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

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DUESBERG FUNDING

prevents evidence, compelling or otherwise, to develop one way or the
other. As a scientist, I object to the a priori obstruction placed in the
way of experiments to investigate the possibility that nitrite usage per
se may cause KS or AIDS.
(c) Reviewer R2 asks the question: "But is this proposal going to
prove that nitrites cause AIDS or AIDS defining illnesses such as KS?"
and asserts: "I very much doubt it." Indeed, the proposal makes no
claim as to what it's going to prove. One cannot determine what a
proposal is "going to prove" before having made the experiments. The
experiments themselves could have inconclusive results, for various
reasons, thus not "proving" anything except that a certain set of results
is inconclusive. Even if all experiments eventually show a uniformity
that after taking poppers in sufficient quantity for a sufficiently long
period, mice develop immunodeficiencies or cancer type diseases, the
experiments still would not "prove that nitrites cause AIDS" in human
beings when taken in sufficient quantities for a sufficiently long period
(possibly not the same period as for mice). Thus, speaking for myself, I
don't "very much doubt" that the experiments "will prove that nitrites
cause AIDS or AIDS related diseases". I know they will "prove" no
such thing, defectively formulated in such absolute generality by
Reviewer R2.
However, the experiments might suggest others; they might be
preliminaries for further experiments, on other animals, varying
circumstances or whatever. That's what experiments are for, to test
various ranges of validity of various hypotheses. If the experiments
systematically show the above uniformity, they might also open some
people's minds to consider more seriously the possibility (not certainty)
that nitrites may cause AIDS related diseases in human beings.
Conversely, if they turn out inconclusive or show an opposite
uniformity, they might have the opposite effect. The effect of the
experiments will depend on how they turn out, it will be different on
different people, and it cannot be predicted in advance, partly because
it will depend on many factors in many ways.
If a reviewer's doubts that Duesberg's proposal will prove that
nitrites cause KS or AIDS were taken as a reason not to fund the
proposal, and as a reason not to report the matter in Science, then I
object and I ask the scientific community to evaluate the legitimacy of
non-funding and non-reporting based on such a reason.