HIV and AIDS: Questions of Scientific and Journalistic Responsibility

HIV AND AIDS

WHAT THEY SAID
From an interview (Q&A) with Kary Mullis in the California
Monthly (UC Berkeley Alumni Magazine), September 1994:
0Q: You mentioned Nobel Prize-winner David
Baltimore a moment ago. In a recent issue of Nature,
he said: "There is no question at all that HIV is the
cause of AIDS. Anyone who gets up publicly and says
the opposite is encouraging people to risk their
lives."
A: So what? I'm not a lifeguard, I'm a scientist. And I get up
and say exactly what I think. I'm not going to change the facts
around because I believe in something and feel like manipulating
somebody's behavior by stretching what I really know.
I think it's always the right thing and the safe thing for a
scientist to speak one's mind from the facts. If you can't figure
out why you believe something, then you'd better make it clear
that you're speaking as a religious person, not as a scientist.
People keep asking me, "You mean you don't believe that HIV
causes AIDS?" And I say, "Whether 1 believe it or not is
irrelevant! I have no scientific evidence for it." I might believe
in God, and He could have told me in a dream that HIV causes
AIDS. But I wouldn't stand up in front of scientists and say, "I
believe HIV causes AIDS because God told me." I'd say, "I have
papers here in hand and experiments that have been done that can
be demonstrated to others." I believe it was decided in the 17th
century around the founding of the Royal Society that that was
the way science was to stake its claims. It's not what somebody
believes, it's experimental proof that counts. And those guys
don't have that.
The quote by David Baltimore is from the article "AAAS
criticized over AIDS sceptics' meeting", by C. Macilwain, Nature
369 (1994) p. 265