But John Moore and his squad are on the job to sink it if possible

House of Numbers premiered last night at the Quad in New York City, and contrary to the uninformed review by Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times (see previous post), the documentary is a winner on every level – clarity of exposition, entertainment value, and unexpected revelation. Small wonder it has started garnering prizes at festivals (six so far).

Brent Leung adopts the Boy Scout approach of innocent inquiry, and travels the world in search of answers to the huge questions that HIV/AIDS ideology raises in every inquiring mind. He ends up gaining remarkable admissions from some leading lights in the field.

Web of inconsistency

The impression left as the credits roll is that every time he pokes at the supposedly solid science of HIV/AIDS he finds he meets no resistance, and his finger tears another hole is what seems like a cobweb of false claims, one that needs sweeping away before it catches another million hapless “HIV positives” to feed killer drugs to and, the film implies, shorten their lives for no good purpose except to preserve the careers and salaries of all in the vast economy of this statistically exaggerated and medically misread disease.

The film makes all the major points that the much vilified (by HIV defenders) “denialists” have made over the years, starting with Peter Duesberg’s brilliant and unrefuted reviews of the late 1980s, which have been censored from public attention ever since by Anthony Fauci of NIAID and the editors of the New York Times. But none of these McCarthy-ite internal politics are touched on in the film, which keeps it all very simple.

Conjuring the statistics

Can electron microscope images of the AIDS virus be produced? A leading expert in the technique shows Leung all the pictures produced by Gallo and by others since, but confirms they are only “probably” HIV. Do any tests provably confirm the presence of HIV or even HIV antibodies in the blood of “HIV positives”? No they don’t, other experts admit.

As the scientists quarrel on camera about which combination of tests might be definitive, it emerges that all tests, even PCR tests, have package disclaimers saying that in themselves they confirm nothing about the HIV status of the individual. Meanwhile, test interpretation varies by country, and by the information you have given the tester (are you gay? are you poor?). Rapid tests, used widely now in South Africa, are unreliable and prove nothing, it turns out, though Brent takes one on camera. Many Africans are still judged to be AIDS victims without any testing at all (the Bangui definition is still widely used, he discovers, for symptoms as simple as diarrhea and fever, no testing required).

James Chin, who was chief epidemiologist for WHO for five years, says he warned headquarters how flimsy the statistics were but no one paid any attention. Now he predicts that their “house of numbers” will collapse as the true situation emerges, and indeed huge downward adjustments have been made by the UN for the total of HIV “positives” in the world. (Kevin De Cock, the WHO official who stated a couple of years ago, that heterosexuals have never in reality been threatened by AIDS is not mentioned.)

With Brent and his audience thus instructed how a positive status doesn’t necessarily mean they are infected or have ever been infected by HIV, he is then shown how damaging and even lethal the drugs administered are. Reducing the dosage of the dreaded AZT in the nineties by substituting David Ho’s cocktail of protease inhibitors slowed patients’ decline, reprieving them from the early death guaranteed by full dose AZT before the mid nineties. Everyone lasted longer, so the triumph of protease inhibitors was applauded and the cause of AIDS spuriously confirmed. But deaths have continued at the same rate in the US since (about 17,000 a year). Meanwhile the definition of AIDS was expanded so that a decline was turned into a doubling of cases.

Applause during the film

By the time the film contemplates the experience of Steve and Sherrill Nagel the audience is ready to be horrified. The Nagels adopted a baby from Romania who tested positive in the US, and dutifully fed her AZT while doctors predicted she would barely last till age two. Her leg pains, loss of coordination, and mental disruption are disturbing to watch, and the parents finally decide that even by the measure of standard AIDS ideology it is not worth harming the child any further with AZT. There was a burst of applause at the premiere when it is announced that the child is now 19 and perfectly healthy.

The film doesn’t leave room for any official rebuttal of this or other anecdotes, but on the core points of the science and its politics well known figures such as Anthony Fauci of NIAID are given time to rebut the cynics. When they contradict themselves this is shown clearly. But what is most surprising is that Martin Delaney, who turned from being a skeptic to a staunch advocate of AIDS drugs when his San Francisco group Project Inform gained drug company funding, expresses a lot of world weary doubts about their usefulness and even notes that the companies have no financial motivation to think up a better way to go.

Montagnier’s stunning statement

In its final phase Brent Leung maps AIDS worldwide and shows how it matches poverty and how lack of good food and hygiene gives rise to exactly the same symptoms that are laid at the door of HIV. Is it possible, he asks, that much of global AIDS is sickness from poverty, and would be cured by pouring money into clean water and decent food rather than damaging drugs? That the drugs are damaging is earlier highlighted by photos of buffalo humps and by the death of Joyce Hafford after only 39 days in a test of nevirapine, with grotesque skin symptoms.

The establishment in HIV/AIDS has practiced answers to all this, to be sure, though none of them bear examination, as we have found in writing this blog. So perhaps Brent Leung can be forgiven for not including them, although they are undoubtedly among the 300 hours of film he has recorded. What he has produced is a vivid documentation of unanswered – in fact, confirmed – doubts about the scientific rationale peddled in HIV/AIDS, conflicting claims by experts, and real people examples of ignorance and suffering. He has shown how AIDS drugs could equally be causing the same and worse symptoms and deaths as HIV is supposedly causing.

The climax of the film comes with Luc Montagnier assuring him that “a good immune system” can rid the body of HIV in a few weeks. Leung gets him to repeat this unexpected statement and then asks if it applies to poor Africans. If their immune systems are restored with adequate nutrition, would their bodies conquer HIV too? The soon to be Nobelist Montagnier says “I would think so.”

Montagnier also emphasizes as he has done over the years (he was barred from the San Francisco AIDS Conference for it) that a co-factor is always necessary for HIV to do its deadly work, which opens the possibility that HIV itself is not actually involved. Presumably now that he alone won the Nobel last year for discovering HIV “the cause of AIDS” he will now be less frank in public. But here he is on film. The cat is out of the bag.

Will the doc be stopped?

This is the kind of paradigm threatening conclusion that a huge array of vested interests cannot abide, ranging from the emotions of patients who have committed themselves to taking the drugs to the vast array of career and financial interests that need to keep the 25 year old HIV/AIDS ideology in play, including now George Bush and Bill Clinton, who have both sought redemption through AIDS funding.

John Moore of Cornell, the HIV scientist most hostile in public and behind the scenes to outside review, has vowed in email to them that the filmmakers will, as the Hollywood phrase has it, ‘never eat lunch in this town again.’ Yet his efforts haven’t been able to stop their momentum so far, despite his supporters at the Times, which itself now has a huge, 25 year investment in the status quo.

With the politics so intense the censors of AIDS review may still succeed, but on behalf of the public Leung has fired the loudest shot yet across the bows of the great ship of fools, SS HIV Science. It is hard to imagine that, as has already happened, thoughtful people completely unaware of the real situation before they take their seats won’t leave the cinema skeptical of and even hostile to those that want to shut off public debate.

And the irony is that Leung has done nothing but document the tale that HIV scientists tell against themselves. The confusion he records looks amusingly like the Mad Hatters tea party from Alice in Wonderland. Could it be that they have led the world through a looking glass for 25 years?

Entertainment plus important revelation. All in all, a stunning achievement.

Long run danger remedied by normal health measures

As we were saying, we welcome the Lasker prize which Dr Anthony Fauci of NIAID has won, because we already recognized a year ago the extraordinary contribution that the well tailored director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases had earlier made quietly to the final solution of the world wide AIDS panic, at a New School panel in June last year.

For some reason, perhaps personal modesty, Dr Fauci had not informed the general public previously of his breakthrough in understanding, but merely communicated it to the Proceedings of the National Academy and included it in a chapter on the Immunology of AIDS he wrote for the textbook “Fundamental Immunology”, edited by William E. Paul MD and published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins in 2003 (p. 1295):

What Fauci confirmed to the few graduate students and working scientists who perused this book was that the result of HIV arriving in the human body was to touch off and maintain proliferation of T-cells, rather than killing them off.

What happens is that for a 56 fold (5600 per cent) gain in HIV early on CD4 T-cells drop maybe 6% but CD8 T-cells rise 20 per cent. The net increase is there until drugs are provided, in which case this beneficial effect is wiped out. If the drugs are stopped, then the benefit is once again felt.

The total outcome is hidden in the complexity of the immune system – there are other major factors involved in the standard and rather misleading T-cell count, such as rate of production, redistribution, longevity of cells, level of apoptosis and activation induced cell death – but these trends are clear, Fauci pointed out:

“Several investigators have demonstrated that there is an increase in CD4+ T-cell proliferation in both HIV and SIV infection. In certain studies, the enhanced T-cell proliferation that was observed during active disease was significantly decreased following the initiation of anti-retroviral therapy, and proliferation increased again in parallel with plasma viremia following the cessation of treatment in these individuals.

Read the Proceedings for genuine AIDS truths

Fauci’s reference is a paper by Lempicki R. A. et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (97:13778-83, 2000). The Proceedings is the place where all those seriously interested in what is really going on in science should go, perhaps. It is after all, the place where Peter Duesberg’s definitive review and rejection of HIV as the cause of AIDS took place nearly two decades ago, a beautifully written and argued exposition with 200 footnoted references from mainstream literature which oddly enough has never been answered in the same journal, though the HIV=AIDS paradigm author Bob Gallo promised the editors he would do so.

Apparently Gallo preferred to do so from the safe bunker of the last chapters of Virus Hunting, his 1991 book three years later which was happily not subject to peer review, nor did it have to provide references, unlike Duesberg’s masterpiece, which was afterwards cited in Nobel prize winning biologist Walter Gilbert’s graduate class at Harvard as an exemplary paradigm challenge. But we digress, as usual for the benefit of newcomers to this issue.

Fauci explains what kills T cells

Returning to Dr Fauci’s brave and perspicacious statement drawing the attention of insiders to the efficacy of HIV in stimulating the immune system, and the negative impact of drugs, this seemed at such odds with the general assumption in HIV∫AIDS that HIV kills T-cells rather than adds to them, and that drugs are needed to defeat the virus at whatever cost, that when Dr Fauci and Mathilde Krim mounted the stage at the New School with Larry Kramer to celebrate 25 years of HIV∫AIDS a year ago June 19th, Robert Houston took the opportunity to ask Dr Fauci about it.

The question came as a rowdy audience of middle aged gays calmed down after upsetting Larry Kramer so much with their objections to him telling the representative of the New York Times that the Times didn’t cover the issue of HIV∫AIDS enough that he stalked off the stage.

His departure was a pity, for his long time friend Dr Fauci gave an extremely informative reply which heralded the final solution of the AIDS puzzle, suggesting both its cause and its cure.

Fauci’s Final Solution in AIDS

Here’s how it went. Houston asked his question as follows, both flattering the two exceptional scientists and armed with the reference to the Fauci written statement if for some reason the great man saw fit to deny it.

Houston: We have two of the most distinguished scientists in the world on AIDS on this panel and I would like to ask a basic scientific question. How does HIV cause AIDS? Does it do so by directly killing T-cells, as the New York Times science writers seem to tell us, or do you think it does it in the opposite way: by causing T-cells to multiply – and by overactivating the immune system?

And this is how Dr Fauci explained how HIV boosted the immune system, rather than crippled it, having identified drugs as the real cause of T-cell decline in his written review earlier:

Fauci: Well… It does it in both ways. I don’t want to waffle with you on that but it is very, very clear that HIV is related to a very aberrant turning on and activation of T-cells. When T-cells are sustained in their activation – because every time anybody in this room gets an immune response to a benign virus or bacteria your immune system activates (he draws line going up in air with his hand) and then it goes down again (draws line in the air going down again) to the base line.

We like the Freudian slip here in calling HIV a ‘benign” virus, but we may have misheard Fauci – readers can check for themselves when we put the video up on YouTube shortly for the admiration of all.

Here Fauci has confirmed that when HIV is responded to by the immune system, the T-cells are activated to drive it out, and indeed, reference to the Lempicki paper will, as Robert Houston has shown here in the last comment attached to our earlier post nominating Fauci for the Nobel, for a 56-fold rise in HIV viral load between early and intermediate levels of infection, CD4 T-cells decline not very much (around 6% in the chart), while CD8 T-cells rise 20 per cent, for a combined rise of 11%. Now Fauci continued:

When you have a high level of viremia with a lot of activation you just drive the immune system to an aberrant form of activation that leads to the death of a cell, even cells which don’t directly get infected with HIV. They die by a process called apoptosis, meaning essentially they die a suicidal type death.

Here the director of NIAID for 23 years is bringing in cell suicide as a means of explaining how T-cells do die in the face of HIV. Apoptosis is indeed the last refuge of HIV∫AIDS paradigm promoters in their anxiety to explain how it is that HIV might be causing immune collapse by killing T-cells, when there is no discernible biological activity along these lines detected by any researcher in the 23 years of exceptionally well funded HIV∫AIDS research.

The problem is that until Dr Fauci in this reply confirmed that this was the case, doubters had wondered what the evidence was that there was any more cell suicide than normal when the body is aiming for homeostasis, ie returning to the normal balance in the proportions of the constituents of the blood. Cell suicide is a normal process here, and with the levels being maintained, as Dr Fauci confirms, it is hard to see how it is killing off so many T-cells that the immune system collapses.

The difficulty that conjuring up cell suicide is intended to solve is that there is no evidence of any mechanism by which HIV directly kills T-cells, which was the original premise of Robert Gallo’s theory that HIV was the cause of the immune collapse of AIDS. The evidence is that HIV does not kill T-Cells, so enthusiasts for the well funded paradigm had to come up with indirect ways it might get rid of T-cells.

Apoptosis is the best they could come up with, which didn’t present any great difficulty to the army of officials, politicians, activists, health workers, journeyman scientists and dying AIDS patients who were told of this solution perhaps because none of them had heard of Ptolemy the Egyptian, who managed to work out elliptical orbits that could predict the movements of the planets even though he assumed that the Sun went around the Earth, rather than vice versa. The indirect mechanisms by which HIV is said to work its fatal effects on T-cells are the elliptical trajectories of the HIV∫AIDS explanation of AIDS.

Now, however, the director of NIAID sums it all up in one beautiful breakthrough concept which accounts, finally, for the ultimate decline and fall of the human immune system after years of responding to HIV by making T-cells which effectively drive out the virus in a matter of weeks, reducing it to minimal levels of as little as one to five active virions per milliliter, impossible to detect without PCR.

Why does it all change? Steam is key

The puzzle has always been, why does the immune system collapse in five ten or even twenty years, if it has got rid of virtually all virus within six weeks. Fauci now ‘explains’:

You can wind up depleting your T-cells by direct infection and those cells dying or just a burst of aberrant activation and also some elimination by the immune system of infected cells. So it’s not a unified concept; there’s multifactorial ways in which you drain your T-cells and then after a few years you just run out of steam.

In other words, Dr Fauci is prepared to throw everything including the kitchen sink into the mix. Those who say that HIV doesn’t kill T-cells are wrong, it does kill them by “direct infection” somehow. Then you have more killed by cell suicide after a “burst of aberrant activation”. Finally – here is the key at last – the immune system just “runs out of steam”.

Dr Fauci’s Solution to AIDS

Robert Houston confesses that he failed to follow up his question because he was prepared only for Fauci to deny that T-cells proliferated when faced with HIV. What we wish he had done is congratulate Fauci for a conceptual framework which tells us how to defeat AIDS.
Unless we misunderstand him, here is his solution to HIV∫AIDS:

1. With even a dramatic leap in viral load, the T-cells divide faster in response. The end result is that CD 8 T-cell count goes up substantially, with no significant decline in CD 4 T-cell count.

2. So if there is any concern that the immune system is weak, simply add more HIV.

3. Remove ARV drugs, and T-cells will multiply and return to excess levels again.

4. After defeating HIV is a matter of weeks and then maintaining this success for up to twenty years, somehow the immune system might run of steam.

5. But as Dr Fauci’s choice of phrase implies this loss of steam can surely be prevented with proper exercise, nutrition, fresh air, travel and all other general health stimulants, including the renewed optimism that comes from knowing there is a solution – the Fauci Solution to AIDS.

But since the Lasker winner didn’t actually mention this last point explicitly perhaps we can check with him at the lunch where he will accept his prize, surrounded by the members of the medical and economic establishment, of which he has long been a fully paid up member.

So after years of the whole world left confused and supporting antiretroviral drugs as the only defense against the deadly effect of HIV, we have Dr Fauci to thank for telling us that on the contrary, it is HIV rather than drugs which benefit the immune system.

Of course, it must be acknowledged that both Robert Gallo, and two years later Peter Duesberg, were the first to point out that HIV was harmlessly involved in AIDS. But neither of them detected the fact that it was actually beneficial to AIDS patients.

Gallo, of course, proved that HIV was not the cause of AIDS with his 1984 papers showing it was occurring in only one third of sick AIDS patients, with pre-AIDS patients having it more often, suggesting it was a possible antidote. Now Anthony Fauci has found why – HIV stimulates the immune system – and he has also noticed that drugs have a negative impact.

Considering that the drug companies involved in HIV∫AIDS have a considerable interest in this revision of the paradigm, we feel that Anthony Fauci is showing considerable moral fortitude in revealing these insights in public in front of gay activists, who were already a noisy crowd and most of them funded by the drug companies.

Luckily, however, none of them noticed.

But no one offers a check – yet

Just how well Duesberg’s talk went at the Libertarian Lew Rockwell conference in San Francisco on Friday and Saturday, where Duesberg delivered the keynote on Friday evening at 6.30pm, “AIDS – a viral or chemical epidemic?”, is made clear on Barnesworld, the blog renamed Hank’s You Bet Your Life, where two appreciative reports are carried today. They give a good account of both the scene and the content of Duesberg’s talk to about 150 people.

Duesberg was surrounded by a throng of questioners for two hours afterwards, during which a birthday cake was carried in in his honor, December 2 being his 70th birthday (”he looks 50″ says one of the entries). Scholar and author Harvey Bialy, the eminence grise of the blog and now its frequent correspondent, follows the reports with an email from Duesberg which ends with the single down note (as far as we are concerned) of the evening, his joke that “they did offer heart-felt applause and questions from 9 until 11 PM. But no one has asked if they could write a check to the lab yet.”

In the Comments that follow, however, there is already one Pat Edmonson promising Duesberg a share of a sum he will receive after the year end.

Carrying these reports on YBYL is a significant public service, not only because it shows how overwhelming Duesberg’s critique is when presented to a live audience, but draws attention to the key factor – big money – which has crippled good science in this field, and allow bad science to triumph. Everything is being done, we hope, to make contributions to Duesberg as easy as a click on PayPal or mailing a check. His website is Peter Duesberg, where it lists his address as Professor Peter H. Duesberg, Ph.D., Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, c/o Stanley/Donner Administrative Services Unit, 229 Stanley Hall #3206, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3206 Fax: (510) 643-6455. There is a form to write a quick email to Duesberg if you wish at Write an email.

Why send money to Duesberg?

His research into cancer is the most significant and pioneering in the field, and can be continued at the modest sum of $100,000 a year. Modest, that is, relative to the huge sums being wasted by proponents of the current oncogene paradigm in cancer research, which Duesberg and Bialy have pointed out in their respective articles and books has been a theoretical dead end since the mid eighties, like HIV∫AIDS, an even vaster money machine which is also wasting all its research millions on a paradigm which has yet to be justified in any meaningful way, not to mention wasting the expanding millions spent on delivering AIDS drugs to patients here and in Africa, India and points East, courtesy of the efforts of Gates, Clinton, Bono and other celebrities whose view of HIV∫AIDS is under researched.

At the moment, with his faithful long time lab assistant dying of the very same dread disease that they were researching, Duesberg is alone in his laboratory, dealing with his own minor errands and bench work as well as following his fruitful intellectual path into exploring aneuploidy (multiplying chromosomes) as the real trigger of cancer, as explained in Harvey Bialy’s valuable handbook to the Duesberg saga in both fields, “Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS: A Scientific Life of Peter H. Duesberg”.

There have been no graduate students in Berkeley who have dared work under Duesberg since he entered the fray by tilting against both the HIV∫AIDS and oncogene windmills two decades ago in Cancer Research. But the undergraduates he taught about viruses and cancer last year gave him a standing ovation after his final class.

All in all, there are few scientists who deserve full funding more than Duesberg, given the staggering quality and significance of his accomplishments, from starting two major fields of research (oncogenes and aneuploidy) to renouncing two (oncogenes and HIV∫AIDS) out of a love of real scientific truth and a sense of public responsibility, despite his privileges as the leading scientist in oncogenes and retroviruses and popularity among the scientific elite – he was a member of the National Academy before any of his opponents in AIDS, as far as we know, and every single grant application of his to the NIH was given the green light, until he wrote the Cancer Research paper in 1987 rejecting HIV as the cause of AIDS.

His work over twenty two years dealing with the profession and the public on the HIV∫AIDS question is a breathtaking accomplishment given the depth and breadth of the research he had to cover to shut all the escape hatches built by the paradigm promoters in arguing that even if the theory didn’t make too much sense in this regard or that regard it would all become clear in the end.

Meanwhile they need another $100 million from the NIH, please, whereas all the time Duesberg’s important research in cancer was shortchanged of his time and starved of funds, since Duesberg has never got a penny from the NIH since 1987 and the number of private patrons who have responded you can count in the fingers of one hand and have two fingers left over, and this in a country where there are now so many millionaires that only billionaires are counted as rich any more. San Francisco private investor Robert Leppo deserves a medal for taking the lead in enabling Duesberg’s work.

ABC’s John Stossel ran a segment last Wednesday taking the super rich to task for not contributing enough to charity, and we were particularly struck by the man worth $6 billion who said he didn’t know where to send it.

We are sending him a suggestion.

First annual award of NAR goes to indomitable scientist

We have just learned rather belatedly from our brother in arms blog, the high level Hank’s You Bet Your Life directed by Harvey Bialy that Peter Duesberg is to speak tonight (Fri Dec 1) in San Francisco. Go to Lew Rockwell and the Libertarians Celebrate World AIDS Day with Peter Duesberg to read about it, and download Duesberg’s powerpoint presentation which will be put up during today, and a live report before and after the talk.

The cost will be $150 and in our opinion, well worth it, especially for anyone who has never seen this restlessly sharp and witty analyst in action. A lecture by Duesberg is a live event that lives up to the description, for his style is entirely spontaneous, even if he is delivering slides and comment he has covered before. The only problem is that sometimes his witticisms at the expense of dull mediocrity are delivered in a conversational throwaway giggle, rather than in the ringing tones they deserve.

Come to the LRC Conference!“May you be Healthy, Wealthy and Wise.” That’s about as generous a wish one person can offer another. Well, you’re on the way if you attend the LRC Benefit Conference on revisionist health and finances on December 1–2, 2006 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Foster City, California, near the San Francisco Airport. Join us. You’ll be dazzled by our speakers, have a terrific time and help LRC as well.

Friday, December 1, Marco Polo Room

* 5:30pm: Registration and Welcome 6:00pm:

* Burt Blumert, Center for Libertarian Studies Mark Thornton, Ludwig von Mises Institute “Welcome”

* 6:15pm: Gary North, “Dr. Rothbard’s Prescription for Health and Wealth”

* 6:45pm: Peter Duesberg, University of California at Berkeley “Is AIDS a Viral or a Chemical Epidemic? – a Multi-Billion-Dollar Question”

* 7:15pm: Gala Reception

Presumably Duesberg’s presentation will be the one he gave at the meeting in New York in June, when he addressed the Rethinking AIDS group meeting and the press on the topic of how HIV∫AIDS scientists and officials have failed to realize any of the predictions inherent in their favorite paradigm, from heterosexual spread in the US to a rise and fall in prevalence in the US to virus killing T cells to significant mortality globally, while Duesberg’s alternative account of AIDS, as an immune deficit syndrome caused by drugs in the US and conventional assaults such as malnutrition and diseases in Africa, predicts everything that has happened in this field over the last two decades quite beautifully.

Peter Duesberg wins first annual NAR “Hero of AIDS”award

The Duesberg presentation on World AIDS Day coincides happily with the decision of the editors, writers and researchers of New AIDS Review to award its first annual Hero of AIDS medal to the distinguished pioneering scientist.

Other scientists in the running for the award included Robert Gallo, the first man to entirely disprove his own fervent hope that HIV was the “probable cause of AIDS”, as he and Margaret Heckler announced in 1994 at a press conference faithfully transmitted to the front page of the New York Times and thence worldwide by Lawrence K. Altman, the MD and CDC trainee on whom the Times has since depended for its unvarying support of this notion of HIV as “the virus that causes AIDS”, even though as it turned out a week later Gallo’s heralded papers in Science revealed that HIV was not the cause of AIDS after all, since he had been able to find it in only 26 out of 72 patients’ blood samples.

Also considered was Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID at the NIH, who was the first to bring the attention of scientists to the fact that HIV not only did not kill T cells in a provable manner that anyone understood, either directly or indirectly, but actually provoked the proliferation of CD4 T cells, the very cells it was meant to kill directly or indirectly, or by supernatural means, and thus cause AIDS through immune dysfunction. This didn’t provably happen.

Instead, the implication from the pen of this giant of science running NIAID was that the answer to AIDS might be infecting patients with more HIV, normally absent from their bodies in any detectable amount, which like any good leukemia virus (human T cell leukemia virus was Gallo’s first name for HIV) would not only augment the CD4 count of patients, but also act as a vaccine to ensure that they were better defended against HIV by multiplying antibodies to it, so there will be even less HIV in patients than the normal vanishing amount. In other words, the correct antidote to HIV was more HIV.

However, neither of these scientists have had the courage of Peter Duesberg in bringing their conclusions to the attention of the public as well as of scientists, so we unanimously decided that Duesberg was the first and only choice for the first award of Hero of AIDS for his work over two decades demonstrating that Gallo was correct, and there is no chance in Hades that HIV is the cause of anything, let alone AIDS.

The following is the full rationale attached to the award, which will be presented to Duesberg in person when he is next in New York:

This Hero of AIDS Medal is hereby awarded to Peter Duesberg, Professor of Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, member of the National Academy, and pioneering researcher in cancer and in AIDS, who is undoubtedly one of the most stable and smart minds in the world, as the style and substance of his papers testify. There are very few men if any in science who could have taken on such a monster of misinformation and misapprehension as the HIV∫AIDS boondoggle and relentlessly exposed its lack of scientific and common sense across its whole range, which is exceptionally wide and diverse compared with any normal theoretical topic. We salute him for that in particular. For this he sacrificed immense amounts of time, having to repeat again and again for the benefit of even willing listeners, truths which really should be obvious to most smart people, if they weren’t crippled by the pressure exerted by the idea that virtually all the world’s scientists and the entire host of humans that occupy this planet are united in an army that marches under this flag and will actively battle anyone who stands in their way.

This great scientist sacrificed work on cancer which might well have led by now to better palliatives if not a cure for that monstrous way of dying, which takes so many more human beings off this planet than the ills of AIDS. He did this in a spirit of service in the public good which is now largely anachronistic.

In return American science and American society have trounced him unmercifully in a manner which is shameful and should disgust everyone who bothers to find out what happened – not a penny from the NIH since, not a single grad student in his lab, where he is now alone except for undergraduate help. Significantly, the undergraduates rose and applauded his course this year, except for one or some who immediately sent round an anonymous email letter before the final exam warning against taking up his view on how genes and retroviruses work, evidently sponsored by other senior academics in terror of his debunking of the theory of oncogenes, which has been profitable in attracting funds for twenty or thirty years but not at all in results.

There is no more self demeaning stupidity in this affair than the urge so many smaller people to withhold from Duesberg his due, calling it hero worship from his fans etc instead of acknowledging greatness where it occurs without the approval (yet) of the Nobel committee, advised as they are by David Baltimore, Harold Varmus and other politicians of science said to have finagled theirs for relatively doubtful if not useless work based on the death of one chicken a hundred years ago.

The correct course of action in an ideal world would be to simply give Duesberg his own research department at the NIH with $1 billion to spend on pursuing real science, with a large administrative staff to run his errands perhaps including Anthony Fauci to look up things on Pub Med for him, if someone could teach that stalwart spokesman of HIV∫AIDS lore how to do that, in which process he might stumble across the papers we have referred him to a year ago that reveal that a tad of Vitamin A will do the trick as far as Bird Flu is concerned, since that is what mainstream studies have proved defeats the production of TNF, the lung suffocating killer in that case.

Yes, we at NAR admire and thoroughly approve of Duesberg’s decency and scientific spirit in not selling out or giving in to maximum pressure against him and his family, and we have found his science and logic to be impeccable across a breathtakingly wide range of false claims forced on his attention by the miserable pack of self serving or dimwitted scientists, irresponsible officials, unprofessional reporters, robotic doctors, unaware health workers, and foolish patients who ignore or deride his advice.

We also admire Duesberg’s cheerful and witty public persona and we admire him for remaining unaffected by all the disgraceful exhibitions of personal animosity and idiocy he has aroused by just doing his job as a thinking member of the scientific elite.

We at NAR say he is a heroic figure who will be a name noted in the history books of science and his critical work objecting to the grand pile of absurd science that is HIV∫AIDS will be studied at Harvard as exemplary (as it has been already in Walter Gilbert’s graduate seminars) far into the future, unless independent scholarship in science goes down the YouTubes along with traditional quality in other spheres.

Let’s hope not, and it is in that hope that we hereby present Duesberg with The NAR Medal to a Hero of AIDS, Peter Duesberg.

This tribute as written above is a first draft and will be willingly edited if anyone writes in to NAR directly or in comments and objects to anything offensive, for which we apologise in advance.

Now back to San Francisco and Hank’s You Bet Your Life to see if the promised Powerpoint of Duesberg’s presentation tonight is available.