Document:Adams foreword
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Berkeley, California
20 July 1988
In 1960, a veteran retrovirologist urged his peers to "raise questions whether the known facts about viruses suffice to account for it". The subject was cancer, the veteran was Peyton Rous, and the quote is from a paper in Cancer Research. Mindful of that example, in 1987 I asked a similar question in a paper likewise published in Cancer Research: whether the known facts about two human retroviruses suffice to account for leukemia and AIDS.
Clearly, following Rous's example did not make me very popular with the multinational club of retrovirologists. My article was officially ignored and not 'dignified' with a response because the AIDS virus establishment was 'too busy...saving lives' and testing for antibodies to HIV. I was often shunned like an AIDS patient by my former fellow retrovirologists. My views were unwelcome for several reasons: after a frustrating, twenty-year-long search for a human cancer virus, the retrovirologists were craving for clinical relevance and hence happily adopted HIV – 'the AIDS virus' – as the cause of AIDS. The discovery of HIV was announced in the US at a press conference and the virus-AIDS hypothesis became instant national dogma in the US. On this basis, the retrovirologists convinced their governments to spend billions of dollars to stop the predicted viral epidemic, already being labelled 'the epidemic of the 20th century'. The virus was also the immediate darling of the biotechnology companies. Due to its very low complexity, it can be readily cloned for diagnostic test kits and vaccines. In turn, the virus was a hit with the press because it mobilised in readers the instinctive fears of a contagious disease, and appealed to the public prejudice that all evil comes from without.
Even potential critics were infected by the AIDS viromania. Instead of criticising the virus, they were kept busy criticising virologists engaged in a three-year-long Franco-American legal battle over who first discovered the 'deadly virus'. Ironically, the fierce controversy generated further loyalties for the virus-AIDS hypothesis, since it would have been a farce if the battle had been fought over a virus that was not even the cause of AIDS.
Last summer, however, Jad Adams and his team from Meditel, Katie Leishman from the Atlantic Monthly, and John Lauritsen from the New York Native called for interviews – evidence for islands of common sense somewhere in the sea of AIDS viromania.
I am often asked why it is just myself, Harry Rubin, Joseph Sonnabend and a handful of others who question the virus-AIDS hypothesis. Why doesn't a young, ambitious scientist make a name for himself by questioning it? The answer lies in the strong conformist pressures on scientists, particularly young, untenured scientists, in the age of biotechnology. Their conceptual obedience to the establishment is maintained by controlled access to research grants, journals and positions, and rewarded by conference engagements, personal prizes, consultantships, stocks and co-ownership in companies. A dissenter would have to be truly independent and prepared for a variety of sanctions. I, for instance, was sarcastically called a 'brilliant chemist', but labelled a bigot for considering daily administration of psychoactive and immunosuppressive chemicals more likely to be the cause of AIDS than a chronically dormant and chemically almost undetectable retrovirus. Invitations were issued only on the condition that I did not debate the 'control' of AIDS with the AIDS tests or the DNA-inhibitor AZT, both of which are based exclusively on the virus-AIDS hypothesis.
I hope that Jad Adams's book will not only entertain, but also open minds and free science to solve AIDS. Let me end with the words, again, of Peyton Rous: "We are of many minds and opinions, yet we are one in the search for truth." (Cancer Research, 1960)
© 1989 by Peter Duesberg
