New AIDS Research Under Fire : Masters & Johnson Study: Revealing the Facts . . . or Promoting ‘Senseless Hysteria’?

A storm of criticism greeted sexuality researchers Dr. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson on Monday as they formally announced results of a study they say indicates the AIDS virus is “running rampant” among the heterosexual population.

Addressing a crowded and highly contentious press conference to introduce their book, “Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS” with co-author Dr. Robert C. Kolodny, the husband-and-wife researchers blasted “complacency” on the part of government and other AIDS specialists as they contradicted claims by public health experts who say the AIDS virus infection remains largely confined to the so-called “high-risk” categories of gay and bisexual men and intravenous drug users.

“At a minimum, we estimate that 200,000 heterosexuals have been infected” with the AIDS virus, said Kolodny, medical director of the Behavioral Medicine Institute in New Canaan, Conn., and a board member of the Masters & Johnson Institute in St. Louis.

But at a press conference immediately following the Masters, Johnson and Kolodny gathering, Mathilde Krim, American Foundation for AIDS Research founding chair and a research biologist, charged the three with performing “a disservice to the nation” with the release of their book, published by Grove Press, which was also the subject of a Newsweek cover story dated March 14.

“To put it bluntly,” she said, Masters, Johnson and Kolodny are “commercializing on AIDS and the fear of AIDS.”

Krim, who said she had read the Newsweek excerpts at her home over the weekend and had read the 200-plus-page book after it was delivered to her Monday morning, called the book “needlessly alarming,” and accused the three authors of promoting “senseless hysteria” and “exploiting public fear in order to sell a book.” In addition, she characterized the new AIDS book and the publicity surrounding it as presenting “a very serious setback to AIDS education.”

Had the authors confined their writings and recommendations to “their principal field of expertise--human sexuality,” Krim said, “I believe they could have helped rather than hurt the global effort to contain the epidemic of AIDS.”

Among the findings that have generated the debate among scientists is that kissing is a “possible” means of transmission of AIDS, and that the risk of contracting AIDS through blood transfusions may be as much as “50 times greater than claimed by government experts and representatives of the blood-banking industry.”

Much of the criticism of the Masters, Johnson and Kolodny material surrounds the study they conducted of 800 sexually active heterosexual men and women. The subjects were all between the ages of 21 and 40, Masters said. All reported that they had had no blood transfusions since 1977, that they had no use of illegal intravenous drugs and had had no homosexual or bisexual contact for 10 years.

The subjects were divided approximately equally between men and women who reported having been in long-term monogamous relationships for at least five years prior to the study, and those who reported a minimum of six sexual partners a year over the preceding five years. The participants came from two cities considered high-risk areas for AIDS--New York and Los Angeles--and two, St. Louis and Atlanta, considered less so.

Their finding of a 5% infection rate among the study group of men with at least six sexual partners over the past five years and 7% for women in the same category demonstrated firmly that the “infection of HIV (the AIDS virus) has definitely broken out of the high-risk group and is now rampant among the general population that has had numerous sex partners,” Masters said.

Joining Krim in her rebuttal to the Masters, Johnson and Kolodny findings, Dr. Michael Grieco, chief of infectious diseases and epidemiology at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center here, said that “glancing through this book, there is not anything new that I could see” in it.

Challenging the three researchers to offer their data for peer review or for publication in scientific journals, Grieco labeled the book “not responsible” in its conclusions.

“A book is not peer-reviewed,” Grieco said. “All it needs is a publisher to publish it. That’s not a test of validity.”

Masters, however, decried the scientific journal route, saying it was too time-consuming, and contending that journal articles did not provide enough space to encompass the three researchers’ information.

“We were interested in rapidity, in getting this information to the public,” Masters said. Their book includes data completed as late as the end of 1987, he said, and was published in just three months, “not one year,” as might have been the case in a professional journal.

Still, Kolodny said, as recently as last summer, the co-authors were not certain that the book would be published at all.

“This book was turned down by a great number of New York publishers,” he said.

He declined to reveal the advance the three received. Johnson, for her part, bristled at the suggestion that the book was written with commercial intent.

“We’ve never tried to sell books,” she said. “We’ve been more surprised than anyone else when they’ve sold.”

Kolodny, stressing the importance of preserving “absolute anonymity” of those involved in the study, refused to name the laboratory or laboratories that had conducted tests for the study. He also insisted that “we did not project our own data base onto the general population,” but rather, used computer models and other methods to reach broader conclusions.

In Washington, Dr. Peter J. Fischinger, AIDS coordinator for the Public Health Service and formerly the deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, said he had not read the Masters, Johnson and Kolodny book, but had examined the special report in Newsweek. The study of the 800 individuals, Fischinger said, was “not carried out in a scientific format, so I can’t tell enough about how the study was carried out. But it has to be put in the context of the number of studies that have been done.”

One year ago, Fischinger said, “4% (of heterosexuals) were infected. That number has held steady. Obviously we are not seeing any explosion in heterosexual infections.”

The Masters, Johnson and Kolodny study, he said, “looks at a very small number of the population and has to be taken in the larger context.”

‘Not a Representative Study’

Masters himself balked at extending his group’s findings to the general population, saying, “It is not a representative study.”

He added, however, that “before this study, not a single large-scale study” of AIDS virus infection had been conducted among non-drug users.

While early reactions from Krim and others faulted the Masters, Johnson and Kolodny book for adding to an air of “hysteria” about AIDS, Johnson countered that until now, “this issue has been met with nonchalance,” even by experts in the field.

“There has to be a strong stand taken to reverse these years of complacency,” Johnson said.

As for charges that none on their research team had any experience in epidemiology or public health, Johnson responded that as in the case of their earlier studies on counseling and human sexuality, their status as outsiders was actually an advantage.

“We have a long history of experience with being questioned as to our expertise,” she said.

Premarital Test Encouraged

In their book, the three authors strongly urge mandatory premarital testing for the AIDS virus. At Monday’s press conference, they called also for a “prospective, longitudinal study” that would assess “perhaps 50,000 people annually, for two to three years,” for the presence of the AIDS virus.

At her own press conference, Krim echoed the call for a wider study of the risk factor of AIDS virus infection for the general population. But she disputed the concept of mandatory premarital testing for the AIDS virus, saying that method “is not a good way of protecting the public health.”

It was just one of Krim’s arguments with the famed sexuality researchers.

“For Masters and Johnson--household names in our nation--to revisit the theoretical ‘parade of horribles’ concerning AIDS transmission serves no purpose except to fuel senseless hysteria,” Krim said.

Times staff researcher Eileen V. Quigley also contributed to this story.