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| Gallo | Our primary concern is with rebutting Farber’s misconceptions about HIV/AIDS and antiretrovirals (ARVs). We have not focused our attention on misleading or biased reporting that relate to the NIH; none of us is an NIH employee. We have also ignored the sections on Peter Duesberg’s career problems, his rejected funding proposals, and how he is (or is not) regarded by other cancer researchers nowadays; we have no interest in Duesberg, other than to note that he is not an AIDS researcher and has no practical experience in studying HIV. Using a plethora of false, misleading, biased and unfair statements, Farber attempts to cast scientific institutions and scientists as dishonest. But intellectual dishonesty is the norm for Farber and other AIDS denialists including David Rasnick, Peter Duesberg, Kary Mullis and Harvey Bialy – all people she mentions favourably in her article. David Rasnick works for a vitamin entrepeneur, Matthias Rath. They have conducted unauthorised experiments on people with HIV in South Africa, convincing their subjects to take Rath‘s vitamin products in dangerously high doses, instead of scientifically recognised treatments for AIDS. It has been alleged that some of their subjects have died due to this experiment 1 . Farber implies financial motives permeate scientific research. Why does Farber not make similar allegations against the AIDS denialists, many of whom are involved in the marketing of unproven alternative medicines? HIV has been shown to be the cause of AIDS in numerous studies. ARVs have been shown to reduce death and illness in people with HIV. They have also been shown to reduce mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV. They often cause side-effects. On rare occasions these can be fatal, but death from HIV/AIDS is a far greater risk. The evidence shows beyond doubt that the benefits of ARVs far outweigh their risks. |
| RA | While not included as one of the 56 ‘errors’, the Gallo attempts to impugn the character, qualifications and credentials of the AIDS ‘dissidents’, ‘denialists’ or, as we would prefer, ‘rethinkers’ interviewed by Celia Farber: Dr. Peter Duesberg, Dr. Kary Mullis, Dr. David Rasnick and Dr. Harvey Bialy. The first sign of bias is the omission of their scientific credentials, including the prefix “Dr.” or suffix “PhD” – “David Rasnick” rather than “Dr. David Rasnick” or more specifically “David Rasnick, PhD”. By contrast, they purposefully mention that Robert Gallo and Daniel Kuritzkes are MDs and that John Moore and Jeffrey Safrit have PhDs. David Rasnick is described as performing unethical experiments for a “vitamin entrep[r]eneur”. They neglect to mention that he is a PhD research scientist with a background in protease inhibitor drug development. Yes, an expert in the very drugs that, in the mid-1990s, were going to revolutionize the treatment of AIDS. Sadly, after a brief period of hype, serious side effects started to emerge, fatal in too many cases. Rasnick no longer believes that the drugs he is an expert on have a place in treating AIDS. The authors mention Duesberg’s funding troubles, insinuating that this is a dismal reflection on his qualities as a scientist. However, within modern scientific institutions, funding and publication is decided by anonymous peer review. It is common and profitable for the majority (with lab, salaries and ability to publish dependent on HIV/AIDS) to exclude a minority of troublesome scientists who refuse to go along with their dogma. Duesberg was shut down after publishing a major paper in 1987 claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS. The Gallo document claims that Duesberg is “not an AIDS researcher”. This is an incredible statement. Robert Gallo has previously stated that Duesberg is one of the world’s leading retrovirologists. He has won many prestigious grants and awards. Apart from three books on HIV/AIDS, a PubMed query on “Duesberg P[au] AND (HIV OR AIDS)” reveals 34 scientific publications. A similar search for papers on retroviruses reveals 151. A search on papers related to cancer or tumors reveals 113, dating back to 1966. At the back of the Gallo document, just before the references, the authors do admit that Kary Mullis is a nobel laureate. What they don‘t tell you is that he won the 1993 Nobel for Chemistry – for the invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction nor do they reveal that he opposes the use of the manufacturing technique as a test for HIV. Mullis admittedly has some other unusual views which he is very open about. It would be a terrible day for science if everyone with unorthodox ideas was excluded from scientific discussions. Were that the case, Einstein’s crazy ideas, e.g., how time slows down if you travel real fast, would have excluded him from the inner circle of scientists, not catapulted him into it. At the back of the Gallo document is the information that Harvey Bialy was the founding scientific editor of the journal Nature/Biotechnology. They state “He no longer holds any position with Nature” which seems to imply that he did something wrong, when he simply retired and moved onto other positions. The authors fail to mention that Robert Gallo no longer holds any position with the National Institutes of Health, a much more interesting story, which will get to in a momemt. This character assassination would be more successful if all the authors of the Gallo document were scientists. Half of them, however, are AIDS drug treatment advocates. Pubmed queries on Nathan Geffen reveal 0 (zero) scientific papers on any topic. Gregg Gonsalves has 21 Pubmed-indexed news articles listed (omitting three scientific papers on turtles, presumably by a different G. Gonsalves), mostly in the Gay Men’s Health Crisis newsletter. Richard Jefferys had 11 hits on HIV or AIDS, all news articles, all but three in the Body Positive newsletter. Bruce Mirken has 31 news articles and letters listed in PubMed and one document that might be a scientific paper. All but three of these documents are in two AIDS treatment newsletters (AIDS Treatment News and BETA, the Bulletin of Experimental Treatment for AIDS). The other half of the authors – Kuritzkes, Safrit, Moore and especially Gallo – do have many scientific publications to their name. Robert Gallo has a different problem, the quality and validity of his scientific output. Probably no scientist in recent memory has been the subject of more investigations. An entire book was written by John Crewdson, Chicago Tribune science journalist, called “Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo” [1]. A chapter on the Gallo affair from Yale Mathematician Serge Lang’s book Challenges can be found at duesberg.com/viewpoints/gallocase-content.html. A Staff Report to the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations is at www.healtoronto.com/galloindex.html. A scientific report on errors and false claims in retrovirology, mostly in Gallo’ lab, by virologist Abraham Karpas, has recently been published [2]. While the numerous investigations into Gallo’s research are impossible to describe briefly, a good summary is in the New York Times review of Crewdson’s book: “Science Fictions is bursting with allegations leveled at Dr. Gallo, his associates, rivals and enemies, that include deception, misconduct, incompetence, fraud, sabotage, back-stabbing, double-dealing, overstatements, half-truths, outright lies, a clandestine affair with a co-worker, a bribery attempt, denials, evasions, coverups and serial rewritings of history”. We are not averse to non-scientists investigating HIV and AIDS, in fact we encourage it. We are, however, concerned that the eight Gallo document authors should attempt to belittle the accomplishments of Farber’s sources – Rasnick, Duesberg, Mullis and Bialy. All four hold PhDs. All are well-published, legitimate scientists. All have a right – indeed, an ethical obligation – to comment on HIV and AIDS. |
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