical of the broad consensus that fossil fuel emissions are intensifying global warming….

The critic, Patrick J. Michaels, is a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and Virginia’s state climatologist.

Dr. Michaels told Western business leaders last year that he was running out of money for his analyses of other scientists’ global warming research. So a Colorado utility organized a collection campaign for him last week and has raised at least $150,000 in donations and pledges….

This is a classic case of industry buying science to back up its anti-environmental agenda,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of the Washington advocacy group Clean Air Watch.

Others, however, view it as the type of lobbying that goes along with many divisive issues. One environmental scientist, Donald Kennedy, former president of Stanford University and current editor in chief of the journal Science, said skeptics like Dr. Michaels were lobbyists more than researchers.

“I don’t think it’s unethical any more than most lobbying is unethical,” Dr. Kennedy said….

Dr. Michaels said the money would help pay his staff.

“Last I heard, anybody can ask a scientific question,” he said.

Come on Dr Michaels, don’t be ingenuous, this is news precisely because of the suspicion that he who pays the piper calls the tune. This is “industry buying science”, says the advocacy group president. But is it? Let’s try defending him.

Seven reasons to take industry money

First, since Michaels formed his views by himself, as far as we know, and has already made them clear all over the place, the money is not going to change them, is it? As well as journal articles, he has written columns and a book on the topic, “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media.”

Secondly, why shouldn’t he accept money from people who like his research because of conclusions he has already come to? He needs money to do work, just like everyone else. Someone has to pay fo his research staff. Who else is going to give him money? Should he apply only to private foundations which don’t have a position on the issue? If so, where are they, and even if he can find them, why should they care to give him money unless he fits their agenda in some way?

Third, OK, maybe there are foundations who support good science, period, and don’t care how it comes out. They must want to support scientists who just want to analyze the issue objectively, independently of politics.

But is there any example of this you know of? The only one we know of is Robert Leppo, the one man among six million millionaires who stepped forward to fund Peter Duesberg in combating the HIV/AIDS paradigm and continuing his vital cancer research. He doesn’t care in the end whether Duesberg is right on the science of HIV?AIDS, though he trusts him as a fine scientist to get it right, he is simply concerned as a libertarian with Duesberg’s ability to do excellent research without being ostracized and unfunded by the tyrannical and vengeful censorship imposed on HIV?AIDS paradigm reviewers.

Sure, all patrons everywhere will receive special consideration from their beneficiaries. Even Duesberg’s actions and ideas are going to be circumscribed in some way in his dealings with Leppo. He probably won’t get into a heated argument with him over politics, for example. But will he change his scientific ideas? Assuredly not, since he will not be asked to by a patron who has no investment in the issue except the freedom of science.

Fourthly, of course, Michaels sounds ingenuous when he says ““Last I heard, anybody can ask a scientific question.” The problem he has to deal with is that we all think that his objectivity will be influenced by his gratitude towards utility company executives. If he changes his conclusion too radically, after all, their support will evaporate. But what he is saying here out loud is that he doesn’t expect it will be influenced. He doesn’t view the utilities as his puppetmasters. He rejects the suspicions of those who do not trust him to make up his mind on the basis of good research with an independent mind. Is there any proof that he is lying?

Fifthly, reason also indicates he might even actively resist bias and therefore acquire a little bias in the other direction, pushed also by the embarrassing attacks of global warming activists and the Times coverage.

Sixth, if he does change his position radically after receiving the funds, he will then be admired by others for his integrity, and he can hope to find support from them. So receiving the funds does not prevent him from changing his conclusions, at least after a decent interval, to avoid giving the impression that he took money under false pretenses.

Seventh, he has already shown integrity by taking a stand against the consensus, placing him in an embarrassing minority position, not to mention making him a suspect as an industry tool.

Anti-consensus doesn’t mean bad guy, either

All these factors seem to argue that Michaels shouldn’t be automatically condemned for his industry support. On the other hand, people being what they are…somehow we know that the money is tainted… don’t we?

We admit we can’t really make up our mind where it all comes out, and we empathize with the editor in chief of Science, Donald Kennedy, who calls Michaels both a bad guy and a good guy - a “lobbyist more than a researcher”, yet adds that “lobbying is not unethical”. Huh? Doesn’t combining both roles compromise the research more than the acceptance of industry money?

Perhaps not if Michaels genuinely feels strongly about conclusions he has come to independently. Why shouldn’t he lobby for his own views? He has reason to be proud of them if he argues against a huge consensus, and is not stupid, because he thereby proves he is a courageous and principled man, a man of integrity. Unless and until he is rewarded for it with sizeable industry money, that is. Then we have to wonder if that was the motivation all along.

Trouble is that outsiders cannot judge

In the end, perhaps as scientists who look for evidence we should reject all such suspicions as irrelevant and unprovable speculation that intelligent people should ignore. Perhaps Michaels’ views should stand or fall according to whether it is supported by the data he points to.

That would get rid of all the emotional and political smog that obscures the view.

But most people are not able to assess the vast scientific data themselves, so they have to rely on reputation and credentials, and for other scientists to assess the issue independently, and not be biased against Michaels just because he is against a vast consensus.

For consensus is not a guarantee of truth in science. By definition, each time a paradigm is replaced consensus is proved wrong. Science is not a democracy and its truths are not decided by vote.

It would much easier if all scientists were very intelligent and unbiased and had the time to give complex issues their due, but Alas this is not the case, as HIV?AIDS has shown.

This is why the unanswered questions in HIV?AIDS must be debated and solved instead of censored. It has the most important lesson of all to teach us, which is that modern science with all its panoply of technology and expertise can still make grand mistakes which send the consensus in the wrong direction.

When political intervention sends consensus down the wrong path, HIV?AIDS shows, and censorship prevents review of the situation, consensus consolidates and the lesser minds in the field join the compromised leaders in defending the paradigm from criticism.

What is overlooked is that overturning consensus is the normal process of progress in science.

Money is the root of bad science

Simply put, the tyranny of power politics can kill good science and promote bad as rapidly as it can kill democracy. Big money is the death of science, because big money is power. Since apparently the worst case of this to date is HIV?AIDS, this is why it will be good for all of science to break the NIAID censorship and expose the paradigm to public review

That is why Dr Michaels should get his funding from some other source, and why society should help him do so, even though the consensus says he is wrong.

Is there a scientific consensus on global warming?

What we need is a disinterested observer. Here we are, an article written today by a history of science professor who did the study on the topic, called Naomi Oreskes:
PERSPECTIVE”>Global warming: Signed, sealed and delivered

By Naomi Oreskes

Yes, she says. There is a consensus. She did the study, and contrary to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Richard Lindzen recently, it has not been refuted. And a history of science professor must be disinterested, surely, unless she is pally with everybody in the field, which come to think of it, is likely:

To be sure, there are a handful of scientists, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, the author of the Wall Street Journal editorial, who disagree with the rest of the scientific community. To a historian of science like me, this is not surprising. In any scientific community, there are always some individuals who simply refuse to accept new ideas and evidence.

Those few who refuse to accept it are not ignorant, but they are stubborn. They are not unintelligent, but they are stuck on details that cloud the larger issue. Scientific communities include tortoises and hares, mavericks and mules.

Of course, one cannot help wondering if Naomi is competent to assess whether the consensus is right or not, which is another question. Still, that wasn’t her purpose.

But why do we imagine that she probably categorizes Duesberg as a mule, if she has heard of him at all?

Perhaps she would pause if she learned that Duesberg did not take money from industry.

Gallo corrected, Bialy triumphant on Amazon and fearless blog matador skewers sacred bull at Barnesworld

Lynn Margulis endorses Bialy and doubts

Padian is the sword in the heart

Questioners of HIV∫AIDS are currently winning the paradigm war, it seems, with advances on several new fronts. The Harpers article in March, like a beachhead in Normandy landing an army, has proved armor plated in the fact of false critique and calumny. It has now been followed up by successes on two fronts on the Web.

The Correcting Gallo “56 errors refuted” issued by Rethinking AIDS two weeks ago examined at length and rejected all the 56 objections of Robert Gallo and a group of pro-paradigm activists. Every single claim was faulty, it turned out, when compared with the scientific literature, which apparently is not bedtime reading for Gallo any more, since he doesn’t yet seem to understand that direct T cell killing by HIV has been ruled out.

Now Harvey Bialy has routed John Moore on Amazon, with Moore forced by Amazon to replace his childishly dismissive review of Bialy’s exemplary book, “Aneuploidy, Oncogenes and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg”, with a rewrite (it was against the rules to include the referral to his misleading AIDSTruth.org site), and now a new champion in the form of Lynn Margulis, member of the National Academy and alert to the unjust trashing of Duesberg for some years now. Margulis’s review is worth quoting in full:

Bialy’s message in his hotly contested book Oncogenes, aneuploidy, and AIDS. A scientific life & times of Peter H. Duesberg is of crucial importance to everyone with an interest in the science that should underlie the practice of medicine. “Oncogenes” are defined as “cancer-causing genes”, “aneuploidy” refers to any anomalous number and arrangement of chromosomes in a nucleated (plant, animal, protist or fungal) cell. AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) refers to an illness, a constellation of opportunistic infections and pathologies in a patient with diminished capacity for production of the repertoire of antibodies typical of healthy people. In 1984 a virus now named the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was announced to be the cause of AIDS. Duesberg disagrees. Duesberg’s accessible, comprehensive and scientific book, Inventing the AIDS Virus that explains why is more an epiphenomenon of the controversy than its cause. Bialy defends Peter Duesberg.

Duesberg’s real sin, as Bialy reports, was his review paper in the most prestigious scientific journal in the United States, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) that questioned the data and interpretations claimed to prove that. Duesberg found a troubling lack of evidence and a number of glaring anomalies in the body of literature.

Duesberg’s paper caused such an uproar in the medical research community that it led to rewriting of the rules for submission by members of their own scientific articles for the PNAS. His questions are still valid. Lives are at stake. We find the paucity of evidence published in standard peer-reviewed primary scientific journals that leads to the conclusion that “HIV causes AIDS” appalling. No amount of moralizing censorship, rhetorical tricks, consensus of opinion, pulling rank, obfuscation, ad hominem attacks or blustering newspaper editorials changes this fact. The conflation “HIV-AIDS” may be good marketing but is it science? No. Yet certainly the political and economic implications of the term “HIV-AIDS” are staggering. (See Harper’s March 2006 article “Out of Control” by Celia Farber).

Peter Duesberg continues his splendid 35-year research career at the University of California at Berkeley where, since 1986 he has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences and hence, eligible to publish any of his own scientific work. Although his government research funds (like ours, on a far smaller scale) were cut from $350,000 per year to zero, he continues investigations into the cause of cancer with work on aneuploidy.

Harvey Bialy’s book may be hard at times for readers with little or no background in this arcane science, but its riveting narrative documents the troubling censorship and punishment of a tenacious scientist seeking answers. Unjustifiably labelled “denialists”,”homophobes”, “charlatans”, or “Nazis”, Bialy and Duesberg are foremost excellent scientists who follow David Bohm’s adage “Science is the search for truth, whether we like it or not”. It strains credulity to ascribe any other motivation to their stance.

Here one has to feel sorry for Moore and friends, for such an indictment of their own attitudes from such a sterling source has to be a source of lasting embarrassment socially for these defenders of their beneficent faith.

Just for good measure, it is backed up by Rebecca Culshaw, the mathematician who finally threw up her hands at the task of making sense of modeling HIV∫AIDS’s supposed biology and publicly announced her refusal to engage any more in this nonsense on Lew Rockwell’s site recently (see Why I Quit HIV and Why I quit HIV - The Aftermath; also Math Professor: Why “HIV/AIDS” Doesn’t Add Up):

Although some of the book’s devastating - and fascinating - moments do indeed come when Bialy is exposing some of the more distasteful tactics behind what is surely the most politicized medical issue in history, by focusing on AIDS, many reviews will likely draw attention to a book that is equally important for what it reveals regarding the politics, and the science, of cancer research.

Beginning with Peter Duesberg’s unwelcome criticisms of the single gene mutation theory of carcinogenesis and leaving the reader with an introduction to the current theory of aneuploidy on which Duesberg now focuses his attention, Bialy weaves a tale of the man and his mission, which is simply to find out truth. Would that so many scientists have similar motives.

Amusingly, the Moore brigade has responded to this magisterial judgement with a frankly dimwitted review so obviously dripping with ill motivated prejudice that it serves as Exhibit A for the prosecution:

3 of 22 people found the following review helpful

Mr. Bialy’s opus. Science fiction at its worst., July 19, 2006

Reviewer: Manny Kimmel (Ohio) - See all my reviews

Mr. Bialy’s journeyman’s prose never fails to bore. He creates a parallel universe in which the modern-day plague of AIDS is a fiction created by greedy and ambitious scientists, politicians, activists, Pharma executivies, and other assorted henchmen.

Against this backdrop of evil, we are given a Christ figure, played by a scientist at a California university who would save the world from the great lie that is AIDS. Oddly, Mr. Bialy’s descriptions of our hero smacks of a schoolgirl crush. Would that we had learned whether this curious realtionship was ever consummated.

Mr. Bialy takes a halfway good science fiction story idea (what if HIV were harmless??) and beats it to death with excrutiating, ham-handed detail.

Life is too short for this kind of drivel. Shame on me for wasting several hours of my life on this nonsense. Shame on YOU if you repeat my mistake.

Ahem.. “Would that we had learned whether this curious realtionship was ever consummated”? Doesn’t the homophobe detector swing wildly at that remark? Bialy is famously passionate for exotic women, Mr “Kimmel”, and married his current wife under romantic circumstances in Cuba, as you would know if you were familiar with the actors in this affair. No doubt we will find out eventually if this is a penname for Moore or some lab intern trying to curry favor, but this illiterate sally is precisely what the author of the book in question delights in, for it tends to more persuasively recommend the book as important and interesting than any direct praise can by itself. Indeed, when last heard from Bialy was in seventh heaven at the rate copies were disappearing from the warehouse.

Meanwhile, today we have yet another positive review from a respected source, Gerald H. Pollack, professor in the department of bioengineering, University of Washington, Seattle:

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Stimulating and Thought Provoking, July 25, 2006

Reviewer: Gerald H. Pollack - See all my reviews

(REAL NAME)

I was impressed. I invite you to read this fascinating book and decide for yourself whether Duesberg has a point or two. I took time from a busy schedule to see quickly how the saga would end, and came away enlightened by a rich body of information about issues of profound significance that cry out for resolution. The message is quite serious, but the presentation is buoyed by abundant humor and wit - a pleasure to read. This is one of those books that will inspire unending conversations with friends and colleagues. Rarely have I been as moved by a book as by this very scientific biography.”

Honestly, could one ask for a simpler, more truthful sounding recommendation? Exhibit B, Dr. Moore! Readers can compare all these with HIV researcher Moore’s newly rewritten diatribe for sense, evidence of having read and digested the book, underlying motivation and other aspects:

1 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

Missing the point on Duesberg, June 25, 2006

Reviewer: John P Moore, PhD (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

The author completely misses the point when writing about Peter Duesberg. His book comes across as a hagiography, not as an objective review of Duesberg’s flawed and ultimately failed scientific career. A more considered approach to the subject would have discussed why it was that Duesberg adopted foolishly contrarian and scientifically inaccurate positions on oncogenes and, a few years later, on HIV and AIDS. Were Duesberg’s thought-processes at this critical time in his career purely science-based? Or were they, as many of his scientific contemporaries believe, driven by his jealousy over the far greater career successes of his then-rivals in cancer virology (Bishop, Varmus, Gallo, Baltimore, for example)? An objective reviewer of Duesberg’s career would have explored such a critical issue. A detailed exploration of whether personal jealousies drove Duesberg’s public posturings should have been a critical component of the story; the book is the worse for such an important omission.

There is another glaring flaw in the book: Duesberg’s perceived (but, nowadays, not real) stature as a professional scientist underpins the activities of a small group of individuals who, bizarrely, deny that HIV causes AIDS (it is, of course, almost universally understood both within the scientific community and by the general public that HIV infection is the cause of AIDS). Like Duesberg, a few of the AIDS denialists are scientists whose careers fizzled out; but others are zealots with extreme political views (both on the far-right and the far-left) who find AIDS denialism politically convenient; and some are deeply troubled individuals with disturbing behavior patterns who deserve pity and professional help. Again, an objective book on this general subject area would explore the role played by Duesberg as the figurehead of the AIDS denialism movement. Why have such an eclectic gallimaufrey of people rallied to Duesberg’s banner? The present author utterly fails to tackle this component of the Duesberg story. As a result, his book is simply not worth reading. The definitive book on Duesberg remains to be written, although he’s probably not an interesting enough subject for a professional biographer to tackle.

John P. Moore

Professor of Microbiology and Immunology,

Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York

Only a man who has never met Duesberg could publicly suggest that “personal jealousies drove Duesberg’s public posturings”, or state “Duesberg’s perceived (but, nowadays, not real) stature as a professional scientist”. Only a man whose position in science leaves him clambering about in shoes two sizes two big for him, a man who is personally familiar with the motivations he suggests, a man who has not read Bialy’s book without prejudice and all the way through, could possibly write such calumny without embarrassment. Pity John Moore, who will have to face all his life the responsibility of having written such self revealing text, as the paradigm is eventually recognized for what it is.

Here are the full Margulis and Culshaw reviews, if you don’t want to click to the complete list at Amazon:

With the result of John Moore’s attempted slander on Amazon a total rout, Cornell’s Times Op-Ed writer and favorite son of David Ho and John Maddox has a further humiliation to worry about in the form of a defeat at the hands of Hank Barnes, anti-HIV blogger extraordinaire.

Lawyer uses Padian to defeat all comers, routs Moore

For last week Hank Barnes of Barnesworld, the alter ego of a busy lawyer in real life, reeled in his biggest fish to date, and it was none other than John Moore of Cornell. Moore seemed unable to escape Barnes’ net, and the blogger has been