Is it Politically Incorrect to Challenge AIDS-HIV Link?
Only correct thinkers need apply.
You’ve heard about the “political correctness” movement that is said to be spreading conformity through academe and the media.
But what about science? Surely nothing that intellectually stultifying could happen in science.
Science is predicated on the exchange of opposing opinions, the free flow of ideas, the testing and retesting of any hypothesis, right?
Tell that to Charles A. Thomas, 64, president of the Helicon Foundation in San Diego, a basic research firm.
Thomas has been bold (or foolhardy) enough to try to publish a letter in a major scientific journal doubting the government-approved hypothesis that the HIV virus is the cause of AIDS.
So far, Thomas has not found a journal willing to publish his letter, despite his top-drawer scientific credentials and those of his co-signers.
For the record: Thomas has a Harvard doctorate in biochemistry and has held tenured professorships at the Harvard and Johns Hopkins medical schools.
The 2 dozen co-signers include professors and researchers from top universities and laboratories in the United States and abroad.
Local signers are Robert Hoffman, professor at the UC San Diego medical school, and Kary Mullis, the biochemist whose work on DNA revolutionized medical analysis.
And it’s not like the brief letter is an up-yours tirade or anything. Says the kicker sentence:
“We propose that a thorough reappraisal of the existing evidence for and against this hypothesis be conducted by a suitable independent group.”
Despite its mild tone and impressive names, the letter has been turned down by Nature, Science (a publication of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science), and Lancet (the British medical journal).
(Thomas is awaiting what he’s sure will be a rejection from the New England Journal of Medicine.)
The turndowns have been strangely equivocal.
Lancet said that everyone already knows there are dissenters about HIV. Science promised to turn the letter over to a reporter, although none has yet followed up.
Thomas says that, in four decades of scientific work, he’s never seen journals so unwilling to publish something challenging a hypothesis.
Hoffman of UCSD thinks the journals may be reluctant to air “contrarian” views on AIDS because they are in competition to publish major AIDS papers from federally funded researchers.
As Thomas sees it, the federal government, under great political pressure to cure AIDS, rushed to judgment in deciding HIV causes AIDS and now is wastefully throwing billions of dollars at researchers:
“About 99% of AIDS research is devoted not to whether HIV causes AIDS but how it causes AIDS. The brain is inventive. It can find thousands of reasons.”
Not surprisingly, he said, researchers getting funded to study HIV-AIDS are not eager to suggest that the hunt is misguided, and that maybe the culprit is another virus or set of viruses.
Acceptance of the AIDS-HIV link, Thomas said, “is an artifact of federal (financial) support of science.”
Hoffman, Mullis and Thomas all point to the sad fate of Peter Duesberg, a renowned microbiologist at UC Berkeley who has been scorned and lost federal funding since he questioned the AIDS-HIV orthodoxy.
Hoffman said the example of Duesberg has discouraged other scientists from stepping forward: “They’re afraid for their reputations and their funding.”
Thomas has no federal funding at Helicon. He says that has freed him to speak up:
“I don’t want to die and know that I didn’t stand up for the truth.”
Weapons, Chickens and Real Money
Believe it or not.
* Spotted by San Diego attorney Phil Connor:
A scruffy fellow dumping two guns and two knives into a tree planter box on Broadway.
And then walking briskly into the downtown courthouse through the door where county marshals check for weapons.
* How do I get out of this chicken outfit?
Somehow the wrong telephone number appeared in a recent ad on how to become a franchisee for Chicks Natural, a San Diego-based chain of chicken restaurants.
Jim Spratt, who lives in Carlsbad and is not connected to Chicks, soon was getting numerous calls at home.
Now the ad has been changed, and Spratt has been soothed with a “generous quantity” of free chicken.
