Science Guardian

Readers may wonder who are the main characters involved in the various paradigm challenges are, so here is a brief SG guide to both sides of the HIV∫AIDS issue and in future, other science wars:

(Page in progress: This list will be built up as time allows, and all objections, corrections and contributions from readers in email or in comments are welcomed. Currently it is a rough, off the top of the head temporary draft in many instances, and the facts remain to be confirmed if the end of the biographical mention is so labeled.)

The HIV∫AIDS Debate

HIV Negative (as in debunker):

Peter Duesberg - Very distinguished, capable and literate University of California at Berkeley cancer retrovirologist with exceptional theoretical, analytical and expository talent, as well as great personal courage and integrity, whose career includes initiating two major fields of research, oncogenes and aneuploidy, two theories of cancer, repudiating one of them (oncogenes), and in his reviews authoritatively rejecting the paradigm of yet another field (HIV∫AIDS). This Berkeley professor is the chief critic of the HIV=AIDS (only-HIV-causes-AIDS) paradigm and has written extensively in the peer reviewed literature about its overwhelming failings, only to be met with severe political and professional hostility and a significant absence in peer-reviewed attempts at direct refutation and rebuttal in the same elite journals. Cancer Research (in 1987) and the Proceedings of the National Academy (in 1989) published the initial two comprehensive critiques which sank the hypothesis theoretically, though it has survived and flourished politically and financially ever since. Events since have continually borne out his points as the outcomes of their own AIDS studies regularly embarrass paradigm promoters by conflicting with their claims, as this blog has often noted. His book on the topic is both popular and scientific, Inventing the AIDS Virus (Regnery, 1995) and an excellent account of how one of our finest scientists has been politically and financially harmed for exposing the gross scientific inadequacy of the politically and financially rewarding HIV/AIDS paradigm, and how this came about. All Duesberg’s papers on AIDS are available at his AIDS site. and those on cancer at his cancer lab site.

Kary Banks Mullis, Ph.D. (born December 28, 1944) is an American biochemist and Nobel laureate. Mullis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for his development of the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology which allows the amplification of specified DNA sequences. Dr Mullis subsequently was awarded the Japan Prize that same year. Mullis is a delightfully spontaneous and lively personality with a incessantly busy mind who is entirely beyond the reach of all tyrannical conformity. His PCR technique, dreamed up during a late night California drive with his lab girl friend sleeping beside him (he woke her up to ask her opinion of the idea, promising her a share in the Nobel if she participated, but she relapsed into sleep again), is an inspiration many believe to be without parallel in usefulness in modern biology, and it has enabled over two hundred innocents to be released from jail from DNA evidence otherwise impossible to analyze. Anthony Liversidge interviewed him for OMNI Magazine in a classic Q/A where Mullis’ best attributes are on display,

Serge Lang was a distinguished mathematician at Yale well known for his many textbooks, and for carrying on fruitful and original mathematical work into his later years. His unique avocation was to challenge misinformation purveyed by academic professors and officials, by the government bureacracy and by editors and reporters in the media, sending them letters demanding change and publishing the resulting exchange of correspondence in compendium “Files” which he would forward to 100 influential people in the US. Some of these remarkable works were collected in “Challenges”, a unique book which should be not be neglected by anyone who needs to understand how politics and incompetence distorts truth in the higher reaches of US institutions. The finest work of this kind Lang did was his last, a substantial File on HIV/AIDS, partly included in the book, which with utter clarity demonstrated the inadequacy of claims in the field and the unacceptable nature of its statistics from the CDC, presented in terms completely free of politics and personal comment, an academic and public ideal which Lang advocated and lived up to in all his public interventions.

Harvey Bialy, founding science editor of Nature Biotechnology and long a staunch supporter of Peter Duesberg, whose pupil he may have been at one point at Berkeley, is the author of Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg (North Atlantic, 2004), a most accurate guide to the way the difficult politics and exemplary science of Duesberg’s reviews of the HIV and oncogene theories, and his pursuit of a new research path in cancer, have unfolded over the years. Notorious for the fierce lack of restraint of his emails lambasting the errors of recipients, Bialy took over the editing of the cheeky Barnesworld dissenter blog initiated by a West Coast lawyer in 2006, and turned it into a group blog carrying posts by several prominent AIDS dissenters, as well as more scurrilous material such as Bialy’s entertaining email provocations of John P. Moore (Moore’s revenge consists of various excerpts from this claiming to expose Bialy’s (nonexistent) homophobia on AIDSTruth). Renamed You Bet Your Life, the blog became a center for the most intelligent and witty debunking of the HIV∫AIDS paradigm until it suddenly ceased operation in May this year, after Bialy warned associates that he was either ill and subject to chemotherapy, or was intending to go into a Buddhist retreat, or possibly both. Since then he has turned to preparing and exhibiting art, having communicated that the debate on whether HIV could possibly be the cause of AIDS is now over, as far as he is concerned, the paradigm having been exposed as scientific error in every respect.

Gordon Stewart, emeritus professor of public health at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, physician and consultant whose field is epidemiology and preventive medicine. In a professional career of over 50 years in the UK and elsewhere, he has specialised mainly in the control of infections, with increasing emphasis upon the importance of behavioural, social and environmental conditions as prime factors in disease control. He was one of the first physicians to recognise the dangers to personal and public health of the sudden increase in drug addiction, sexual freedom and unfamiliar infections which began in the 1960’s, now called HIV=AIDS. He designed programmes for investigation and control of some of these problems in the USA and UK. The WHO asked him to continue this work when he retired in 1983. This led to an intense involvement in the epidemiological investigation of AIDS, on which he has written reports for the WHO, medical, nursing and economic journals, and the Press. He has participated in many radio and television programmes internationally. In 1987, he challenged the view that AIDS would cause a pandemic by heterosexual transmission in the general populations of the USA and Europe. Mathematical projections which he prepared then have now been shown to be accurate to within 10% of registration data. In Stewart’s view, present policies for the control of AIDS in the UK are erroneous and unbalanced because the medical emphasis is upon elimination of HIV by vaccination or chemotherapy whereas, in the USA and Europe at least, the epidemiological evidence shows unequivocally that AIDS is attributable in the first place to behaviour which places individuals and sometimes entire communities at high risk of all sexually­transmissible and many other infections.

Celia Farber is one of two daughters of Barry Farber, the gravelly voiced radio host who conducted the most interesting late night conversation on the Manhattan air waves for several decades, and she is the most literate and dogged investigative reporter in HIV∫AIDS, who rose to prominence with her Words from the Front column in SPIN magazine, which with publisher and editor Bob Guccione Jr.’s strong support covered the doubtful claims and inconsistencies of the paradigm of HIV=AIDS from 1986, when she first interviewed Duesberg. Farber’s persistence in the face of scorn and counter attacks from the AIDS scientific, activist, media and political establishment marks her as the most courageous illuminator of dissent from this globally entrenched belief, dissent which otherwise is censored from mainstream media coverage by the notorious hostility of paradigm participants, particularly Anthony Fauci, to review. In March 2006, Farber succeeded in publishing in the liberal flagship Harpers magazine a seminal piece entitled “Out of Control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science”, her 12 page review of the poorly administered (by NIAID) Uganda trial of the damaging drug nevirapine, and included the underlying problem with the credibility of the paradigm, detailing the objections of Duesberg which had been evaded and ignored for 20 years. This unprecedented elevation of the alternative view into the heights of liberal East Coast media was partly due to the courage and perceptions of Roger Hodge, the new young editor who was taking over the helm of the advertiser-independent monthly from Lewis Lapham, but the initiative was unfortunately not taken up by the rest of the liberal media, who merely barked at the intruder and continued to act as the lapdogs of scientists whose expertise they are not prepared to challenge. A paperback collection of Farber’s best work in the field, Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS, was afterwards published by Melville House ($16.95) and it currently forms the most literate and culturally perceptive survey of the social ramifications of this scientifically indefensible paradigm. A profile of Farber and her valiant role in HIV/AIDS coverage was published in the New York Observer a few months ago.

David Crowe is a young, married Canadian journalist in Alberta who formed the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society, whose excellent web site keeps current with new developments and carries a great deal of useful information, with key articles by Crowe. He is a board member of Rethinking AIDS (the Committee for the Reappraisal of HIV/AIDS) and AnotherLook. He has written numerous articlesfor magazines including Alive magazine and Red Flags Daily as well as technical letters in the Lancet, AIDS, JAMA, Medical Hypotheses and Pediatrics. He is a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists.

Rebecca Culshaw is a young mathematician and professor who worked on epidemiological models for mainstream HIV∫AIDS for ten years until she threw up her hands in disgust on the grounds that the paradigm was severely flawed and the models were invalid. She published two short essays explaining her decision on LewRockwell.com and then, at the beginning of 2007, a fine short book, Science Sold Out, which runs through all the arguments for the HIV paradigm and why they do not pan out, and is currently the best work on the unreason of HIV∫AIDS.

Henry Bauer is the author of The Origins, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory (McFarland 2007), the latest trade book on the HIV=AIDS debacle, a judiciously phrased, academically accurate, but very readable analytical survey particularly valuable for its exposure of the false epidemiology drawn by HIV positive tests as biased towards certain groups without justification. As the editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and by virtue of long acquaintance with and analysis of the field of paradigm novelty and dissent in science, Bauer answers the question of how so much science can have gone so far wrong better than anyone else to date. His blog, HIV Skeptic” continues his work eviscerating the unacceptable scientific foundation of HIV=AIDS claims as they enter the media news stream. Bauer is emeritus professor of chemistry and science studies and Dean emeritus of arts and sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University.

Darin Christopher Brown is a young mathematician with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2004. His research area is algebraic number theory, and his dissertation was on Lifting Properties of Prime Geodesics on Hyperbolic Surfaces. His earlier mathematics degrees were an MA from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2000) and a B.A. from California State University, Stanislaus (magna cum laude, 1996). He was a graduate teaching fellow in 1996-97 in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Oregon. He founded and administers the AIDS Wiki, an accurate encyclopedia of AIDS scientists, their critics, and the disputed science of HIV∫AIDS, which corrects the mainstream bias of the relevant entries in the standard Wikipedia and presents accurate biographies of dissenters and their ideas. Unfortunately the AIDS Wiki currently omits any prominent mention of this blog, if any at all, apparently owing to the fact that Brown objects to some material posted in comments here which lavishly complimented his friend and fellow mathemtician Rebecca Culshaw on her charms, a personal compliment which her husband says she always appreciates. In April 2007 Brown wrote a classic piece on the now stalled, HIV=AIDS debunking group blog You Bet Your Life on the quintessential flaw in AIDS epidemiology, the flat line prevalence of HIV positivity in the US over the last twenty years, as a defense of Rebecca Culshaw superb debunking HIV=AIDS book, “Since Sold Out”, under the title Science Sold Out” Scares AIDS, Inc. Silly. Brown is also the curator of the e Lang Memorial HIV/AIDS Archive initiated in 2006.

Anthony Liversidge is a science reporter who has published numerous interviews with leading scientists and other articles in popular national science and general interest magazines in the US, as well as covering a variety of other topics including technology, events and travel. Born in England, he studied economics and philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (MA with honors, 1963) and worked in economic research and as a reporter for magazines in London and then New York before taking up independent reporting on science politics and general interest topics, most notably a series of personal interviews with leading scientists for OMNI magazine. H is accent is still British and that may be one reason why the ebullient Robert Gallo granted him interviews in the early years of HIV∫AIDS on the topic of the science and its dissent which the leading AIDS scientist surely later regretted for their frankness in revealing to all perceptive readers that no scientific substance lay behind his novel and soon-to-be-global paradigm that HIV=AIDS. His interest aroused as an investigative reporter and science critic, Liversidge has followed the issue ever since, increasingly appalled by and eventually resigned to the fellow traveling of the media whose producers and editors are supine under NIAID censorship and uncritically cooperate by banning all coverage of Peter Duesberg and his views, even though the Berkeley scientist’s peer-reviewed dissent has never been directly refuted or even responded to in the same journals, and is now supported by an unprecedented accumulation of books, scientific papers and major articles in magazines (eg Harpers, March 2006) and newspapers which have flouted the censoring edict of NIAID’s Anthony Fauci, who effectively banned coverage of dissent from the beginning. Liversidge’s own key articles on this topic include two early interviews with Gallo and some columns on the topic of the heresy for SPIN, an article, Modern Galileos, for the now defunct OMNI magazine, covering Duesberg along with two other distinguished scientific heretics, Thomas Gold and Linus Pauling, an article, The Limits of Science, for the Cultural Studies Times, and all the posts on this blog, Science Guardian/New AIDS Review. His talk given in Naples at the Institute of Philosophical Studies, The Scorn of Heretics, was expanded for publication in the Proceedings of the Conference on Science and Democracy, 2001.

Robert Houston is a Manhattan-based independent investigator, science writer and consultant who researches the medical and scientific literature of cancer, HIV∫AIDS, and nutrition. He has published articles on these topics in medical and scientific journals and books, newspapers and magazines as a science writer, and he wrote a classic survey of paradigmatic resistance to change in cancer, Repression and Reform in the Evaluation of Alternative Cancer Therapies (Project Cure, 1989). The book formed part of the briefing of the Office of Technology Assessment when it was preparing its report on cancer and its treatment at that time, when Houston headed off the disparaging rejection of alternative cancer treatments the OTA was preparing by producing for them many scientific studies they were overlooking. Unfortunately for the state of public knowledge Houston avoids television appearances though earlier he appeared as a guest on WBAI, and provided consulting research and analysis to television programs such as ABC 20/20, CBS (60 Minutes), PBS, and to New York reporters at NBC TV and elsewhere. In HIV=AIDS debunking Houston is notable for his priority in making an early public argument that one vital key to the novel syndrome was a drug and diet induced lack of trace elements on which the immune system is dependent, a nutritional approach which was displaced in the media by the HIV theory but is still considered by Houston and numerous others to be the right scientific approach. We view Houston as currently possibly the best reference researcher in the world, a brilliant PubMed jockey who detects many otherwise buried nuggets in the scientific and medical literature, and reads them with close attention and retention. Like all genuine scholars, he clearly values the truth he researches for its own sake. One remarkable example is his find two year ago that there are now several studies showing that the sufficient answer to bird flu may simply be an extra dose of Vitamin A, since it repressed Tumor Necrosis Factor, news which has so far been overlooked at the NIAID.

Peter Chowka. Peter Barry Chowka is an investigative journalist and medical-political analyst who specializes in reporting on alternative and innovative therapies and the politics of health care. In colleague Emma Holister’s view, he is “one of the only journalists who is clearly and consistently exposing the betrayal of true grassroots alternative medicine by the influential armies of complementary/integrative medicine marching in step with the mainstream allopathic medical Iidustry.” Since the 1970s, she writes, he has broken a number of important stories, including the federal government’s cover-up of its own promising research on diet and cancer, the Hoxsey herbal cancer therapy, and the suppression of Dr. Linus Pauling’s research on vitamin C and health. In April 1994 Peter did the last interview with Dr. Pauling before the two-time Nobel prize winner died at age 93 four months later. Peter’s work has been published widely, both in print and, over the past decade, on the Internet. He has appeared in major documentary films, has written for television, and has been a guest on several hundred radio and TV talk shows, most recently the nationally syndicated Coast to Coast AM on April 24, 2007. Between 1992-’94, Peter was an advisor to the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Alternative Medicine. Recently, Peter has been investigating the push for “universal health care” which he sees as the most serious threat to Americans’ freedom, autonomy, and choice in medicine since the country was founded. His Web site is http://chowka.com

Roger D. Hodge is the editor of Harper’s magazine, who replaced Lewis Lapham in early 2006. His biography on their website states that Hodge began his journalism career as a freelance writer in 1989. After “a lengthy detour through the thickets of academic philosophy”, he was hired by Harper’s as a fact checker in 1996. He joined the magazine’s entertaining and ironically edited Readings section in 1997 and edited the section from 1999 to 2003. Under his leadership the Readings section strengthened its political and literary focus while continuing to publish outrageous comic and historically significant primary documents, as well as a judicious selection of the best poems and essays to be found in the little magazines and forthcoming books. Hodge brought a new emphasis on contemporary art to the magazine, and came to treat the artwork published in each issue of the Readings section as a curated exhibit of paintings and photographs drawn from galleries all around the world. In December 2000 Hodge orchestrated the relaunch of the magazine’s website, Harpers.org, and created the popular “Weekly Review,” a deadpan satire of the twenty-four hour news feed. In the fall of 2003 Hodge left the Readings section to devote more of his attention to long-form journalism. In December 2003 he oversaw another radical redesign of Harpers.org; that month he also began writing a monthly print column, “Findings,” a sardonic portrait of recent medical, scientific, and environmental developments. Hodge was named Deputy Editor of the magazine in November 2004 and took over as Editor in April 2006. Born in 1967 and raised in Del Rio, Texas, where his family has been in the ranching business for five generations, he attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and eventually made his way to New York City in pursuit of a Ph.D. in philosophy at The New School for Social Research. Hodge received a master’s degree for a thesis on the logic of Aristotle’s metaphysics but abandoned his dissertation on Spinoza’s theory of freedom to work at Harper’s Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their two sons.

HIV + (as in paradigm propagandist):

Robert Gallo is a retrovirus researcher who built up a million dollar a year lab at the NIH searching in vain for human retroviruses which might cause cancer, and managed to establish HTLV-1 as causing leukemia, a much disputed result, and thus win a slice of the royalties (reportedly $100,000 per annum) that flowed from patenting the test which is now used to check donated blood before it is transfused in the US. He then won fame as the man who, with the encouragement of Margaret Heckler, Reagan’s Secretary of Health at the time (1984), first proclaimed to the world press that HTLV-III (his label at the time for what later was named HIV) was the probable cause of AIDS, the unprecedented immune deficiency syndrome that had appeared among gays in US cities in the early eighties. He is well known for initially discovering the now notorious retrovirus “HIV” (then LAV, soon HTLV-III) in two Fedex packs he received from Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, though he self-effacedly denied this for many years until an international battle over the royalties for the HIV antibody test, for which he filed a patent on the same day as the press conference, forced him to admit he hadn’t found it independently. Gallo became the most referenced scientist in the world for a time, as research into the virus drew extraordinary levels of public funding in the face of gay activism, but in the aftermath of fighting off charges that his laboratory had made false claims concerning its work on HIV the globe trotting scientist moved from the NIH to take the helm of a new Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where Gallo is now rapidly becoming the grand old man of AIDS virology. (All facts to be checked and confirmed).

David Baltimore is a noted retrovirus researcher who won a Nobel in 1975 for discovering reverse transcriptase the weekend following his hearing of the discovery of the substance by Howard Temin, with whom he shared the prize. Dr. Baltimore has always staunchly defended and promoted the current HIV∫AIDS paradigm, where HIV causes the illness, a role in which he has been characterized as “the Pope of retrovirology”, although for a time he came under fire from critics for resisting the withdrawal of a novel paper with surprising results which had his name on it, though it was written by Imanishi-Kari, a woman at a different university who conducted the experiment it described. The complaints of a graduate student, Margaret O’Toole, that the work reported seemed not to have been done after all, eventually triggered three official investigations which ended with the Secret Service finding that some data had been entered after the date of the experiment. Baltimore, who had apparently managed to bar O’Toole from science for several years, when she refused to abandon her complaint, rather than withdraw the paper, then apologized but eventually lost his position as President of Rockefeller University in the face of faculty disapproval, but after a rehabilitation process involving a new biography of him by Daniel J. Kevles of Yale, The Baltimore Case (Norton 1998), managed to end his career as president of Caltech, where he is now president emeritus, and Kevles is Koepfli Professor of the Humanities. (All facts to be checked and confirmed).

Howard Temin (1934-1994) was a leading cancer retrovirologist who researched and taught at the University of Madison at Wisconsin from 1961 until he died of lung cancer 33 years later, although he never smoked and he crusaded against smoking. In 1975 he shared the Nobel with Baltimore and his former professor Renato Dulbecco for his 1970 discovery of the enzyme reverse transcriptase, which proved the novel theory Temin had come up with in 1964 that the Rous sarcoma virus caused cancer by being transformed by an enzyme from RNA into DNA, which then integrated into cellular DNA which caused the cancer by redirecting reproductive activity. Temin held a panel in 1987 in New York City which has so far proved to be the only discussion of Peter Duesberg’s scientific objections to the HIV/AIDS paradigm held by establishment scientists and open to the general public. (All facts to be checked and confirmed).

Robin Weiss is a prominent Cambridge retrovirus researcher who has pursued, promoted and defended the HIV∫AIDS paradigm from its announcement by Gallo in 1984, and has attracted considerable drug company funding.(All facts to be checked and confirmed).

Anthony Fauci is a prominent bureaucrat and long the director of NIAID, who has based his career since the mid eighties on promoting and defending the current paradigm, at one point winning a surprising accolade for his efforts from President Reagan, who described him as his “hero” in AIDS. But in fact in HIV=AIDS Fauci’s notoriously unscientific act was to warn reporters in an article the AAAS newsletter that if they raised the topic of Peter Duesberg’s review of the HIV∫AIDS paradigm, they would not be welcome at the NIH, a career crippling sanction. The result of this attitude is that not even Larry Altman at the New York Times has dared raise the topic in his copious coverage of every other aspect of this prominent field of medicine, and the public is seriously underinformed about the existence, quality and details of the scientific objections to the current wisdom.

John P. Moore is a British born Cambridge graduate who currently researches the potential of microbicides to interrupt HIV transmission between macaques at Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan. His energetic activities in promoting and defending the HIV∫AIDS paradigm have been well known ever since he scored an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times last year (2006) deploring the “dangerous” activities of those who wish to review it, and he started up AIDSTruth.org soon afterwards, a website devoted to undercutting dissenters by publishing spurious replies to their critique and ad hominem comments on their supposed “homophobia” and similar. The site is now a useful excellent exhibition of the weakness of the best defenses against the scientific objections to the standard wisdom, and the reluctance and inability of the most strongly motivated defenders to answer with science rather than politics and social sanctions. Moore is notorious for calling the employers of dissenters and arguing that they should be fired or banned from teaching.

Renata Simone is a woman who has been in charge of producing documentaries on HIV∫AIDS at WGBH TV in Boston for the last fifteen or more years, and she is presumed to be the executive responsible for their gross dereliction of journalistic responsibilities in ignoring Peter Duesberg and other paradigm critics entirely in their extensive coverage since. Simone had lunch with Robert Houston in the early nineties, and he has reported that she informed him that she would like to cover Duesberg, but unfortunately she had been warned that her access to NIH and its scientists would be cut off if she did so. In this, however, she has done no more than match the responses of producers at other television channels, who have sometimes gone so far as to invite Duesberg to appear on camera only to withdraw the invitation at the last minute and substitute Fauci or some other paradigm defender.

Frank Lusardi is an AIDS skeptic and a computer programmer who has worked for large corporations constructing web sites, and who has helped to improve the sites of HIV∫AIDS dissenters, such as the AIDS Wiki. He is on the board of the Committee for the Reappraisal of HIV/AIDS, though he is not responsible for its site. Lusardi helped move Science Guardian/New AIDS Review in early 2007 from the host Powerblogs.com, using Powerblogs software, to BlueHost, and adapted WordPress blog software to look like the theme being used at Powerblogs. Unfortunately he suddenly abandoned ship without explanation before the project was completed, which is why colored links and other mechanisms on this blog do not yet work. Anyone who can read and understand WordPress code is encouraged to rescue the situation by contacting the host at the email provided (al@scienceguardian.com).

Nick Bennett, is a British pediatric physician working in upstate New York who believes in HIV=AIDS and has debated dissidents since 1998, and now occasionally posts on his misleading blog devoted to “stopping the spread of misinformation, mostly about HIV and AIDS but also about the accompanying scientific research.” He states that the site Correcting the AIDS Lies is “intended more as an info portal than a discussion group.” He is an MD and PhD. His PhD research was in the molecular biology of HIV. He states he has never received funding from any pharmaceutical company that makes HIV antivirals. “I do not get and have not ever been paid to do this.” He is currently working as a pediatric resident physician, with a goal to subspecialize in infectious disease. His salary is paid by New York State.

Tara Smith is an assistant professor (Ph.D in 2002) and epidemiologist at the College of Public Health at the University of Iowa who runs a leading blog (#7 in rank of activity) on ScienceBlogs, the sixty blog SEED Magazine promotion site, named Aetiology, which covers a wide variety of topics, including AIDS “denialism”, as she labels the view that HIV=AIDS is debunked by its own literature, with which she does not feel she needs any more intimate acquaintance than she has already to make up her mind on this issue. The blog has attracted some of the leading HIV=AIDS debunkers, including Darin Brown, Michael Geiger, Claus Jensen, and Robert Houston, and even this blogger, most extensively in the Mbeki: still in denial thread of Nov 6, 2007 and following, which accumulated 1362 Comments by Dec 13, and featured HIV=AIDS critics finally giving pause to Chris Noble’s endless parade of red herrings to draw off critics from basic, irrefutable flaws in the HIV=AIDS ideology, including an admission that AZT is .

John Lauritsen, a Harvard graduate and distinguished writer trained in survey research and statistics who began reviewing AIDS research in 1983, and he was co-author of Death Rush: Poppers & AIDS (ISBN 0943742056) in 1986 with Hank Wilson. He was thus well prepared to analyse the early AIDS drug trials, beginning with the 1987 Fischl AZT trial which was not only compromised by lack of controls (transfusions rescued some in the AZT group from death and unblinded the placebo group, who were slipped AZT by the others) but also by cheating (some AZT group members’ deaths were removed from the count). Lauritsen’s brilliantly scathing critique was carried in the New York Native gay weekly until that folded under attack from HIV=AIDS activists, and yielded a remarkable book, Poison By Prescription: The AZT Story, which is said to have saved thousands of lives, and reached its fourth printing. A collection of his major writings on AIDS, going back to February 1985, was published as ‘The AIDS War; Propaganda, profiteering and genocide from the medical-industrial complex’ Asklepious Press USA 1993, ISBN 0-943742-08-0; in a more rational world, it would have won Lauritsen the Pulitzer prize, for it is also one of the most intelligent books in the dissident arena. An early book which is widely admired is his The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935), 1974. For information on ordering books by John Lauritsen, contact him via e-mail: john_lauritsen@post.harvard.edu.

Emma Hollister, the founder of Candida International, a web site devoted to “Networking for health freedom internationally”, writes that she is an English artist and health freedom activist. “She lives in most places other than England, although she currently finds herself in the South of France. Her health freedom work involves networking, writing and translating. She speaks fluent French and Spanish and appalling but enthusiastic German and Italian.
Thanks to a healthy diet and the use of supplements she has been able to fight off a cancerous virus and other serious health problems caused by Candida. She decided it was essential to help others to learn about Candida and its connection to medical corruption and so created Candida International. As an artist she is more or less self-taught apart from a brief waft through Central St. Martins, London. She has exhibited wherever her travels have taken her, including in London and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her painting is mostly about things that worry or annoy her. She often uses cartoon imagery because she feels it’s the best way to talk about depressing things without boring people. The themes she covers, amongst many others, are: domestic violence, eating disorders, colonial guilt and overwhelming desires, the abuse of the pharmaceutical industries and many other ‘irritating subjects’.”