"You Bet Your Life"

Dueling Scientists at Amazon!

There is a great book about the scientific times of Dr. Peter Duesberg, called Oncogenes, Aneuploidy & AIDS by our pal, Doc Bialy. Even if you have no scientific background, it is a fascinating read about one of the last great scientists in America.

Now, go check the reviews of the book at Amazon. Focus on two reviews by some contemporay scientists. The first is by Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Kary Mullis.

Why has Peter Duesberg, one of the smartest, imaginative, hard working, and honest biological scientists of the last fifty years, had such a rough time convincing other people and spreading his irrefutably superior ideas in the areas of cancer and AIDS? Why is Peter not incredibly successful and loved as an indefatigable thinker and keeper of the scientific faith? It is a mystery why this man is not a famous and well-funded director of an influential institute leading our young scientists.

Harvey Bialy has been around Peter and molecular biology for forty odd years, observing and collecting notes, and now he tells the intriguing story. I think it is important, because Peter is one in a million never to be repeated again.

His story, predicted by Jean-Paul Sartre when he pronounced somewhere that we all make our own hell out of the people around us, is told up-close and brilliantly by Bialy.
It is about humans taking on a vast responsibility, with the usual suspects - money, glory, and stubbornness. Unfortunately only an insignificant fraction of them seem concerned with the mission of saving lives. Bialy tries to remember it all, with some of the raw edges chewed back by time as he wisely allows the unsavory characters to hoist on their own inelegant petards.

It is a well-told tale with the humor of a sympathetic observer, a humor that reminds me not a little of the same incorruptible humor of his protagonist, Peter Duesberg - head and shoulders above the competition in so many ways, but unable to pull it off. He seems to know that something has damned him to that space, but maintains nevertheless a vital resignation in that razor sharp cortex, which misrepresents nothing and would never in a fair hearing be called on to answer for misdeeds. We meet a lot of the contenders in this well researched and deeply considered book, their powers and their fallibilities - their own statements a most readable report.

I recommend it to anyone who cares to be entertained or educated in the details of how the science of cancer or AIDS has been done in this last half century. But it is far more than that. It is a window cracked not just on Peter's travails but on all of the science and sorcery since the invention of money. A long winter's tale.

Pretty good, no?

Scroll down a bit. Compare Dr. Mullis' insightful prose to that of another scientist -- our pal, John Moore.

It is hard to imagine that this book was actually written by a professional scientist. The author displays only his ignorance and his prejudices when championing the extraordinary argument that HIV does not cause AIDS. This theory, of course, is utter nonsense, but it is a nonsense that was created by Peter Duesberg, the maverick scientist who is the focus of the book. Hence the author is writing a hagiography of one of his heroes, not a fair and accurate representation of the scientific facts and moral truths about HIV/AIDS. The book should therefore be read (or preferably not read) in that political context: it appeals to the small clique of AIDS denialists who think like the author does, and it should be ignored by anyone who respects science and the truth. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and when it comes to HIV and AIDS, the author and his hero are prime examples of the aphorism in practice. For factual information on HIV/AIDS, interested people should consult http://www.XXXX.XXX or the NIAID's web-site, amongst other bona fide resources.

So, which scientist makes the better, more clearer observations based on facts?  Which scientist has actually read and analyzed the book, and which scientist is merely offering pointless twaddle to pimp an obscure website?

Amazon asks, Was Moore's review helpful to you?  Tough call, but.......HELL NO:)

Exclusive Interview with Dr. Duesberg!!

Nah, just kidding. It's an old interview from 1993 -- the great Spin Magazine. I reproduce the first part below, conducted by Bob Guccione:

BG: Why do you think HIV doesn't cause AIDS?

PD: Every virus I've ever seen gets its job done by killing a cell at a time, and when it has killed enough, you get sick. HIV is said to be responsible for the loss of T-cells, which are the immune system. Now, in every AIDS patient studied so far, there is never more than, on average, one in 1,000 cells infected by HIV.

BG: How many cells in 1,000 would another virus infect-for instance a flu virus?

PD: If it would cause flu, then 30 percent of your lung cells are ruined by the virus, the lining is gone, or is infected. If you have hepatitis almost every single cell in your liver is infected.

BG: A lot of very bright scientists are working in AIDS and they don't all have dubious agendas and they must have asked themselves the same questions. If HIV doesn't kill a lot of cells, why is it widely believed to be the cause of AIDS?

PD: By assigning it all these unprecedented, paradoxical properties that no other virus ever had. They say it can kill cells indirectly, or can induce something called autoimmunity, which essentially is, the virus sends out a trigger and the body is now convinced to commit suicide. Or they say there are cofactors, if you really press them hard on it. But what they are has yet to be determined.

BG: How feasible is the argument that HIV triggers autoimmunity?

PD: It is very implausible indeed. There are a million Americans with HIV who are totally healthy. There are six million Africans according to the World Health Organization who have HIV; 129,000 had AIDS by the end of last year, that means five million eight hundred and so many thousand had no AIDS. Half a million Europeans have HIV and 60,000 have AIDS. So there are millions and millions of people on this planet who have [HIV but] no AIDS-why don't seven-and-a-half million get autoimmune disease if HIV is the cause of an autoimmune disease?

Well, the establishment says that everybody with HIV will develop AIDS and it's just a matter of time.

In the last ten years this has happened in America to about 20 percent of all people with HIV, 250,000[including deaths to date] out of a million. But the people who are dying from AIDS are hardly ever your all-American friends of 20 to 40 years of age: Virtually all heterosexual Americans and Europeans who had AIDS are intravenous drug users. And the homosexuals who get AIDS had hundreds if not thousands of sexual contacts. That is not achieved with your conventional testosterone. It is achieved with chemicals. Those are the risk groups, they inhale poppers, they use amphetamines, they take Quaaludes, they take amyl nitrite, they take cocaine as aphrodisiacs.

BG: What is it about intravenous drug use as opposed to ordinary drug use, like snorting cocaine, that would mean theses people would go on to develop AIDS?

PD: It's a matter of degree. With drugs, the dose is the poison. You take one aspirin, you lose your headache, you take 200, you drop dead. You smoke one pack of cigarettes, you're fine, but if you smoke two packs of cigarettes for 10 or 20 years, you may get emphysema. It is the same with drugs. If you snort a line of cocaine on a weekend, you probably won't notice the difference. But if you inject it intravenously two or three times a day, that's when the toxicity shows up. We're designed to take some shit. But we're not designed to inject cocaine three times a day. People have been having a little cocaine in their tea in South America, yes, but not injecting it three times a day, and nobody was inhaling nitrites-nitrites are toxic as hell. Nobody was taking amphetamines at those doses; they were not available. That's what's new.

But back to this argument about HIV. Viruses can only work one way. They can only be toxic if they affect a cell. They cannot work at a distance. There's no exception. Viruses are what you call an intracellular parasite. They don't have an autonomous life. They are just a little piece of information that is stuck into a cell and acts like a parasite. But outside of the cell it's like a disc outside a computer.

BG: So is there any precedent of a virus creating an autoimmune disease?

PD: There are a few hypotheses, but no. When a doctor doesn't know how to explain a disease, he has two classical crutches: it's a slow virus or it's an autoimmune disease. I've heard that for the last 20 years. When they didn't know what diabetes was, it was a slow virus or an autoimmune disease. Alzheimer's: slow virus or an autoimmune disease. And with AIDS, slow virus, causing an autoimmune disease. You have both!

An autoimmune disease is a misdirected immune response. It cannot tell a harmful virus from a harmless one, it overreacts. If the virus were the trigger, that should follow as soon as the virus gets in you. Not, as they say about AIDS, you get infected now, ten years later you get diarrhea. It's totally absurd.

BG: Is it possible that AIDS could be an autoimmune created disease, but HIV isn't the trigger?

PD: Some of the AIDS diseases could possibly be autoimmune diseases. Certainly not all. 38 percent of American AIDS cases have nothing to do with immune deficiency. 38 percent. 10 percent are Kaposi sarcomas, 19 percent are this so-called wasting disease.

BG: That's seen in Africa a lot, the slim disease?

PD: Yeah, there it's somewhat different, it's usually coupled with infections. But the American or European wasting disease is actually specifically defined as a nonparasitic disease.

Anyway, 6 percent is dementia, 3 percent is lymphoma cancer. If you add those up, that's 38 percent of all American AIDS cases. Out of 250,000, that's about 100,000-their diseases cannot be explained by any form of immunodeficiency whatsoever.

BG: Why is it considered AIDS, then?

PD: That's one of the questions I would love to know the answer to. I have asked several experts; they always get mad. AIDS is always presented as if it's all immune deficiency. It is not at all. Cancer has nothing to do with immune deficiency.

BG: So what is the common denominator between all of the 25 AIDS diseases?

PD: None! They name it AIDS, that's all. None of these 38 percent have anything whatsoever to do with immunodeficiency, but they're called AIDS.

There's not one AIDS disease that's new. What is new is only the incidence of these diseases in 20-to 45-year-old men, mostly, and a few women, has gone up.

BG: I've always thought the 25 diseases that form the AIDS syndrome had the common denominator that they were the results of the Immune system's inability to stave them off.

PD: That's how they try to sell it without looking at the evidence. But cancer is not a consequence of immune deficiency. Dementia has nothing to do with the immune system. Your brain is independent of the immune system. Of course, if there's no immune system, and your brain gets infected, you can get meningitis. But it doesn't affect your IQ. Sure, in the end, if everything fails you can get all sorts of diseases.

Even if you accommodate the virus with all sorts of absurd and paradoxical hypotheses-indirect mechanisms, and cofactors, autoimmunity, a ten-year latency period-even that doesn't get you around the solid number of 4,621 HIV-free AIDS cases [worldwide, a third of these in the U.S.]. How do you explain those? You couldn't have a better alibi than being there! And that is suppressed. Here we have a real cover-up. Last year the numbers of these cases was going up like crazy, and Anthony Fauci [director of National Institutes of Health [NIH], and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] called a meeting. And you know what they did? They gave it a new name. They call it "Idiopathic CD-4 lymphocytopenia." Or ICL. When you're HIV-free now, it's no longer called AIDS.

BG: There's 4,000 cases that don't have HIV, but the 250,000-plus cases that remain do have HIV.

PD: That's what you think. How do you know that?

BG: Because they've been tested.

PD: By whom?

BG: By their physicians

PD: So who tells us that they have been tested?

A guy goes to his doctor, clearly very ill, he has AIDS. He's tested or was tested earlier on and is found to be HIV-positive.

Even now, there is no record, anywhere, that says in how many American AIDS cases HIV was actually found.

But in every AIDS case, the CDC would know whether or not the patients were HIV-positive, because the physicians reported it.

You're led to believe this by the CDC, but the evidence that HIV is there, they never disclose. Nowhere in the HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, as they call the national statistics kept by the CDC, do you ever find HIV data. No survey on HIV at all. All they talk about is AIDS. And then you read a little more of the fine print, how AIDS is defined. They accept what you call "presumptive diagnosis"- AIDS cases without HIV tests. You know what that means? The guy wears a leather jacket, has an earring, and is coughing. And he's from San Francisco. That's an AIDS case. I don't even have to check it, his physician thinks.

I recently wrote a letter to Harold Jaffe [acting director of the Division of HIV/AIDS at the CDC]. He acknowledged 43,606 presumptive diagnoses up to 1988. I checked the literature and came up with 62,272 until 1992.

BG: Let me get this straight, you're saying between 43,000 and 62,000 of the cases of AIDS up until 1992 were not tested, which means we have no idea whether or not they were HIV-positive.

PD: Absolutely.

BG: They may or may not have been HIV-positive.

PD: Yeah. Even in the latest AIDS definition, in January 1993, they allowed presumptive diagnosis. In other words, a good number of them even now will be reported without and HIV test.

The public perception is that all cases of AIDS have HIV, that a case is not defined as AIDS without the presence of HIV, which would mean, by definition, that somebody tested them.

Most people assume, like you do, that everyone [with AIDS] is positive. That's not the end yet. We have what is called false-positive antibody tests. They call them HIV tests, but you know what you're testing. The antibody can be there and the virus could be long gone.

Great Radio Interview!

Author Stephen Davis has a written a provocative book, entitled  -- Wrongful Death. It's a novel about all this AIDS wackery and quackery, which we often make light of, but are ever mindful that it: (a) has psychologically terrorized and killed a lotta folks and (b) has deeply corrupted science, particularly biology.

Davis, former politician from Arizona, and Vietnam Vet, was interviewed by Doc Watson, on a radio show, discussing his book.  Immediately go check it out and tell me how it sounds!

And, NO, for the last time I ain't Stephen Davis -- (although the symmetry is rather remarkable!)

Second-Hand Smoke Jive

Yes, I think cigarettes cause lung cancer. Yes, I think the tar in the cigarettes scrambles the DNA of cells upon mitosis, causing insertions, deletions, and rearrangements of the nice, sublime chromsomes. This initiates the process of carcinogenesis.

Of course, our government bean-counters wanna extend a principle to the limits of its logic -- so now we gotta scare everyone about second-hand smoke!

Tell the Surgeon General to lighten up! (no pun intended).

The Dose is the Poison.

Moore Silence?

Since our favorite foil, Prof. John Moore,  -- he with big ego and prolific e-mail capabilities --  was smacked down by Prof. Gerald Pollack, a funny thing has happened.

1. No Moore exchanges with Doc Brown.

2. No Moore exchanges with Doc Bialy.

3. Hell, not even a haughty e-mail to me, stuffed with odd references to Star Trek and the West-Wing.

We earlier asked if someone, anyone, would pry his "gnarled hands away from the computer."

Hmm. Mebbe someone has.

But, in the meantime, ANOTHER Doctor, -- this time, Wilhelm Godschalk, PhD., has asked why Moore talks such a big game about AIDS, yet slithers away from any scientific challenge:

From: Wilhelm Godschalk xxxxx@xxxxx
Reply To: xxxx@xxxx
To: [email protected]
Subject: Thoughts of a senior colleague
Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2006 2:25 PM

Dear Dr. Moore, When I heard of the high-handed, though cowardly manner in which you declined a public debate on HIV/AIDS, I called you a fraud on the pages of our Dutch web forum Andere Kijk <http://www.anderekijk.esp.nl/> , so now your name is a household word here in the Netherlands too.  I am not unfamiliar with the behavioral defects of members of the AIDS orthodoxy.  I have had a public debate on the subject myself, with a proponent of the "Let 'em eat AZT-cake" philosophy.  TV cameras were rolling, but the debate was never broadcast.  I was not too surprised by this cowardice. In conclusion, I have a question for you:  Do you know anything about Virology and Biochemisty?  I hear you're from England.  I  used to know some pretty smart fellows over there, such as (Sir) Aaron Klug, John Finch, and Reuben Leberman.  But maybe science went to hell in the U.K. too, as it has everywhere else.  Too bad. Wilhelm Godschalk, Ph.D.

Will there be any reply from Silent John?

Association v Causation

Dr. Bialy at Rockwell has posted another fascinating piece of the AIDS puzzle -- how even the "smart" guys confused association with causation to lead AIDS researchers and the general public down the wrong path.

Analogy:  You see a crowd of people. A mini-riot of teenagers. Nothing deadly. Think Saturday Night on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley. There is noise. There is a bit of confusion, but no major violence. A storefront is shattered. Who caused it?

Yes, Bobby, Teddy, Jeff, Chris, Dennis, and David were all there at the site, hangin' out, whistlin' at girls, talkin' trash on the block. They were THERE. That means there is an ASSOCIATION: Teenagers=>Broken window

However, just being THERE, is INSUFFICIENT to establish who actually smashed the window. In fact, it could have been a gaggle of kids who already fled. It could have been an innocent accident.

To establish CAUSATION requires a more sophisticated inquiry as to who actually did what.

Same thing with disease. Your body is sick. You have millions of microbes. That's ASSOCIATION. Finding which microbe (if any) is causing the disease, however, requires a sophisticated scientific inquiry. In fact, it might not be a microbe at all, since many are present when you are healthy. It might be a deficiency in something  (Lack Vitamin C => Scurvy)

JUST FINDING A VIRUS IS NOT ENOUGH. Every high school kid knows this.

Rewind to 1984: Gallo found (allegedly) a new virus in 26 of 72 AIDS patients (36%). Is that sufficient to establish CAUSATION? Of course not. Why? Because any person with a brain would ask, What is causing AIDS in the other 46 patients, who DON'T HAVE THE VIRUS?

Yet, Gallo boldly (fraudulently) claimed at press conference that he found the "probable cause" of AIDS (actually Heckler said these words.) Quite convenient, that said virus just happened to be called, Human T-Cell Leukemia Virus III , when old Bob had previously claimed to discover Human T-Cell Leukemia Virus I (1980) and Human T-Cell Leukemia Virus II (1982).

Bob already determined that he was gonna find a virus, preferably his own, before he started looking!

From this original sin, the viral-AIDS hypothesis took off, the virologists closed ranks, (except for 1 courageous fellow!) and they've been endlessly milking the gov't cash cow ever since.

Scientists Gone Wild!

We talked about sex-deviant, Dr. Carlton Gajdusek below -- now we have "e-mail" deviant, Dr. John Moore, in his never-ending compulsive and obsessive quest to bother members of academia with deranged view of AIDS science. For God's sake, will someone pry this twit's gnarled hands away from the computer?

Here's Professor Gerald Pollack to Moore:

Dear Prof. Moore,

As a consultant to the National Science Board's Task Force on Transformative Research, I've become intimately familiar with issues of orthodoxy and its challenges.  In fact, the Task Force is now  in the throes of piecing together a plan that opens the National Science Foundation to non-mainstream approaches.  Those in the minority currently have little chance of success in winning grants. We are trying to right that wrong.

One of the areas that we focus on is the arrogance of those in power. Members of the orthodoxy will off-handedly dismiss minority  views as the work of crackpots.  Sometimes this is true, but, in too many instances dismissal is based not on fact but on hearsay. Nevertheless, those in power are consistently unwilling to debate the minority opinion, dismissing such activity publicly as a waste of
time, but too often masquerading the underlying issue: fear. This is some of what we've learned.

In the case of AIDS, minority position support from two Nobel Prize winners suggests that this is not necessarily the views of crackpots. Yet, you swift-boat those scientists with ad hominem remarks that seem to have no place in science.  In my view, this weakens your position.

Why not be brave and take up the challenge?  The opportunity would give you a chance to demonstrate to all and forever that Nobel-support notwithstanding, these guys are off their collective rockers?  If you are unwilling to debate Bialy, why not go to the horse's mouth and challenge Duesberg?  If he's not got something real, surely he'll be unwilling to submit to the humiliation of debate, and you'll come out on top.

Best wishes,

Jerry Pollack

>>>Gerald H. Pollack, Ph.D.
>>>Professor
>>>Department of Bioengineering
>>>Box 355061
>>>University of Washington
>>>Seattle WA 98195

Gracious, professional, sensible, polite. Simple queston, Why not be brave enough to debate Dr. Bialy? Why all the talk, and no action? Then we get Moore's response:

On Tuesday, June 20, 2006, at 09:53 AM, John P. Moore wrote:

Sorry, I don't agree with you, Jerry. The AIDS denialists have long craved respectability, so debating them gives them what they want but dignifies their position to an extent that is unwarranted. Our
position is clearly stated on the AIDStruth.org website and it's one I personally believe to be the correct one. You're welcome to disagree, of course.

You should also note that your internet-posted review of Bialy's  book on Duesberg reveals your sympathy with the AIDS denialist camp for all to see. I'll therefore not be communicating with you any further.

Regards
John Moore

I'll therefore not be communicating with you any further?!!?

Really? Why do we somehow doubt this:)

Here's Dr. Pollack's wonderful reply

From: Gerald Pollack <hxxx@xxxxxxx>
Date: Jun 20, 2006 12:34 PM
Subject: Re: AIDS-Wiki
To: "John P. Moore" <jxxxx@xxxxxxx>

Dear John,

This is the first time ever, in my 35-year scientific career, that a person said they refuse to communicate with me because I was impressed by the logic of a scientific argument, and hoped for a response from the other side.

Is there more to say?

Best wishes,
Jerry

Prof. Moore -- for God's sake -- this is becoming painful even for me. Write to Bialy, accept his offer to debate the issue -- scientifically on the merits without rancor. Have it out, Hell, you may even win! But, you're killin' us:)

UPDATE!

I have it on very good authority that Prof. Moore did make an attempt to educate Prof. Pollack by sending him a paper that he thinks is sufficient to dissuade Prof. Pollack of his "denialist "views. It is puzzling that he chose the particular paper for a number of reasons. He clearly knows Pollack had carefully read  Bialy's book, and therefore must have fallen off his chair when he read the famous Night at the Opera section --- where a government scientist, O'Brien, pleaded with Duesberg to sign off on a bogus paper for Nature. Pollack probably fell off his chair again when he saw that Moore had attached as his definitive proof the same paper that Bialy describes with such pathos.

Yet, Moore asserts "I have read Bialy's awful, awful book, btw." How many ASSertions can he get wrong before the ASS part of the word takes over completely?

Rockwell Rocks!

This libertarian genius, Lew Rockwell, has published some great stuff on bogus AIDS science. He had Dr. Rebecca Culshaw, Dr. Donald Miller (of course, Dr. Bialy) and now he's got......

Dr. Darin Brown -- smacking the hapless J.P. Moore again, upside the head.

More Scientists Behaving Badly

Our friend, George, mentions  the sleaziest Nobel Prize winner ever -- Calton Gadjusek. Made all this bogus research about prions -- replicating proteins -- that allegedly cause mad cow disease, mad sheep disease ("scrapie") and mad midget cannibal disease ("Kuru").

Problem though: When Gajdusek would take exotic trips to study "native" tribes for his "research," he would often bring back the boys to serve as his personal sex slaves. From Wikipedia

Gajdusek was charged with child molestation in April 1996, based on incriminating entries in his laboratory entries, statements from a victim and his own admission. He was found guilty in 1997 and, under a plea bargain, sentenced to 9 months to a year in jail. After his release in 1998, he was permitted to serve his 5-year probation in Europe.

In the course of his numerous research trips in the South Pacific, Gajdusek made a habit of bringing children back to live with him in the United States, where he would pay for their education, act as their doctor (he was trained as a pediatrician) and monitor their development, ostensibly out of scientific interest. From the 1960s to the 1980s over 50 such children, mostly boys, lived with him, and he legally adopted many of them. In April 1996, Gajdusek was arrested in connection with a Federal investigation of  child pornography on the internet. The connection to the original investigation was incidental: Gajdusek's research diaries (published by the NIH), which described man-boy homosexuality among the Fore and also strongly hinted at Gajdusek's own sexual relationships with boys he encountered in the course of his fieldwork, were being discussed online by pedophile groups. The FBI began an investigation of Gajdusek, locating one of his former wards and arranging to tape a telephone conversation in which the now 24-year-old man accused Gajdusek of molesting him at age 16, a charge which Gajdusek did not deny.

From Harvard Medical School to Nobel Prize to the Colonel Kurtz of virology! Now, he's free roaming the streets of a dessicated Europe. I'm tempted to cash in a few Euros, fly to Paris, find this sumbitch and have him publically horsewhipped.

Disgraced Scientist Facing Jail Time

Stem-cell research is a good idea in theory, but in practice, it is rife with scientific fraud and greed.

Exhibit A: The "supreme scientist" of South Korea is under indictment for bilking the gov't outta research dollars.

South Korea's disgraced cloning expert Hwang Woo-Suk has gone on trial on fraud, embezzlement and ethical charges related to his faked stem cell research.

Hwang, once referred to as South Korea's "supreme scientist", was indicted on May 12 with five other scientists on charges in connection with the bogus research and the disappearance of millions of dollars in donations.

Hmmm. I wonder if Hwang Woo-Suk is Korean for Robert 'you-suck' Gallo