Document:Sternhell reviews Bauer

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Quadrant
July/August 2007

This book's title arouses suspicions: is the author really questioning the connection between Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)? A quick look at the back cover confirms this and tempts the rational reader to look no further and to consign the author to the dubious company of UFO nuts, flat-earthers, conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers. Nothing could be further from the truth. This book is a measured, heavily referenced work bristling with tables, maps, graphs and correlations derived from data emanating from impeccable and publicly available sources, although no one had apparently bothered to take a good look at them before.

Furthermore, Bauer is not a fringe-dweller and has strong scientific credentials: a first-class honours degree in Physical Chemistry from the University of Sydney (where I first met him as a fellow undergraduate), a Ph.D., a lecturer at the University of Sydney, a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky, the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Tech. Mainly after his formal retirement, he became involved in broader issues sometimes subsumed under the title of "Science Studies", an area in which he has also acquired an international reputation, but he had spent most of his academic life hewing away at his part (electrochemistry) of the science coal face. A typical life-journey of a successful and well-regarded science academic.

He is also the first to admit that he has no qualifications in or extensive knowledge of virology, or medicine in general, but points out that his thesis, unlike those of other "HIV sceptics" most famously Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, does not depend on technical arguments.

Bauer's thesis is that AIDS does not follow from infection by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus as evidenced by the "positive HIV test" and that HIV is not really a sexually transmitted disease, which is roughly the accepted medical view. He has examined the results of an enormous number of tests carried out on various groups of Americans ranging from blood donors to pregnant women, from prison inmates to volunteers for armed services, from household surveys to psychiatric patients and many more. We are talking about hundreds of research reports and literally millions of tests and of the correlations of the frequencies of HIV-positive results with time, age, gender, geographical distribution, ethnicity and the incidence of AIDS.

These data, carefully tabulated, graphed, mapped and critically discussed, form the bulk of Part I – roughly half of the book – which in my opinion could stand alone: the data are solid and Bauer finds it impossible to reconcile them with the accepted HIV/AIDS theory. It is worth noting that when he first started to examine such data he was amazed, assumed that he was missing something obvious, and wrote to several fellow scientists (including me) to ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Disturbingly, his enquiries to active HIV/AIDS researchers remained unanswered.

The rest of this book deals with attempts to deal with certain inevitable questions his work must provoke: Could your data for low-risk groups be skewed by false positives or by "contamination" from small numbers of high-risk individuals? (No.) If HIV does not cause AIDS, what does? (Probably lifestyle.) What about Africa? (Third World AIDS is a totally different condition and as for their statistics...) What is HIV if it is not the AIDS-causing virus? (Perhaps a measure of oxidative stress.) What does "HIV-positive" mean? (Nothing very important.)

Bauer deals with such questions but points out that all he can offer are reasonable hypotheses not in obvious variance with available data. He devotes much more space to another inevitable question: "How could so many scientists be wrong about HIV/AIDS?" Here he is on his own territory, having been active in the field of history and philosophy of science for a number of years. Part of his answer is both pertinent and indisputable: science and medicine often progress precisely by disproving well-established and universally accepted theories, and he cites important examples, from the bacterial cause of ulcer formation to the phlogiston theory of combustion, from modern physics to causes of kuru.

Kuhn, Popper and others get an airing, but more interestingly and originally, Bauer observes a deeper underlying cause which, not to mince words, amounts to a recent corruption of scientific research by the pressures of funding, media, conflict of interest and political interference, which lead to the formation of scientific monopolies and the erosion of the trust which is essential to the scientific enterprise. To which I would add the insidious temptation of worthy causes, of which climate change is a recent, obvious and important one: once a scientist engages with a good cause he or she very often selects or even falsifies results. However, that is another book. If you want to understand the HIV/AIDS story, read this one.

© 2007 by Sev Sternhell
Originally published in Quadrant