THE HARMONY OF THE MIND, BODY & SPIRIT
& CREATING THE NEW PARADIGM

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), a mathematician and astronomer, questioned the long-held belief that the Earth sits at the center of the universe and the Sun and planets circle around it. Aristotle posited and Ptolemy (85-165) codified this geocentric (Earth-centered) system. But in his On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543, Copernicus said that they had it backwards. He concluded that the Sun is at the center of the cosmos, and the Earth and other planets revolve around it. This book altered the direction in which scientific thought developed. Aristotle, for example, reckoned that the reason objects fall to earth is that they seek their natural place at the center of the universe. With the Earth displaced to a secondary role in a heliocentric (Sun-centered) system, a new explanation for this phenomenon was needed, which Isaac Newton provided a century-and-a-half later with his Universal Law of Gravitation.

Peter H. Duesberg (b.1936) is a molecular biologist. He is Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg questions, on a submicroscopic scale, two tenets of biology. One is the germ theory of AIDS. He contends that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. The other is the gene mutation hypothesis of cancer. Duesberg claims that mutations in genes are not the cause of cancer.

Harvey Bialy has written a book about Duesberg titled Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life & Times of Peter H. Duesberg (2004). Bialy is founding scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology, a molecular biologist, and a poet. He recounts Duesberg's rise and fall in the world of mainstream science, beginning with the recognition he and co-worker Peter Vogt received in 1970 for biochemically defining the first retroviral oncogene, found in birds. (An oncogene is a gene, viral derived or not, associated with cancer.) Bialy portrays Duesberg as having "a furious intellect"; an "encyclopedic knowledge of a vast scientific literature, in several languages"; and "tenacity."

In Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (2006), William Vollman praises Copernicus for having the good sense to die shortly after the publication of his paradigm-altering work, thus avoiding the cruel punishment then accorded heretics.

So far, this has been Duesberg's fate: Admired as a "wunderkind" in the 1970s, the NIH (National Institutes of Health) awarded him a long-term Outstanding Investigator Grant; he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize; the U.S. National Academy of Science, in 1985, invited him to join the academy, a high honor among scientists, especially for one then only 49 years old; and in 1986 he was awarded a Fogarty fellowship to spend a year at the NIH studying cancer genes. But in 1987 Duesberg ran afoul of the establishment. He published a paper in Cancer Research titled "Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality," followed a year later by one in Science, "HIV is Not the Cause of AIDS." Thereafter, Duesberg was subjected to the punishment now accorded modern-day heretics. The NIH ceased giving him grants (the NIH and other federal and state funding sources have rejected his last 21 consecutive research grant applications), colleagues labeled him "irresponsible and pernicious" (David Baltimore) and his work "absolute and total nonsense" (Robert Gallo), and graduate students at Berkeley were advised not to study with Duesberg if they wanted to go on and have a successful career in biology. He was branded a "rebel," a "maverick," an "iconoclast," and by one writer, in an article in Science in 1988 titled "A Rebel Without a Cause of AIDS," a "gadfly." Blocked from receiving grants, he obtained private funds to maintain his laboratory at UC Berkeley, and he now spends part of each year doing research in Germany.

His principle work on HIV/AIDS is Inventing the AIDS Virus, published in 1996. In this book, and in other papers he has written on the subject, Duesberg systematically dismantles, piece by piece, the germ theory of AIDS. This theory/hypothesis has two parts: 1) HIV causes AIDS, and 2) HIV is sexually transmitted.

With regard to sexual transmission, only 1 in 1,000 unprotected sexual contacts transmit HIV. One in 275 U.S. citizens has antibodies to this virus. Therefore, an uninfected person would need to have 275,000 random unprotected sexual contacts in order to acquire sexually transmitted HIV. Prostitutes do not get AIDS, unless they are drug addicts; and wives of HIV-positive hemophiliacs do not contract AIDS from their husbands. Proponents of the HIV/AIDS hypothesis ignore these facts. The dire heterosexual AIDS epidemic predicted to occur in the U.S., Canada, and Europe twenty years ago has not happened, and the disease remains confined to the original two main risk groups - gay men (66 percent of all AIDS cases) and intravenous drug users, male and female (32 percent). The other 2 percent are hemophiliacs and babies born to mothers who used intravenous drugs during pregnancy. The easiest way to acquire HIV sexually is through receptive anal intercourse.

Unlike other viruses, which cause diseases such as smallpox, mumps, and herpes, a retrovirus is like a hitchhiker going along for the ride. It enters a cell, mixes its genes up with those the cell possesses and aligns its fate with that of the cell. Retroviral genes make up an estimated 8 percent of the approximately 35,000 genes in the human genome. It is not in the retrovirus' self-interest to destroy the cell it lives in. Its survival is contingent on the host cell staying healthy. But HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), a retrovirus, supposedly causes AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) by killing the T cell it infects. Without an adequate number of T cells immunodeficiency results, rendering a person susceptible to AIDS. As Duesberg points out, however, two important facts argue against this model: HIV infects, at most, only 1 in 500 T cells. And T cells infected with HIV placed in a test tube (in vitro) grow and thrive. The cells do not die. Instead, they manufacture large quantities of the virus, which providers use to detect antibodies to HIV in their patients' blood. For these and a dozen other reasons, the germ theory of AIDS is wrong. HIV is a harmless passenger on the AIDS airplane, not its pilot.

Perhaps Duesberg's final statement on HIV/AIDS will be *"The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition," published in 2003. Rebel he may be, as Science avers, but Duesberg is not without a cause for AIDS. He wrote this paper with Claus Koehnlein and David Rasnick. I heard Dr. Rasnick, also a Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, present this paper at the 2003 meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. They hypothesize that AIDS is caused by three things, singly or in combination: 1) long-term, heavy-duty recreational drug use - cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, and nitrite inhalants; 2) antiretroviral drugs doctors prescribe to people who are HIV positive - DNA chain terminators, like AZT, and protease inhibitors; and 3) malnutrition and bad water, which is the cause of "AIDS" in Africa.

AIDS appeared in young gay men in the early 1980s following an explosion of recreational drug use that began twenty years earlier in the 1960s. Male homosexuals are the highest users of recreational drugs. AZT, given to people who are HIV-positive, first used in 1987, is another cause of AIDS. As Duesberg and coauthors show in this paper, a chemical (noninfectious) basis for AIDS is supported by a lot of important data. One fact is this, which government spokespersons and the media do not report: HIV-positive people treated with antiretroviral drugs have a four to five times higher annual mortality rate compared to HIV-positive people who refuse treatment with these drugs - 6.6-8.7 percent vs. 1.4 percent. Duesberg writes, "AIDS is stabilized, even cured, if patients stop using recreational drugs or AZT - regardless of the presence of HIV. The drug hypothesis predicts that AIDS is an entirely preventable and in part curable disease."

There are other, larger societal issues that resonate around AIDS. In AIDS: Virus or Drug Induced (1996), Duesberg writes:

The AIDS virus [HIV] also proved to be the politically correct cause of AIDS. No AIDS risk groups [e.g., gay men] could be blamed for being infected by a God-given egalitarian virus. A virus could reach all of us. Nobody would be ostracized since 'We are all in this together.' Not so with drugs. The consumption of illicit psychoactive drugs implies individual and social responsibilities that nobody wanted to face… The perceived danger of an AIDS virus decimating the general public also provided the scientific and moral arguments for quick and unreflective action and for the complete dismissal of the competing drug-AIDS hypothesis.

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