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

TO FUND OR NOT TO FUND, THAT IS THE QUESTION:

PROPOSED EXPERIMENTS ON THE DRUG-AIDS HYPOTHESIS.
TO INFORM OR NOT TO INFORM,
THAT IS ANOTHER QUESTION
by Serge Lang
14 May 1994
Since Gallo's press conference with HI-S Secretary Margaret Heckler in
1984, the HIV-AIDS hypothesis that "HIV is the virus that causes
AIDS" has generally been accepted. Some people, notably Peter
Duesberg, have pointed to serious difficulties about the scientific basis
for this hypothesis, and have proposed another hypothesis, the drug
hypothesis, that under certain conditions, involving the quantity and
nature of drugs taken over certain periods of time, drug use may be a
cause of certain diseases which have been listed by the CDC as AIDS
related diseases. I take no position at this time concerning the validity
of any of these hypotheses, but I am concerned here with the history of
a proposal by Duesberg to perform some experiments to test the drug
hypothesis. The bottom line is that the NIH Center for Drug Abuse
refused the funding, and the matter has not been reported in the
scientific press, notably Science, thus raising two issues: one about the
legitimacy of refusing such funding, and the other about the way the
scientific community is not informed properly of some events which
some scientists regard as important. The documentation I shall provide
can also be used to evaluate the verdicts of scientific reviewers
concerning the funding of a proposal that goes against accepted ideas.
~1. The proposal.
Duesberg filed a grant application to the HHS Public Health Service
on 30 August 1993. The purpose of the application was to examine the
effect of some drugs (nitrites) on some animals, to see if they cause
AIDS-related diseases involving both immunodeficiency, and cancer
type diseases. As Duesberg once said, "we'll feed poppers to mice".
Duesberg filled in the box asking for "the application's broad, longterm objectives, making specific reference to the health-relatedness of
the project" in more standard scientific language, as follows:
5571095.0256.048