Fighting on after the war is over, HIV contrarian publishes yet
another paper
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/01/hiv-contrarian-still-publishing-still-wrong.arsBy John Timmer |
Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg
When the world first learned of AIDS, there was a lot of justifiable
confusion over what could cause such a confusing array of symptoms.
But, over time, the confusion slowly subsided. A virus, HIV, was found
that infected the right cells and spread in the right ways to explain
the progression of the disease. Public health measures that targeted
it slowed its spread, and drugs designed to target the virus helped
extend the lives of those infected. By now, the Nobel Prizes have been
awarded and the evidence that HIV causes AIDS is so comprehensive,
it's treated as a fact.
But not by everyone. As attention first focused on HIV, a handful of
scientists very publicly raised questions about whether the scientific
evidence was as solid as others thought. And, years later, at least
one's still at it: Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg. Last
month, after his latest effort to see his arguments published ended up
in a retraction and the firing of an editor-in-chief, Duesberg managed
to get it published in the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology.
It's a rather dramatic path to publication for a paper. But anyone
familiar with Duesberg's sometimes flamboyant contrarian nature
wouldn't be surprised.
A history of contrarianism
The HIV/AIDS connection isn't the first scientific consensus that
Duesberg decided to go up against. He did pioneering work in the
characterization of retroviruses (viruses that are transmitted using
RNA as a genetic material, but then copied into DNA and inserted into
their hosts' genome), helping to show that they could pick up genes
from their host that enabled them to induce cancer. That work,
extended by others, ultimately led to the oncogene hypothesis, which
suggests that cancer is caused by mutations in a limited number of
host genes that control cell growth. The work got Duesberg a tenured
position at Berkeley and election to the National Academies of
Science.
By the time oncogenes had earned their leading proponents a trip to
Sweden to meet the King, however, Duesberg was having none of it. The
genes we'd identified, he'd argued, are mostly incapable of driving
cancer when mutated. Oddly, it was an argument that most people would
agree with—one mutation in one oncogene isn't enough, and must be
accompanied by additional genetic changes. But Duesberg would argue
that these mutations only came about due to wholesale genetic changes,
while knocking down a caricature of what most people in the field
thought.
If his differences with the scientific consensus on oncogenes were
either subtle or imaginary, the same can't be said of his arguments
over HIV. As the research community became ever more convinced that
this retrovirus was the cause of AIDS, he persisted in arguing that
the virus was just an opportunistic infection, taking advantage of an
immune system compromised by some other agent. Duesberg blamed a
variety of other agents: drug use among homosexuals, malnourishment in
sub-Saharan Africa, etc.
His arguments, to a casual reader, might sound compelling. To give one
example, he argued that HIV failed to satisfy Koch's postulates, which
were central to the development of a scientific approach to infectious
disease. That sounds like a significant failure—until you read
Wikipedia and recognize that the postulates date to the late 1800s and
that Koch himself was already aware that some disease-causing
organisms, like cholera, don't satisfy all the postulates.
Strange bedfellows and serious consequences
Duesberg wasn't the only scientist with impressive credentials to
question the HIV/AIDS link. Kary Mullis, who won a Nobel Prize for
developing PCR (which, ironically, provides an accurate test for the
presence of HIV), joined him in raising questions. And, in 1991,
Duesberg and a collection of people who called themselves the Group
for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis managed to
get a letter published in Science in which they stated their case.
It's quite a document. It includes a list of demands, the first of
which is that, "researchers independent of the HIV establishment
should audit the Centers for Disease Control's records of AIDS cases."
Although the "HIV establishment" is not identified, the demands for
other independent re-evaluations continue along those lines.
Eventually, it wraps up by stating, "the skeptics are eager to see the
results of independent scientific testing. Those who uphold the HIV
'party line' have so far refused."
The letter has a dozen signatures, and a third appear to have at least
some relevant expertise. But one signatory is an actuary; another
wrote a biography of Duesberg; two are journalists. One of the
journalists was the author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to
Science, which also criticized the science of climate change and
evolution. The biggest surprise was the presence of Phillip Johnson,
the Berkeley Law professor who had by this point founded the Discovery
Institute and helped develop its wedge strategy, a plan to replace
science as it's currently practiced with something he found more
theologically palatable.
(This collection of questionable beliefs wasn't limited to those who
signed the letter; Mullis has apparently written that HIV, the CFC-
ozone connection, and climate change are all part of a plot hatched by
environmentalists.)
Although the letter's signatories labelled themselves skeptics, its
language is that of conspiracy theorists and cranks. With a few
exceptions, most of its signatories don't even have the relevant
expertise, and many of them have serious issues with science in
general. In short, these are not people who should be listened to when
it comes to matters of evidence.
Unfortunately, someone did. And, even more unfortunately, that someone
was Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa, who appointed at least two
of them to a committee that evaluated his country's response to AIDS.
One result of this was a long delay in the widespread use of
antiretroviral therapies in South Africa, which a 2010 paper estimated
as having cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Don't give up the fight
That estimate is what prompted Duesberg's latest salvo. He and a
handful of other authors put together a paper that argued that the
populations of African countries shouldn't be increasing if the HIV
infection rates and mortality are what they claimed to be. Thus, in
the paper's presentation, HIV can't be causing the health problems
it's being blamed for. This leads to the same old argument: HIV is
just a harmless virus that justs takes advantage of AIDS to infect
immunocompromised individuals.
Needless to say, the research community didn't consider these
arguments worthy of publication, so his paper would obviously fail
peer review. So, Duesberg found a journal, Medical Hypotheses, that
didn't require peer review, and had a history of publishing papers
with outlandish ideas. In keeping with its reputation, the journal
published the paper, which was then duly indexed by PubMed, the
database of biomedical literature run by the National Institutes of
Health.
Things didn't end there, though. Complaints poured in to Elsevier, the
publisher of Medical Hypotheses, which decided to act. It ordered its
editor to institute peer review; when he refused, he was fired.
Duesberg's paper, along with another from a similar group based at the
University of Firenze in Italy, were withdrawn from the literature.
Many of the other people involved with the journal were asked to step
down and complied. In essence, the journal's decision to publish the
paper destroyed it.
The editor was unrepentant. In an interview, he argued that Duesberg's
relegation to the fringes of science as evidence of the worthiness of
his ideas: "Duesberg is obviously a competent scientist, he is
obviously the victim of an orchestrated campaign of intimidation and
exclusion, and I interpret his sacrifice of status to principle as
prima facie evidence of his sincerity."
With his paper out of the literature, Duesberg apparently went
shopping for another outlet for his paper, and found one in the
Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology. That's published by the
Firenze University Press—the home of the other researchers that had a
paper pulled by Elsevier. Whether personal connections played a key
role there isn't clear, but the paper is well outside the journal's
normal focus, which is the "anatomy and embryology of vertebrates."
Is there a lesson here?
Whatever damage was done by Duesberg and other contrarians in the
past, they've now been relegated to the sidelines; nobody is basing
public policy based on their unfounded skepticism anymore.
Unfortunately, it's all too easy to see why some people might have
found them compelling in the past. The contrarians included a Nobel
Prize winner and a member of the National Academies of Science—if you
didn't pay careful attention to the company they kept and the fact
that they had a tendency to back zany ideas, it was easy to conclude
they were an impressive group. And, to someone who didn't look into
the details, their arguments sounded scientific. After all, as
described above, they were able to paint the medical establishment as
ignoring Koch's Postulates, the very foundation of infectious disease
research, and present themselves as the true scientific skeptics.
The fact that they were going against an established scientific
consensus made for a great story, a mix of underdog saga and
conspiracy theory. It wasn't just that the scientific community
thought the contrarians were wrong—they were actively suppressing
their ideas, protecting their own position and the acclaim and grant
money that went with it.
Mix in people's tendency to interpret expertise through cultural
filters, and the ability of the contrarians to attract a following
seems inevitable. In the case of South Africa, these cultural filters
included lingering resentments from colonialism and apartheid,
combined with new worries about the pharmaceutical industry.
It's easy to recognize these things in retrospect. But pretty much
every scientific idea—even things like relativity, quantum
entanglement, and evolution—have their share of well-credentialed
contrarians. All that's needed is for the field to matter enough that
the public starts paying attention to them.
Disclosure: Duesberg is tenured by the department from which the
author received his PhD. The two did not have any significant
interactions.
Photograph by upload.wikimedia.org
--
Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth. - Mohandas Gandhi
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