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

DUESBERG FUNDING

think a revision of the grant could well be fundable. I consider.
that a judgement of "not recommended for further consideration"
is harsh and unfair, and is partly based on wrong premises as
noted above. This judgement may indeed prevent a useful
research project from being carried out. I disagree with most of
the views of Dr. Duesberg about the causes of AIDS, but hope that
he is sufficient of an objective scientist to perform the tests
properly (if he revises the application and does some
preliminary studies) and hope that he will report the results
promptly whether or not they support his views. (He does state
that he will report the results whichever way they turn out.)
The other two "researchers" who wrote back were not among those
suggested by Duesberg. One of them was extremely unfavorable. I quote
from what he wrote to Jon Cohen.
Reviewer R2. I must assume that the average quality of NIMD
grants is as high as those funded by NIAID. On this assumption,
if I submitted an application of this standard to NIAID, I would
not expect it to be funded. The overall content is very meager.
Firstly, the background section is strongly biased toward a
particular hypothesis and either ignores or minimally discusses
contrary views...
Kaposi's sarcoma is a focus of this application. There is
reasonable, but not overwhelming evidence for an infectious agent
other than HIV that causes KS. The pathogenic effects of such a
microbe may be facilitated by HIV-induced immunosuppression,
and it is possible that HIV may also promote the development of
KS directly. Oral-fecal contact has been linked with later KS
development, perhaps due to microbe transmission, and such
sexual activities may be associated with nitrite usage. But there
is no compelling evidence that KS, or AIDS, is caused by nitrite
usage per se......But is this proposal going to prove that nitrites cause AIDS or
AIDS-defining illnesses such as KS? I very much doubt it...dosing
mice chronically with compounds does not prove that the same
conditions will be found during "normal" human usage. The
toxicological limitations of the experiments have been pointed
out by the study section; I am not qualified to assess the validity
of the objections, but they seem reasonable...
In short, this proposal suffers from a poorly justified
hypothesis, a shortage of preliminary data and a very sketchy