HIV and AIDS: Questions of Scientific and Journalistic Responsibility

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HIV AND AIDS

with leukemia in chickens. As he said (quotes taken from the Lauritsen
account on the e-nets):
Notice, I used the words, "associated with". They were given
the name, Avian Leukosis Virus, indicating they cause a type of
leukemia in chickens, along with many other symptoms,
incidentally. Now what I learned from my own work -- I
developed the way of assaying these viruses in culture so they
could be worked with, in a fairly expedient manner -- is that
these leukemias could and would occur in the absence of the
retroviruses....
Every cell in the chicken is infected, and every cell is
constantly producing virus, but even then...only 15% of those
chickens, who were congenitally infected, developed the
leukosis. In spite of these findings, these viruses are still called
Leukemia or Leukosis viruses, as they have been for 85 years. The
assumption is made that they are the sole, or at least the prime,
cause of the disease in chickens...
One of the things I want to point out is the tricky business of
naming a virus. Naming something HIV, Human
Immunodeficiency Virus, Avian Leukosis Virus, Avian
Myelocytosis Virus -- all of those names fix in the minds of those
who use them, or work with them, that this is the proof.
Rubin also addressed the "political problem":
What's transpired in the development of this symposium is
illustrative of the difficulty of making a critical scientific
analysis of the AIDS problem. It's really more of a political
than a scientific problem..."
Now I've come to my point about the politicization of this
issue. In 1988 the American Foundation for AIDS Research
(AmFAR) convened a meeting in Washington, DC, which had the
obvious purpose of silencing Peter Duesberg. As I had discussed
the matter with Peter on many occasions, he asked me to join the
meeting, even though he knew I was an agnostic about the role of
HIV -- more like Erasmus than Martin Luther. I reluctantly
agreed, feeling I could play the role of an intermediary. How
naive I was! I did some extensive reading before the meeting, and
a lot of questions occurred in my mind, that I thought needed
discussion. When I raised those questions at the meeting, I got
the response you might expect from a bunch of fundamentalists