To Fund or Not to Fund, that is the Question: Proposed Experiments on the Drug-AIDS Hypothesis

DUESBERG FUNDING

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secondary reviewers, there might have been enough concerns
raised that I may have supported the NERF view.
~4. Some comments.
I shall comment on statements by Reviewers R2 and R3. These
comments merely give a sample of my objections to their evaluations.
(a) Reviewer R2 asserts: "Firstly, the background section is strongly
biased toward a particular hypothesis and either ignores or minimally
discusses other views." So what? It is not the responsibility of the
proposal to discuss other views in a major way. The point of the
experiments is to test some aspects of the particular drug hypothesis.
However, it is important that other hypotheses were not disregarded
in the proposal, because the experiments would be conducted on control
groups of mice some of which would be infected with Molony leukemia
virus and some of which would not. This virus is claimed to cause mouse
AIDS.
(b) Reviewer R2 asserts: "But there is no compelling evidence that
KS, or AIDS, is caused by nitrite usage per se." So what? In the
statement preceding this assertion, Reviewer R2 accepted that "there
is reasonable, but not overwhelming evidence for another infectious
agent other than HIV that causes KS." So according to Reviewer R2
the evidence that KS is caused by HIV is also not compelling. Is this a
reason not to perform further experiments to test the extent to which
HIV does or does not cause KS or AIDS? The medical establishment
has tried for a decade to determine the pathogenesis of HIV, without
success. The people who support the HIV-AIDS hypothesis have only
epidemiological evidence (for whatever it's worth), which is not
compelling.
There is also no compelling evidence that KS, or AIDS, are not caused
by nitrite usage per se. If there was compelling evidence that nitrite
use causes KS or AIDS, there would be no need to do experiments about
it.3 Conversely, preventing such experiments from being performed
3The need for such experiments was explicitly recognized in NIDA's
"Summary Statement", which I have already quoted to the effect that "the
major strength of this proposal is that it addresses the important public health
problems of whether nitrite abuse acts as a cofactor in AIDS pathogenesis and
if nitrites can cause Kaposi's sarcoma in the absence of retrovirus infection."