Standards of Excellence
Note: I asked Cancer Genetics specialist Dr. George Miklos to review last month's Newsweek article about Peter Duesberg, in language that might steer us through the ideological fright-effects sprung upon the reader throughout the piece. I selected Dr. Miklos because of my admiration for his gift for interpreting pure science as it moves through an impure landscape. For one thing, (and no small thing, these days) I was acutely aware that he and his medical colleagues were free of any links to cancer funding authorities and could not be influenced by them. Since our first interview in 2004, when I was researching Duesberg's cancer work for Harper's, I have had the pleasure of Dr Miklos' narration of how the cancer story was playing out in the realm of reality — gleaned both through the literature and in what was reflected in patient care. In a personal note as he worked, Dr Miklos called the Newsweek article "crass," and admitted to being appalled, but when he submitted his article, it was, as expected, bereft of emotion, leaving a purely scientific and clinical deconstruction.
— C.F.
The recent Newsweek article "The World's Most Reviled Genius: Can the Scientist Who Denied the Cause of AIDS Be Trusted to Cure Cancer?" by Jeneen Interlandi missed a golden opportunity to help an inquisitive public to better appreciate the latest scientific work in the areas of HIV and cancer. It personalized these issues using Peter Duesberg as a lightning rod, instead of highlighting the rigorous scientific standards by which any work or ideas must be judged. Newsweek failed to inform the public of two recent developments in human health that bear directly on Duesberg's work: the first being the results of the latest HIV vaccine trial, and the second being the results of cutting edge DNA analyses in breast and cervical cancer research. Both data sets are supportive of Duesberg's hypotheses and illustrate the high scientific standards to which every scientist should aspire.
Those scientific standards were set out by the late Richard Feynman, a Nobel prize winning physicist. He stated that it was "necessary to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty." Scientists must be willing to question and doubt their own theories and results. It is the ability to be smart enough not to fool yourself, that is critical.
The Newsweek article states upfront that to honestly evaluate Duesberg's work in both the HIV and cancer fields one must separate the science from the scientist. This is absolutely correct. Unfortunately, the article fails to emphasize the science and puzzlingly launches instead into "the danger of denying HIV" by featuring a video, not from a biologist, but from an obscure psychologist, Seth Kalichman, who travels incognito under the pseudonym Joe Newton.
In an event paralleling Joe the Plumber's rise from obscurity, Joe the Psychologist Kalichman lambastes those who dare to question the dogma that HIV causes AIDS and describes them as heretics who must be ostracized from scientific enquiry. It is doubtful whether the original powerhouse quartet of Kary Mullis, Charles Thomas, Walter Gilbert and Peter Duesberg, who repeatedly raised the question "Where are the data that unequivocally demonstrate that HIV causes AIDS?", would be overly perturbed by Joe The Psychologist's data-free tirade. All four are acknowledged worldwide as serious intellectual and laboratory based contributors to the fields of molecular biology, chemistry, cell biology and virology (and two are Nobel prize winners). All four have highlighted the appalling lack of scientific rigor shown by the leaders of the HIV field and their unquestioning followers.
The constant drumbeat that "everyone knows that HIV causes AIDS" does not substitute for scrupulous data evaluation, particularly in the light of 25 years of failed HIV clinical trials. Instead the leaders and their acolytes conform to the old Chinese proverb: one dog barks and a hundred others mindlessly follow.
The Newsweek article implies that Duesberg's current cancer research is tainted by his supposedly incorrect conclusions on HIV. In order to examine this, one needs to dispassionately look at the predictions of the dogma that HIV causes AIDS. The major clinical predictions of the dogma are straightforward. They are that the heterogeneous collection of 30 or so clinical conditions (collectively subsumed by the CDC into an artificial mega-category called AIDS, that include Kaposi's sarcoma, cervical cancer, tuberculosis and some forms of dementia) is caused by a retrovirus, HIV. The predictions are that
(i) shutting down the virus with a vaccine would prevent all 30 conditions,
(ii) an effective vaccine would lower the viral load in infected individuals,
(iii) the reduced count of CD4+ lymphocytes would return to a normal level when the virus is shut down.
How well do the data conform to these predictions? Some very recent data are helpful in allowing us to reach a decision.
The results of the latest clinical trial for an HIV vaccine involving over 16,000 people became available on October 20 2009 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The trial combined two vaccines, ALVAC and AIDSVAX, each of which had individually been failures in previous trials. Despite the media exposure, examination of the data by independent scientists revealed that "There is not much evidence from the data that [the vaccine] protects at all," said Adel Mahmoud, a molecular biologist at Princeton. (Mahmoud was a former president of Merck Vaccines where he oversaw vaccine development for HIV as well as for rotavirus, shingles, Human Papilloma Virus and a combination vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella and varicella.) Mahmoud pointed out that the trial did not detect any difference between the viral loads in the two cohorts and this was "very, very disturbing." An effective vaccine would surely have been expected to lower the viral load in infected individuals. Not only did the vaccine have no effect on virus levels in vaccinated individuals who became infected, but it had no effect on the CD4+ lymphocyte count. The viral infection rates were also not significant.
Was this latest and best Thailand-USA clinical trial just an aberration? No. It was not. It should be noted that by December of 2007, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had spent about $600 million a year researching HIV vaccines and had supported 99 HIV vaccine trials involving 55 different products, 22 adjuvants and over 26,000 volunteers. 2007 was also the year which saw the implosion of the HIV vaccine trial, termed V520, undertaken by the pharmaceutical company Merck. The Merck vaccine not only did not lower the viral loads of AIDS patients, but it purportedly increased the risk of HIV infection in some groups.
"No one expected this," said Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health and the leading HIV researcher in the USA. Fauci is quite incorrect, this was expected, by scientists such as Mullis, Thomas, Gilbert and Duesberg who pointed that the original conclusion drawn by Robert Gallo that HIV causes AIDS, was not even supported by his original data published in Science in 1984. (It will be recalled that Gallo was the scientist investigated for scientific fraud by the Congressional Investigative Sub-committee of John Dingell, as well as by the US Secret Service. The US Secret Service forensically analyzed Gallo's laboratory material and reported that some of Gallo's laboratory notes were falsified; certainly there was no evidence for the virus.)
Gallo's data were always suspect and, as can now be seen from the failed 2009 clinical trial and its 99 predecessors, the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS was a house of cards just waiting to collapse. However, its leaders, its indentured laborers, and its cheerleaders (such as Joe the Psychologist) have failed to realize that they are providing life support to a corpse. HIV research is where your tax dollars go to die.
What then are the predictions of the alternate hypothesis that HIV is not the cause of AIDS? They are that
(i) vaccination against HIV would be largely ineffective,
(ii) viral loads would remain unchanged in vaccinated individuals, and
(iii) CD4+ lymphocyte counts would also remain unchanged.
Thus the data from the Thailand-USA clinical trial make perfect clinical and scientific sense if HIV is not the cause of AIDS. The data reinforce the scientific ignorance of the causes of the diverse set of clinical conditions that constitute the AIDS mega-category. This category is not a natural grouping of clinical conditions, each of which probably has separate causes. An honest appraisal is that no one knows what causes each of the diverse conditions that have been herded under the AIDS umbrella, but a good place to start to find out would be by breaking up this artificial grouping of clinical conditions and analyzing each condition separately.
It is clear that after 25 years of failed clinical trials and the exclusion of all dissenting hypotheses, the data have come home to roost. The HIV "experts" can be seen in a similar light to the automobile executives, recently described by some US lawmakers as visionless dunderheads and by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times as being "brain dead." It should also be evident from the continuing train wrecks of HIV vaccine trials that the answer to the question raised by the title of the Newsweek article — can the scientist who denied the cause of AIDS be trusted to cure cancer? — has been resolved in the affirmative.
*
Cancer. While moving dissenting voices to the outskirts of town is an easy task, moving inconvenient data to the outskirts of town and ignoring them is fraught with danger. This issue has surfaced again, this time in the cancer area, but yet again, solid data and proper scientific standards illuminate the facts.
The notion that all cancers arise from mutations in "cancer" genes, has become the research manifesto promulgated by one of the most prolific and most cited cancer researchers, Bert Vogelstein and its most decorated luminary, the Nobel prize winner Harold Varmus. The dictum that "mutations cause all cancers" has been elevated to the status of an ironclad dogma, although the data from patients on this point, rather than from manipulated mice or cell lines, are very fragile. Cancer is now considered to be a genetic disease whose origin and subsequent relentless march is caused by the sequential acquisition of mutations in the DNA of a subset of special genes, the so-called "cancer" genes. This is Mutations R Us.
In contrast to the exclusive mutational view, Duesberg has argued that the origin of cancer cells occurs by more normal, every day perturbations, that do not depend on the interminable wait for mutations in specific "cancer" genes. His hypothesis is that the major avenues by which cancers arise are as follows:
(i) a normal cell loses or gains a chromosome by mis-segregation during cell division, yielding aneuploid cells, a situation which leads to further instability and more gains and losses of chromosomes or parts thereof;
(ii) a normal diploid cell replicates its DNA so that it now tetraploid, but the cell does not immediately divide, a condition which is highly unstable and which generates aneuploid daughter cells that are massively heterogeneous in their DNA contents; and finally,
(iii) two cells can fuse, once again generating an initial tetraploid condition which is unstable and leads to aneuploidy.
The Duesberg hypothesis is that aneuploidy gives rise to vast numbers of new combinations of interacting gene expressions that predispose to cancer and any mutations that occur in this process are almost exclusively passengers — they are there for the ride. Importantly, it is the failure of everyday well-known cellular events that relate to mis-segregation of chromosomes, abnormal cell division or cell fusion that drive the cancer process. Basically any event, stochastic or forced, that destabilizes the DNA of a cell can constitute the origin of the cancerous cascade. It is this generation of an enormous amount of a new form of variation that allows some cells to leave the primary tumor and develop the capacity to metastasize at a new distant site, without waiting for more mutations to kick in. This is Aneuploidies R Us. It is strongly supported by the data from the earliest pre-cancerous lesions that are routinely accessible in patients; Pap smears for cervical cancer.
The recent molecular data from Heidi Lyng (November 2009) on cervical cancer have revealed massive changes in the levels of aneuploidy and gene expression. Similarly, Marco Marra and Sam Aparicio have used the latest deep sequencing DNA technology to reveal the state of the DNA in a primary breast tumor of a patient and the metastatic cells from the same patient. The DNA of these tumors has undergone massive upheavals; aneuploidy is extensive with more than half of the genome involved in some form of DNA amplification and some loss of DNA. The tumors also carry many mutations. Determining which of these may be clinically significant in patients is a difficult task.
The above data are the tip of the iceberg, but they are nevertheless representative of the ubiquitous finding of both mutations and massive genomic upheavals in the same tumor. Very tellingly, none of the mutations have been shown to be causative in any solid tumor in patients. (The pros and cons of the mutationalist dogma and Duesberg's alternative hypothesis have been evaluated in a masterful book by Dr. Harvey Bialy in Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS, and the reader is referred there for details.)
As the dust continues to settle around the rubble of the HIV and cancer landscapes, it can be seen that the data remain the only valuable asset and hypotheses must be continuously subjected to hard nosed testing, no matter how damaging the outcomes may be to the credibility of the leaders in the field. The data are the data. No amount of handwaving or smoke and mirrors can alter that.
The above evaluations put the Newsweek article into a more balanced and nuanced perspective. It is patently clear which scientists have adhered to the standards of excellence so clearly articulated by Richard Feynman. Duesberg's hypotheses are strengthened by the latest molecular data and he has at least as good a chance of making significant inroads into cancer as others in the field.
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Comments (6)
THE FIRST THING I TELL PEOPLE ABOUT CANCER...
...is that cancer generates more revenue annually than any other industry except petrochemicals.
What happens to the clinics, the NPO's, the purveyors of chemo and radiation, the makers of all the attendant instrumentation, the pharmas, etc., within, say, nine months after a definitive cure is announced?
The medical blindness is not exclusive to HIV and cancer. US healthcare is the third leading cause of death in the country (JAMA, July, 2000). People aren't getting any better, are not being cured of a whole legion of diseases; they're only getting by, mostly on medications that treat symptoms not underlying causes. It's a greed factor: if you relieve symptoms but don't fix the cause, then the patients are stuck with taking your prescription drugs indefinitely. The drug companies make orders of magnitude more money that way. If they actually produce a cure for something, it's a short-term or once-and-done Rx.
Sad to say, healing biz is sick with a cancer called greed. And since every profession has its whores, it's easy to hire hacks and "medical experts" to shoot down the truth-seekers who dare to publish.
This is something that the great leviathan called ObamaCare will not remedy.
What happens to the clinics, the NPO's, the purveyors of chemo and radiation, the makers of all the attendant instrumentation, the pharmas, etc., within, say, nine months after a definitive cure is announced?
The medical blindness is not exclusive to HIV and cancer. US healthcare is the third leading cause of death in the country (JAMA, July, 2000). People aren't getting any better, are not being cured of a whole legion of diseases; they're only getting by, mostly on medications that treat symptoms not underlying causes. It's a greed factor: if you relieve symptoms but don't fix the cause, then the patients are stuck with taking your prescription drugs indefinitely. The drug companies make orders of magnitude more money that way. If they actually produce a cure for something, it's a short-term or once-and-done Rx.
Sad to say, healing biz is sick with a cancer called greed. And since every profession has its whores, it's easy to hire hacks and "medical experts" to shoot down the truth-seekers who dare to publish.
This is something that the great leviathan called ObamaCare will not remedy.
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November 27, 2009
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Celia, I wouldn't like to have to sort your mail inbox!
Science today seems to be in a really sad state, when propaganda methods trump empirical evidence.
Has your facebook account been deleted?
Science today seems to be in a really sad state, when propaganda methods trump empirical evidence.
Has your facebook account been deleted?
,
November 28, 2009
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In his website, Dr. Duesberg wrote "The hypothesis promises improvements in cancer prevention by eliminating substances that cause aneuploidy from food and drugs".
,
December 13, 2009
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Historical Context
HIV/AIDS, in proper historical context, oh, if we could only see it in 100 years...
I saw an old movie week before last, Arrowsmith (1931), and was a bit floored by it.
The whole idea of the necessity of proper controls has been known for a very long time. The ONLY people abandoning proper controls benefits are the shareholders of big pharma, and so-called "scientists" that pretend they've actually achieved something significant.
In the future, people will look back at this time, and we will be judged, pitied, and looked upon with no small measure of disgust - how could we have been so stupid, so greedy, so short-sighted ?
I saw an old movie week before last, Arrowsmith (1931), and was a bit floored by it.
The whole idea of the necessity of proper controls has been known for a very long time. The ONLY people abandoning proper controls benefits are the shareholders of big pharma, and so-called "scientists" that pretend they've actually achieved something significant.
In the future, people will look back at this time, and we will be judged, pitied, and looked upon with no small measure of disgust - how could we have been so stupid, so greedy, so short-sighted ?
,
December 17, 2009
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Standards of Excellence, yes. AIDS could be eradicated by Nutrition, Not Vaccines, Not Chemotherapy, Not Condoms, and No Profit.
Thanks Celia.
Thanks Celia.
,
December 19, 2009
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I agree with Dr. Miklos that the Newsweek article focuses on the persona of Dr. Duesberg rather than on the scientific debate over the link of HIV/AIDS. I disagree with his selection of an vaccine against HIV as an example to disprove this link.
The HIV vaccine has proven elusive for various reasons, not all of them understood. It is therefore a poor tool to disprove the link of HIV/AIDS, as one cannot account for the unknown reasons of its failure.
In my opinion, Dr. Miklos argument would have been a lot stronger if he had succeeded in disproving the link by using anti-retrovirals as an example. I'd like to postulate that it might be impossible to do so, at least not with the same reasoning he used for the vaccine.
Let me quote his argument, replacing the word 'vaccine' with 'ARV' (anti-retroviral):
'...The predictions are that
(i) shutting down the virus with ARVs would prevent all 30 conditions,
(ii) an effective ARVS would lower the viral load in infected individuals,
(iii) the reduced count of CD4+ lymphocytes would return to a normal level when the virus is shut down.....'
Numerous studies and clinical practice back up this argument. Isn't this sufficient as an indirect proof of the causal link between HIV/AIDS?
The HIV vaccine has proven elusive for various reasons, not all of them understood. It is therefore a poor tool to disprove the link of HIV/AIDS, as one cannot account for the unknown reasons of its failure.
In my opinion, Dr. Miklos argument would have been a lot stronger if he had succeeded in disproving the link by using anti-retrovirals as an example. I'd like to postulate that it might be impossible to do so, at least not with the same reasoning he used for the vaccine.
Let me quote his argument, replacing the word 'vaccine' with 'ARV' (anti-retroviral):
'...The predictions are that
(i) shutting down the virus with ARVs would prevent all 30 conditions,
(ii) an effective ARVS would lower the viral load in infected individuals,
(iii) the reduced count of CD4+ lymphocytes would return to a normal level when the virus is shut down.....'
Numerous studies and clinical practice back up this argument. Isn't this sufficient as an indirect proof of the causal link between HIV/AIDS?
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December 27, 2009
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