520 South African population growth (defying AIDS predictions) vindicates Duesberg - emeritus professor Henry H. Bauer

South African population growth (defying AIDS predictions) vindicates
Duesberg - emeritus professor Henry H. Bauer

(1) Duesberg still defying the AIDS establishment, despite attempts to
suppress him
(2) Duesberg paper denying HIV–AIDS link is published, despite attempts
to suppress it
(3) Elsevier, publisher of Medical Hypotheses, fired its editor after he
published Duesberg article
(4) Berkeley drops probe of Duesberg after finding 'Insufficient Evidence'
(5) South African population growth (defying AIDS predictions)
vindicates Duesberg - emeritus professor Henry H. Bauer
(6) No AIDS epidemic anywhere; not even in Africa - Hans J. Kugler, PhD
(7) Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels - emeritus professor Henry
H. Bauer

(1) Duesberg still defying the AIDS establishment, despite attempts to
suppress him - Peter Myers, June 3, 2012

A chance article about HIV promoted me to check out whether Peter
Duesberg is still claiming that it's a harmless virus (denying that it
causes AIDS), and how his dissidence is faring.

The journal Medical Hypotheses published a paper by Duesberg in 2009;
but in the face of criticism, the journal later withdrew the article,
not for "flawed or falsified data" but for "highly controversial
opinions". Subsequently, Elsevier, publisher of Medical Hypotheses,
fired its editor when he refused to institute peer-review.

Now, a peer-reviewed journal, the Italian Journal of Anatomy and
Embryology, has published a revised version of the article.

(2) Duesberg paper denying HIV–AIDS link is published, despite attempts
to suppress it

http://www.nature.com/news/paper-denying-hiv-aids-link-secures-publication-1.9737

Paper denying HIV–AIDS link secures publication

Work by infamous AIDS contrarian passes peer review.

Zoë Corbyn

05 January 2012

Peter Duesberg has for more than 20 years challenged the idea that HIV
causes AIDS.

S. RAGAN/AP

A controversial research paper that argued "there is as yet no proof
that HIV causes AIDS" and met with a storm of protest when it was
published in 2009, leading to its withdrawal, has been republished in a
revised form, this time in the peer-reviewed literature.

The reworked version of the paper, led by Peter Duesberg of the
University of California, Berkeley, who is well known for denying the
link between HIV and AIDS, was published in the Italian Journal of
Anatomy and Embryology (IJAE) last month1.

The manuscript was examined by two peer reviewers, one of them the
journal's editor-in-chief, Paolo Romagnoli, an expert in cell anatomy at
the University of Florence, Italy. But leading AIDS researchers and
campaigners question how the paper could have passed peer review, and
say that publishing it in a minor journal known to few does not give it
scientific credibility or legitimacy.

"In my view this paper is scientific nonsense and should not have passed
peer review. The thesis that HIV does not cause AIDS has no scientific
credibility," says Nathan Geffen of the South Africa-based Treatment
Action Campaign, who previously raised concerns about the article.

Romagnoli says he decided to review the revised paper because the
original was withdrawn by Medical Hypotheses not for "flawed or
falsified data" but for "highly controversial opinions" — which the
IJAE's readers can make up their own minds about.

"Speculative conclusions are not a reason for rejection, provided they
are correlated with the data presented," he says.

Potentially damaging

The paper's initial publication in Medical Hypotheses caused a furore,
with attention being drawn to the fact that the journal was not peer
reviewed despite being listed in the MEDLINE citation database.

Retrospective peer review later led to the paper's permanent withdrawal
from Medical Hypotheses. The grounds stipulated in the withdrawal notice
were concerns over the paper's quality and that it contained opinions
about the causes of AIDS "that could potentially be damaging to global
public health"2.

The journal's publisher, Elsevier, revamped Medical Hypotheses to
introduce peer review and fired editor Bruce Charlton, who resisted the
changes. The University of California also bought charges of misconduct
against Duesberg over the article's publication, but he was later cleared.

Duesberg says that the revised publication is a "new victory in our long
quest for a scientific theory of AIDS", adding that the new version of
the paper was better documented and more up to date.

Although the revised version has been toned down, the article still
makes many of the same points as the original — refuting the
effectiveness of anti-retroviral drugs, as well as death-toll estimates
from HIV and AIDS in South Africa put forward in a study led by AIDS
epidemiologist Max Essex of Harvard University in Boston,
Massachusetts3. "We deduce ... that HIV is not a new killer virus,"
Duesberg et al. write, proposing a "reevaluation of the HIV–AIDS
hypothesis".

But Geffen says the paper "contains no new arguments or evidence about
the South African data, and these arguments have been rebutted before".

Duesberg admits submitting the revised paper to more than four other
journals before it was accepted by the IJAE, and only alerted his
co-authors to the publication after he was sure it wouldn't be aborted
at the last minute.

Dangerous distraction "It is just so far out that it is hard to respond
in an intelligent way," says Essex, adding that it is "unfortunate" to
see Duesberg continuing on a "dangerous track of distraction that has
persuaded some people to avoid treatment or prevention of HIV infection".

Yet whether the publication will be officially challenged remains to be
seen. John Moore, an HIV researcher at Cornell University in New York,
who lodged a complaint with Elsevier when the original paper was
published, believes that the movement to deny the link between HIV and
AIDS is on its "last legs". Geffen, meanwhile, thinks the likelihood the
paper will have significant impact — and therefore warrant challenge —
is small.

"Duesberg's views no longer have significant political support, like
they did in South Africa in the 2000s," Geffen says. "No one of
consequence in government is likely to take any notice."

Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2012.9737

(3) Elsevier, publisher of Medical Hypotheses, fired its editor after he
published Duesberg article

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/01/hiv-contrarian-still-publishing-still-wrong/

Fighting on after the war is over, HIV contrarian publishes yet another
paper

Long after most of the scientific community—and the rest of the world—is …

by John Timmer - Jan 11 2012, 2:31am EST

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.

(4) Berkeley drops probe of Duesberg after finding 'Insufficient Evidence'

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/06/berkeley-drops-probe-of-duesberg.html

by Martin Enserink on 21 June 2010, 2:07 PM | 0 Comments

The paper that cost the editor of Medical Hypotheses his job will have
no further consequences for its main author, molecular virologist Peter
Duesberg of the University of California (UC), Berkeley. The university
has ended its misconduct investigation after concluding that Duesberg
was within his rights when he wrote that there is no evidence of a
deadly AIDS epidemic in South Africa.

Duesberg's paper, published online on 19 July 2009, triggered a storm of
protests from AIDS scientists and activists. Elsevier, the publisher of
Medical Hypotheses, has retracted the article and has terminated the
contract of the journal's editor, Bruce Charlton of Newcastle University
in the United Kingdom, who declined to introduce a peer review system at
the 35-year-old journal.

UC Berkeley started its investigation in August after receiving two
letters of complaint, one from activist Nathan Geffen of the Treatment
Action Coalition in South Africa. (University rules allow people making
such allegations to remain anonymous.) The investigation, by UC Berkeley
epidemiologist Arthur Reingold, focused on two allegations: That the
article was retracted because of false claims in the paper and that
Duesberg should have disclosed an alleged financial conflict of
interest. One of his co-authors, David Rasnick, formerly worked for
Matthias Rath, a vitamin entrepreneur who claims that HIV drugs are
dangerous and that his dietary supplements can cure AIDS.

In a letter Duesberg forwarded to ScienceInsider, Berkeley Vice Provost
for Academic Affairs and Faculty Welfare Sheldon Zedeck writes that
there is "insufficient evidence ... to support a recommendation for
disciplinary action, pursuant to the Faculty Code of Conduct." (Zedeck's
letter is dated 28 May, but Duesberg says he received it only recently.)
Zedeck's letter did not explain the basis for the decision. However, the
Faculty Code of Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures for the Berkeley
Campus does not mention reporting potential conflicts of interest in
published papers.

The ruling does not mean Berkeley approves of the paper. "The
university's investigation did not undertake to evaluate the merits of
your research," Zedeck writes, "but concluded that your right to publish
and disseminate your views is protected under the umbrella of academic
freedom." A UC Berkeley spokesperson says the university does not
comment on personnel issues.

Duesberg says he feels "exonerated" by the university's decision. He
made his case to Reingold at a 7 May meeting at which he was accompanied
by Berkeley's faculty ombudsperson. His lawyer also wrote Zedeck a
letter in his defense.

Geffen disagrees. "This finding does not exonerate Duesberg," he says.
"The language of the ruling makes that clear." Geffen, who was notified
of the outcome, says he respects the university's decision but believes
that "it was worth raising the issue, in any case, and putting it on the
record.

(5) South African population growth (defying AIDS predictions)
vindicates Duesberg - emeritus professor Henry Bauer

http://hivskeptic.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/census-bureau-supports-duesberg/

Census Bureau supports Duesberg

Posted by Henry Bauer on 2012/02/12

Duesberg et al. ("HIV-AIDS hypothesis out of touch with South African
AIDS – A new perspective") had debunked the claim by Chigwedere, Essex,
et al. ("Estimating the lost benefits of antiretroviral drug use in
South Africa", JAIDS 49 [2008] 410-5) that antiretroviral treatment
could have saved about 330,000 lives in South Africa between 2000 and
2005 — or 2.2 million person-years — were it not for the misguided
theories of Peter Duesberg taken seriously by President Mbeki.

So threatening to the HIV/AIDS Establishment was the Duesberg refutation
of Chigwedere et al. that Nobelist Barre-Sinoussi was enlisted to
lead-sign a protest against the Duesberg publication, which led
eventually to the demise of Medical Hypotheses as a credible vehicle for
innovative ideas ("Elsevier-Gate"): the journal’s new editor claimed it
possible both to "publish radical new ideas" and at the same time "not .
. . get into controversial subjects" (Martin Enserink, "New Medical
Hypotheses editor promises not to stir up controversy", ScienceInsider,
25 June 2010).

Duesberg et al. had resorted to Medical Hypotheses only after JAIDS —
the journal that had published the Chigwedere article — had refused,
counter to all standard practice not to say common decency, to allow a
response in its own pages.

Despite Elsevier’s withdrawal of the Duesberg article, it has been
freely available on the Internet, but it seemed proper and useful to
have it in the mainstream literature indexed as other than "withdrawn".
Independent peer review led to the recent publication of the Duesberg
arguments in the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology, and the
abstract is now in PubMed:

Of course the HIV/AIDS vigilantes were beside themselves at this turn
of events, and even more that it was brought to widespread attention by
a piece on the Nature website. Subsequent fury was expressed in comments
to that piece, leading to rather comical machinations by Nature editors
attempting to cleanse its site by "losing" those comments owing to an
alleged software glitch, see "NATURE and science journalism".

That blog posting brought a highly informative comment from Jean Umber:
Dr. Willy Rozenbaum, who had given Montagnier the first samples in which
"HIV" was supposedly found, had published in 2007 a presentation which
showed projections by the US Census Bureau of how the population of
South Africa would grow if AIDS were present or if AIDS had not been
present:

This is precisely one of the arguments made by Duesberg et al., that the
actual population growth in South Africa is what had been projected to
happen if AIDS were not present:

According to the official doomsayers of the HIV/AIDS faith, AIDS should
have capped the South African population at about 45 million around the
year 2000; instead the population has continued to grow in steady fashion.

The defenders of HIV/AIDS theory had ventured a couple of substantive
criticisms of the original Duesberg article, among them that this
comparison of actual with projected population growth is not convincing.
Yet it is the US Census Bureau that published the projections with and
without AIDS, and what actually happened is precisely what the Bureau
projected if AIDS were not decimating the population.

Rozenbaum’s slide does not give details (other than the date of 2004)
for the actual Census Bureau documents from which he extracted these
projections. It may well have been The AIDS Pandemic in the 21st
Century, issued March 2004, tagged WP/02-2, described as an
International Population Report by Karen A. Stanecki, and given the
imprimatur not only of the US Census Bureau but also of the Office of
HIV/AIDS, Bureau for Global Health, U.S. Agency for International
Development. That document does give copious details of projections with
and without AIDS, in numbers and histograms and graphs. It also provides
even further support for the validity of the case made by Duesberg et al.:

One of the persistent criticisms made by HIV/AIDS vigilantes is that
numbers for the prevalence of "HIV-positive" used by Duesberg et al.
came from pre-natal clinics and that data on pregnant women was not a
valid proxy for the rate of "HIV-positive" in the general population of
South Africa. To the contrary, the Census Bureau points out that it is a
very good proxy, and why that is the case:

Although this particular figure refers to data from Zambia, the Census
Bureau describes it as representative for all of sub-Saharan Africa: "In
Sub-Saharan Africa, More Women Than Men Are HIV Positive At the end of
2001, UNAIDS estimated that 58 percent of all HIV infections in
Sub-Saharan Africa were among women. Peak HIV prevalence among women
occurs at a younger age than among men: around age 25 compared to age
35-40. As Figures 3 and 4 show for Rwanda and Zambia, younger women tend
to have higher levels of HIV infection than men of their same age.
Several studies have shown that HIV prevalence among pregnant women
attending antenatal clinics provides a reasonable overall estimate of
HIV prevalence in the general adult population, although it
underestimates the rate among all women while overestimating it among
men. This is shown for Zambia in Figure 4." * * *

Note that the Census Bureau Figure 4 above is also yet another
illustration of the demographic fact that, in all populations for which
data have been published, prevalence of "HIV-positive" rises from the
mid-teens and falls again at higher ages, and that females test
"HIV-positive" more than males at the younger ages while the opposite is
seen at higher ages. The exact ages at which the ratio reverses, and at
which "HIV-positive" reaches a maximum, varies not only with sex but
also with race; African genes are associated with a longer age-span
during which females test positive more than males. For details see a
number of earlier blog posts confirming all the trends pointed to in The
Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory.

(6) No AIDS epidemic anywhere; not even in Africa - Hans J. Kugler, PhD

https://www.worldhealth.net/forum/thread/98673/no-aids-epidemic-anywhere-not-even-in-a/?page=1

Posted by Hans J. Kugler, PhD

2011-12-21 01:40:40 - No AIDS epidemic anywhere; not even in Africa

I have frequently questioned the sanity of today’s HIV=AIDS voting; as I
see it, it certainly isn’t science/research as I was taught at the Univ.
of Munich Medical School - physiology under Nobel Laureate A. Butenandt
- or at SUNY, Stony Brook, PhD under prof. F. Ramirez, or as I taught to
my students when I was teaching chemistry to pre-meds, and doing aging
research at Roosevelt U in Chicago. http://www.antiagingforme.com ;
click on AIDS poster.

Just published: IJAE, Vol. 116, 2011.

AIDS since 1984: No evidence for a new, viral epidemic – not even in
Africa Peter H. Duesberg1,*, Daniele Mandrioli1, Amanda McCormack1,
Joshua M. Nicholson2, David Rasnick3, Christian Fiala4, Claus
Koehnlein5, Henry H. Bauer2 and Marco Ruggiero6.

Summary:

Since the discoveries of a putative AIDS virus in 1984 and of millions
of asymptomatic carriers in subsequent years, no general AIDS epidemic
has occurred by 2011. In 2008, however, it has been proposed that
between 2000 and 2005 the new AIDS virus, now called HIV, had killed 1.8
million South Africans at a steady rate of 300,000 per year and that
anti-HIV drugs could have saved 330,000 of those. Here we investigate
these claims in view of the paradoxes that HIV would cause a general
epidemic in Africa but not in other continents, and a steady rather than
a classical bell-shaped epidemic like all other new pathogenic viruses.
Surprisingly, we found that south Africa attributed only about 10,000
deaths per year to HIV between 2000 and 2005 and that the South African
population had increased by 3 million between 2000 and 2005 at a steady
rate of 500,000 per year. This gain was part of a monotonic growth
trajectory spanning from 29 million in 1980 to 49 million in 2008.
During the same time Uganda increased from 12 to 31 million, and
Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole doubled from 400 to 800 million, despite
high prevalence HIV. We deduce from this demographic evidence that HIV
is not a new killer virus.

Based on a review of the known toxicities of antiretroviral drugs we
like to draw the attention of scientists who work in basic and clinical
medical fields, including embryologists, to the need of rethinking the
risk-and-benefit of antiretroviral drugs for pregnant women, newborn
babies and all others who carry antibodies against HIV.

Some other key points in this paper:

The CDC and WHO also report over 30 million of HIV antibody-positive
people in the US, Europe, Asia, and particularly in Africa, who are
AIDS-free.

A study of the US Army reported recently that about 5% HIV-positive
soldiers (Renzullo et al., 2001) "through an experiment of nature"
developed no AIDS for up to 20 HIV-antibody-positive years without
anti-HIV treatments (Okulicz et al 2009) confirming the view that HIV
alone is not sufficient for AIDS.

Abnormal facial and bodily appearances of 9 persons treated with
anti-HIV drug cocktails, including accelerated aging and disfiguration -
- - various forms of genetic damage.

Recently - Apostolova, 2011 - documented severe mitochondrial toxicity
of HAART.

Rarely mentioned: in (various species) animal experiments, anti-HIV
drugs cause muscle atrophy, nephropathy, liver disease, cancer of lung,
liver and vagina, and deaths, as well as retarded development and abortions.

With a 96+% probability, people who developed full AIDS have also
severely abused drugs.

In view of the inherent toxicities of HIV drugs, the "failure to accept
available ARVs (Anti-HIV drugs)" (Chigwedere et. al 008) has probably
saved rather than cost South African lives.

Access full paper:
http://www.fupress.net/index.php/ijae/article/download/10336/9525

But somebody might argue: "how about all these life-span increases in
HIV+ people with HAART drugs?" They are really false positives, only
observed in people who start HAART right at point of seroconversion
(when diagnosed HIV+) - - - and which INCLUDES health practice
improvements (equivalent to a good number of years). Please Google
"Drugs to Mugs"; it shows the severity of drug abuse on health. Getting
off drugs alone suggests 14+ years in additional life span. Feed HAART
to HIV+ people at a later point - - after they already made the health
practice improvements - - and the effect of HAART on the death rate from
AIDS is ZERO (Lancet 2008). This paper is accessible at the website
above, by clicking on the AIDS poster.

Also please check out - at CANCER - prof. Duesberg's paper "Is
Carcinogenesis a form of Speciation?" ( - - a key in explaining why
chemo is such a failure). Already 8,600+ views. E-mail me and I'll
forward to you the full-length paper.

(7) Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels - emeritus professor Henry
H. Bauer

http://hearitonline.net/images/21stCenturyScience.pdf

{p. 643} Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 643-660,
2004 0892-3310/04

Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels

HENRY H. BAUER
Professor Emeritus of Chemistry & Science Studies
Dean Emeritus of Arts & Sciences
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
e-mail: hhbauer@vt.edu

Abstract—Minority views on technical issues are largely absent from the
public arena. Increasingly corporate organization of science has led to
knowledge monopolies, which, with the unwitting help of uncritical mass
media, effect a kind of censorship. Since corporate scientific
organizations also control the funding of research, by denying funds for
unorthodox work they function as research cartels as well as knowledge
monopolies. A related aspect of contemporary science is commercialization.

Science is now altogether different from the traditional disinterested
search, by self-motivated individuals, to understand the world. What
national and international organizations publicly proclaim as scientific
information is not safeguarded by the traditional process of peer
review. Society needs new arrangements to ensure that public information
about matters of science will be trustworthy.

Actions to curb the power of the monopolies and cartels can be
conceived: mandatory funding of contrarian research, mandatory presence
of contrarian opinion on advisory panels, a Science Court to adjudicate
technical controversies, ombudsman offices at a variety of
organizations. Most sorely needed is vigorously investigative science
journalism.

Keywords: 21st-century science—knowledge monopolies—monopolies in
science—research cartels—bureaucracies and science—institutions of
science—scientific institutions

Preamble

A search for information about HIV/AIDS led to reports issued by UNAIDS
and the World Bank that are plainly unreliable, incompetent even1.
Evidently, peer review does not safeguard the integrity of what is
publicly promulgated by these organizations.

Other worrying aspects of contemporary science include the prevalence of
conflicts of interest and of actual fraud, and the ignoring by
mainstream science of an array of unorthodox opinions and findings.

Those strands of thought stimulated this essay. Its assertions are
sweeping, but the called-for extended argument and documentation are
unfeasible at less than book length. The citations and anecdotes given
here are offered as illustrative

Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 643–660, 2004
0892-3310/04

{p. 644} only, but should suffice to show that my views are not mere
figments. Again, it is unfeasible here to acknowledge every exception or
to enter caveats wherever called for; instead, I make the overall
concession that the contemporary state of affairs is not monolithic.
What I call changes are really trends whose effects vary from place to
place, from field to field, and from time to time. But I stand by the
main point: supposedly authoritative information about the most salient
sciencerelated matters has become dangerously misleading because of the
power of bureaucracies that co-opt or control science.

Science as an Institution

Dysfunction and obsolescence begin to set in, unobtrusively but
insidiously, from the very moment that an institution achieves
pre-eminence. The leading illustration of this Parkinson’s Law
(Parkinson, 1958)2 was the (British) Royal Navy. Having come to rule the
seas, theNavy slowly succumbed to bureaucratic bloat. The ratio of
administrators to operators rose inexorably, and the Navy’s purpose,
defense of the realm, became subordinate to the bureaucracy’s aim of
serving itself.

The changes came so gradually that it was decades before their effect
became obvious. Science attained hegemony in Western culture toward the
end of the 19th century (Barzun, 2000: 606–607; Knight, 1986). This very
success immediately sowed seeds of dysfunction: it spawned scientism,
the delusive belief that science and only science could find proper
answers to any and all questions that human beings might ponder3. Other
dysfunctions arrived later: funding through bureaucracies,
commercialization, conflicts of interest. But the changes came so
gradually that it was the latter stages of the 20th century before it
became undeniable that things had gone seriously amiss4.

It remains to be appreciated that 21st-century science is a different
kind of thing than the "modern science" of the 17th through 20th
centuries; there has been a "radical, irreversible, structural"
"world-wide transformation in the way that science is organized and
performed" (Ziman, 1994: 5, 7). Around 1950, Derek Price (1963/1986)
discovered that modern science had grown exponentially, and he predicted
that the character of science would change during the latter part of the
20th century as further such growth became impossible5. One aspect of
that change is that the scientific ethos no longer corresponds to the
traditional "Mertonian"6 norms of disinterested skepticism and public
sharing; it has become subordinate to corporate values. Mertonian norms
made science reliable; the new ones described by Ziman (1994) do not7.

Symptoms

One symptom of change, identifiable perhaps only in hindsight, was
science’s failure, from about the middle of the 20th century on, to
satisfy public curiosity about mysterious phenomena that arouse wide
interest: psychic phenomena, UFOs, Loch Ness Monsters, Bigfoot. By
contrast, a century earlier, prominent scientists had not hesitated to
look into such mysteries as mediumship, which had aroused great public
interest.

{p. 645} My claim here is not that UFOs or mediumship are phenomena
whose substance belongs in the corpus of science; I am merely suggesting
that when the public wants to know "What’s going on when people report
UFOs?", the public deserves an informed response8. It used to be taken
for granted that the purpose of science was to seek the truth about all
aspects of the natural world9. That traditional purpose had been served
by the Mertonian norms: Science disinterestedly and with appropriate
skepticism coupled with originality seeks universally valid knowledge as
a public good.

These norms imply that science is done by independent, self-motivated
individuals10. However, from about the middle of the 20th century and in
certain situations, some mainstream organizations of science were
behaving not as voluntary associations of independent individuals but as
bureaucracies. Popular dissatisfaction with some of the consequences
stimulated "New Age" movements. In the 1980s, some scientists were led
to form new organizations— notably the Society for Scientific
Exploration and the International Society of Cryptozoology—specifically
to pay attention to matters of public interest that mainstream
organizations had been ignoring.

A more widely noticed symptom was the marked increase in fraud and
cheating by scientists. In 1981, the U. S. Congress11 held hearings
prompted by public disclosure of scientific misconduct at 4 prominent
research institutions. Then, science journalists Broad and Wade (1982)
published their sweeping indictment, Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and
Deceit in the Halls of Science. It has become almost routine to read in
the NIH Guide of researchers who admitted to fraud and were then barred
from certain activities for some specified number of years12. In 1989,
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established an Office of
Scientific Integrity13. So prevalent was dishonesty that the new
academic specialty of "research ethics" came into being14. Professional
scientific organizations drafted or revised codes of ethics. Various
groups, including government agencies, attempted to make prescriptive
for researchers what had traditionally been taken for granted, namely,
something like the Mertonian norms. This epidemic of cheating in the
latter part of the 20th century meant, clearly enough, that an
increasing number of scientists were seeking to serve their personal
interests instead of the public good of universal knowledge. Scientists
have always experienced the temptation to cheat, of course. Like all
human beings, they are subject to conflicts of interest between their
personal lives and their other activities. But in the latter stages of
the 20th century, conflicts of interest became so pervasive, so extreme,
as to cast doubt on the integrity of every aspect of science—peer
review, publishing, funding (Krimsky, 2003).

Articles in the most prestigious medical and nutrition journals are
often flawed or biased (Kauffman, 2004). According to Ziman (2000), by
about 1980 science had become seriously entangled with commercial
interests. Pharmaceutical companies give gifts to physicians and
researchers who heap public praise on their products, and they pay
doctors and scientists to lend their names to ghostwritten articles in
professional publications (Krimsky, 2003: 115 ff.). In 2003 it

{p. 646} was revealed that drug companies had made hundreds of payments,
totaling millions of dollars, to NIH scientists (Willman, 2003a–f). An
industry-government-medical complex dominates medical science and
medical practice15. Pharmaceutical companies conduct or commission the
clinical trials whose results are relied upon by federal agencies in
decisions to approve or disapprove drugs as safe and effective.
Traditionally, the gold standard of reliability in science was granted
when independent researchers had confirmed a given finding; such
warrants of reliability are nowadays lacking in the testing of new
medications. The result is that large profits are made from drugs with
household names whose benefits, in actual proven fact, are at best
doubtful16. The general public is cautioned neither by the mass media
nor by the government agencies supposed to oversee and regulate, until
so many lawsuits or deaths have ensued that they can no longer be
ignored. Warnings are raised chiefly by determinedly contrarian
individuals, on off-beat web-sites, and in partisan publications, making
it easy for mainstream pundits to impugn the credibility of the
unorthodox views through guilt by association17.

Throughout the history of modern science, the chief safeguard of
reliability was communal critiquing (Ziman, 2000). Science begins as
hunches. Those that work out become pieces of frontier science. If
competent peers think it worthy of attention, an item gets published in
the primary research literature. If other researchers find it useful and
accurate, eventually the knowledge gets into review articles and
monographs and finally into textbooks. The history of science
demonstrates that, sooner or later, most frontier science turns out to
need modifying or to have been misleading or even entirely wrong.
Science employs a knowledge filter that slowly separates the wheat from
the chaff (Bauer, 1992: chapter 3; see Figure 1).

This filter works in proportion to the honesty and disinterestedness of
peer reviewers and researchers. In the early days of modern science,
before knowledge became highly specialized and compartmentalized,
knowledge-seekers could effectively critique one another’s claims across
the board. Later and for a time, there were enough people working
independently on a given topic that competent, disinterested critiques
could often be obtained. Since about the middle of the 20th century,
however, the costs of research and the need for teams of cooperating
specialists have made it increasingly difficult to find reviewers who
are both directly knowledgeable and also disinterested; truly informed
people are effectively either colleagues or competitors.

Correspondingly, reports from the big science bureaucracies do not have
the benefit of independent review before being issued—hence the
deficiencies mentioned in Note 118. The dramatic rise in conflicts of
interest has brought the integrity of the peerreview system into
jeopardy. The NIH permits reviewers to have conflicts of interest "when
no other competent reviewers are available" (Brainard, 2004); yet one
may reasonably doubt that such "peer review" could be a satisfactory
analysis of the results being reviewed or an impartial assessment of a
grant proposal19. Nevertheless, reviewers who are competitors of those
whose work is being examined could still be very effective, provided
they were able to be

{p. 647} intellectually honest: they have a vested interest in showing
their competitors to be wrong and have a great incentive to find flaws
in the work being reviewed.

On the other hand, reviewers who are colleagues have the opposite
incentive, not to find flaws. With the increasing dominance of large
research teams and large institutions, whereby the "only competent
reviewers" turn out to be collaborators, the traditional safeguard of
peer review has essentially dissipated.

Causes

Price (1963/1986) saw the exploding costs of research after WWII as a
likely mechanism for bringing to an end the era of exponentially growing
science. The Fig. 1. How peer review over time acts to filter reliable
scientific knowledge from the guesses, claims, mistakes, and mis-deeds
that are part of the human activity of doing science (from Bauer, 1992,
by permission).

{p. 648} mentioned symptoms may indeed be traced to the escalating costs
of research and the continuing expansion of the number of would-be
researchers without a proportionate increase in available funds. The
stakes became very high. Researchers had to compete more and more
vigorously20, which tended to mean more unscrupulously. The temptation
became greater to accept and solicit funds and patrons while ignoring
tangible or moral attached strings.

Politicians unable or unwilling to provide adequate public funds
encouraged scientists in academe to collaborate with business and
industry. Thereby the purpose of science, to seek the truth as a public
good and no matter where it leads, becomes distorted by the drive to
find profitable applications and technologies21. This was perhaps most
obvious most recently during the "dot.com" and "biotech" bubbles, when
fortunes were made by hawking farfetched promises based on speculative
ideas masquerading as scientific. In the 1980s, universities were
forming joint ventures with industry despite concern that the
disinterested search for truth by scientists was being compromised;
medical schools in particular were teaming up with pharmaceutical and
biomedical companies (Krimsky, 2003, especially chapters 3 & 5). It is
ironic that a contributing factor to the demise of trustworthy science
was its very success in bringing useful applications. The triumph of the
Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb during WWII encouraged
unbridled euphoria or "irrational exuberance"22 about what science could
accomplish if sufficiently supported23. On the part of the public and
politicians, expectations became dysfunctionally unrealistic. Science
was asked to deliver the impossible through ventures like the National
Science Foundation’s "Research Applied to National Needs" in the 1970s
or the NIH’s "war on cancer" declared in 1971 by President Nixon. In
that spirit, scientists are encouraged to solicit funds for populist
pipedreams like panaceas from gene therapy or from stem cells.

Unrealistic expectations coupled with misunderstanding of how science
works led to the unstated presumption that good science could be
expanded and accelerated by recruiting more scientists. Instead, of
course, the massive infusion of government funds since WWII had
inevitably deleterious consequences. More researchers translate into
less excellence and more mediocrity24. Journeymen peer-reviewers tend to
stifle rather than encourage creativity and genuine innovation.
Centralized funding and centralized decision-making make science more
bureaucratic and less an activity of independent, self-motivated
truthseekers.

Science attracts careerists instead of curiosity-driven idealists25.
Universities and individuals are encouraged to view scientific research
as a cash cow to bring in money as "indirect costs"26 for all sorts of
purposes, instead of seeking needed funds for doing good science27. The
measure of scientific achievement becomes the amount of "research
support" brought in, not the production of useful knowledge28.

Commercialization may presently be most obvious in the medical sciences,
but every field that offers opportunities for remunerative practical
applications seems headed in the same direction; the
computing-information-technology

{p. 649} complex is not far behind (if at all) the medical sciences in
displaying the unhappy consequences of excessive and excessively rapid
commercialization. Indeed, already during the 1960s, economics and
business faculty at elite universities had established companies using
statistics, systems analysis, and behavior psychology to market "social
problem solving", drawing on their university-provided resources for
personal profit (Ridgeway, 1968). But commercialization is not the only
force driving science into corporate form. National and international
institutions are increasingly co-opting and controlling scientific
activity for social or political purposes.

Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels

Skepticism toward research claims is absolutely necessary to safeguard
reliability. In corporate settings, where results are expected to meet
corporate goals, criticism may be brushed off as disloyalty, and
skepticism is thereby suppressed. As Ziman (1994) pointed out, the
Mertonian norms of "academic" science have been replaced by norms suited
to a proprietary, patent- and profitseeking environment in which
researchers feel answerable not to a universally valid standard of
trustworthy knowledge but to local managers. A similar effect, the
suppression of skepticism, results from the funding of science and the
dissemination of results by or through non-profit bureaucracies such as
the NIH or agencies of the United Nations.


While the changes in the circumstances of scientific activity were quite
gradual for 2 or 3 centuries, they have now cumulated into a change in
kind. Corporate science, Big Science, is a different kind of thing than
academic science, and society needs to deal with it differently. Large
institutional bureaucracies now dominate the public face of science.
Long-standing patrons—private foundations like Rockefeller and Ford,
charitable organizations like the American Heart Association and the
American Cancer Society—have been joined and dwarfed by government
bureaucracies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
NIH, and the National Science Foundation, which, in turn, are being
overshadowed by international bodies like the World Bank and various
agencies of the United Nations—the World Health Organization, the Food
and Agricultural Organization, UNAIDS, and more. Statements, press
releases, and formal reports from these bodies often purport to convey
scientific information, but in reality these releases are best viewed as
propaganda designed to serve the corporate interests of the
bureaucracies that issue them. Of course there are exceptions; but as a
general rule one should nowadays no more trust a press release from the
World Bank29 or from UNAIDS (Note 1) than one issued by, say, the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the former Soviet Union.

The fine print in some of the reports from these organizations actually
concedes that they should not be trusted, a disclaimer not found in
traditional scientific publications: "UNAIDS does not warrant that the
information contained in this publication is complete and correct and
shall not be liable for any damages Knowledge Monopolies and Research
Cartels 649 incurred as a result of its use" (UNAIDS, 2004).
Nevertheless, the media based on this report such headlines as
"Migration ‘threatens Europe with huge HIV crisis"’ (Sunday Telegraph
[UK], 4 July, p. 24) and "Aids [sic] cases hit new record" (Daily
Telegraph [UK], 7 July, p. 12). Apparently overlooked was that the
numbers in the report show little if any increase in HIV prevalence
between 2001 and 2003.

In any case, all those numbers are merely estimates yielded by a
computerized model, not actual counts—not even the deaths supposed to
have occurred in 2001 and 2003. That computer model is based on
assumptions described by their authors themselves as tentative, and uses
such grossly faulty inputs as that the mean time to death from
seroconversion to HIV antibodies is 9 6 1 years30. Moreover, the quality
of surveillance and testing for HIV is admitted to be variable at best,
in other words, even the few actual counts fed into the computer model
are of doubtful validity (Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 80, Supplement
1). Despite all these uncertainties, this UNAIDS report does not
hesitate to extrapolate what populations will or would be in 2025, with
and without AIDS. Moreover, it insists that 2003 saw the greatest
numbers ever of new infections and deaths from AIDS. That insistence
represents the typical bureaucratic case that more resources are needed,
but it is based on a farfetched extrapolation from anything actually
known. Since the incidence of HIV (percentage of people testing
HIV-positive) has remained virtually unchanged (according to the report
itself!), deaths plus population increase must have balanced new
infections; but that balance would equally accommodate the possibility
that deaths and new infections were at their lowest-ever levels in 2003,
or indeed at any level at all.

Despite the uncertainties and deficiencies evident in this and other
such reports, the media (by and large) pass on as factual and
reliable—that is to say without critical comment—statistics and
prognostications and recommendations from the World Bank, the World
Health Organization, UNAIDS, the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control,
the American Heart Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and so on and on. It
seems to have been overlooked that these organizations feel free to
broadcast claims and interpretations that have not run the gauntlet of
critical, competent, disinterested peer-review31,32. In contrast,
individual scientists continue to be severely castigated, including in
the popular media, if they dare to announce results publicly before they
have been published in a peer-reviewed journal32. The large
institutional bureaucracies are not held to that standard as they
routinely issue purportedly scientific information.

The upshot is that policy makers and the public generally do not realize
that there is doubt about, indeed evidence against, some theories almost
universally viewed as true, about issues of enormous public import:
global warming; healthy diet, heart-disease risk-factors, and
appropriate medication; HIV/AIDS; gene therapy; stem cells; and more.

"Everyone knows" that promiscuous burning of fossil fuels is warming up
global climates33. Everyone does not know that competent experts dispute
this34 and that official predictions are based on tentative data fed
into computer models whose validity could be known only many decades
hence (Crichton, 2003).

{p. 651} "Everyone knows" that diets low in cholesterol and saturated
fats are hearthealthy. The actual evidence does not support this claim
(McCully, 1998; Ravsnkov, 2000). "Everyone knows" that it is desirable
to lessen or remove "risk factors". In actual fact, most so-called risk
factors are mere statistical correlations that have not been shown to be
causes, necessary or sufficient or even partial. "Everyone knows" that a
bit of aspirin each day keeps heart attacks away. What everyone does not
know is that there are better ways, with fewer side-effects, of doing
that (Kauffman, 2000).

"Everyone knows" that AZTwas the first medication that could prolong the
lives of AIDS patients. What everyone does not know is that AZT is a
deadly poison (Lauritsen, 1990) avoided by long-term survivors of HIV or
AIDS diagnoses30.

The Food and Drug Administration web-site (www.fda.gov) carries a list
that should be thought-provoking of drugs once approved as "safe and
effective" that have been withdrawn, such as anti-allergy medications
like Seldane that did not induce drowsiness but could cause cardiac
arrhythmias, or the aforementioned (Note 13) statin, Baycol.

What "everyone knows" about the science related to major public issues,
then, often fails to reflect the actual state of scientific knowledge.
In effect, there exist knowledge monopolies composed of international
and national bureaucracies.

Since those same organizations play a large role in the funding of
research as well as in the promulgation of findings, these monopolies
are at the same time research cartels. Minority views are not published
in widely read periodicals, and unorthodox work is not supported by the
main funding organizations. Instead of disinterested peer review,
mainstream insiders insist on their point of view in order to perpetuate
their prestige and privileged positions. That is the case even on so
academic a matter as the Big-Bang theory of the universe’s origin35.
When it comes to an issue of such public prominence as HIV/AIDS, any
dissent from the official view has dire consequences. President Mbeki of
South Africa was castigated around the world for his audacity in
assembling a fact-finding group that included some representatives of
minority opinions. Peter Duesberg, a leading retrovirologist, lost his
research support, and found it an uphill battle even to exercise his
right, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, to publish in
the Academy’s Proceedings. After all, to question whether HIV was ever
isolated, or whether it causes AIDS, is not merely to question some
research claims, it is to resist the authority of the World Health
Organization, UNAIDS, the World Bank, the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, the NIH, and many other powerful organizations. It is to
question the pledges by many governments to spend billions of dollars in
the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa. It is to suggest that many "AIDS
charities" have been misled and misguided even though established and
advertised by such celebrities as Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela, Bill
Gates, Sir Elton John, Arthur Ashe, and others. How could all those
eminences be so wrong? That rhetorical question greets any dissent from
what "everybody knows". Yet initially disinterested journalists

{p. 652} and others have been unable to get explanations of what is
incorrect about the minority views on HIV/AIDS (Hodgkinson, 1996;
Maggiore, 2000; Malan, 2001; Shenton, 1998). A large number of competent
people, including at least 2 Nobelists in molecular biology, question
the orthodox view that HIV necessarily and alone causes AIDS, but their
letter to that effect was rejected in 1991 by Nature, Science, The
Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine36. Public opinion polls
show that the official view is also the popular view37. It is not that
knowledge monopolies are able to exercise absolute censorship. Contrary
views are expressed, but one must know where to look for them; so one
must already have some reason to make the effort. That constitutes a
vicious circle. Moreover, the contrarian view will often seem a priori
unreliable or politically partisan, as already noted17. Altogether,
people exposed chiefly to mainstream media will likely never
suspect—will have no reason to suspect— that there could exist a
credible case different from the officially accepted one.

The conventional wisdom about these matters is continually reinforced by
publicly broadcast snippets that underscore the official dogma. What
other reason might there be to publicize, for example, the guesstimate
that global warming will cause an increase in asthma attacks (Daily
Telegraph, 2004)? This is just another "fact" to convince us that we
must curb the use of coal, gas, and oil. Again, when Merck boasts in
"public service announcements" on Public Radio about its help in
providing access to HIV/AIDS medicines38, that helps make unquestionable
the connection between HIV and AIDS. Such snippets are shibboleths
(Bauer, 1986) whose value lies not in their truth or in the evidence for
them, but in reinforcing the desired viewpoint. This is propaganda
science, not traditional science.

Of course, minority views and unorthodox claims have always been
resisted or ignored, even in science (Barber, 1961; Hook, 2002; Stent,
1972). But different now are the degree of resistance and the power of
the official view; in many cases, resistance has become tantamount to
censorship or suppression. Reform?

The ills of contemporary science—commercialization, fraud, untrustworthy
public information—are plausibly symptoms of the crisis, foreseen by
Derek Price (1963/1986), as the era of exponentially growing modern
science comes to an end. Science in the 21st century will be a different
animal from the so-called "modern science" of the 17th to 20th
centuries. The question is not whether to reform the science we knew,
but whether society can arrange the corporate, commercialized science of
the future so that it can continue to expand the range of trustworthy
knowledge. Ziman (1994: 276) points out that any research organization
requires "generous measures" of room for personal initiative and
creativity; time for ideas to grow to maturity; openness to debate and
criticism;

{p. 653} hospitality toward novelty; respect for specialized expertise.
These describe a free intellectual market in which independent thinkers
interact, and there may be a viable analogy with economic life. Economic
free markets are supposed to be efficient and socially useful because
the mutually competitive ventures of independent entrepreneurs are
self-corrected by an "invisible hand" that regulates supply to demand;
competition needs to be protected against monopolies that exploit rather
than serve society.

So, too, the scientific free market in which peer review acts as an
invisible hand (Harnad, 2000) needs to be protected from knowledge
monopolies and research cartels. Anti-trust actions are called for.

Where public funds are concerned, legislation might help. When
government agencies support research or development ventures, they might
be required to allocate, say, 10% of the total to competent people of
past achievement who hold contrarian views. That would have provided
support for people like Linus Pauling (orthomolecular psychiatry and
uses of vitamin C), Peter Duesberg and Robert Root-Bernstein (HIV is not
the necessary and sufficient cause of AIDS), and Thomas Gold (oil of
non-biogenic origin, and many other far-out suggestions). In addition to
its immediate and direct effects, such legislation would also serve as a
public acknowledgment of how scientific advances actually come about,
and it might thereby encourage private foundations to take similar
measures. It should also be legislated that scientific advisory panels
and grant-reviewing arrangements include representatives of views that
differ from the mainstream.

This would be a far more effective way of ensuring intellectually honest
advice and reviews than is the restricting of financial conflicts of
interest, if only because federal agencies can waive their rules over
conflict of interest when they would bar "all competent researchers"
(Krimsky, 2003). Since in the eyes of the mainstream the dissidents are
not competent, the existence of these waivers is a standing invitation
to bureaucrats to seek advice only from insiders.

Where legislation is being considered about public policy that involves
scientific issues, a Science Court might be established to arbitrate
between mainstream and variant views, something discussed in the 1960s
but never acted upon39. Ombudsman40 offices might be established by
journals, consortia of journals, private foundations, and government
agencies to investigate charges of misleading claims, unwarranted
publication, unsound interpretation, and the like. The existence of such
offices could also provide assistance and protection for
whistle-blowers. Sorely needed is vigorously investigative science
journalism, so that propaganda from the knowledge bureaucracies is not
automatically passed on.

To make this possible, the media need to know about and have access to
the whole spectrum of scientific opinion on the given issue. The
suggestions made above would all provide a measure of help along that
line. A constant dilemma

{p. 654} for reporters is that they need access to sources, and if they
publish material that casts doubt on the official view, they risk losing
access to official sources41. In the bygone era, trustworthy science
depended on scientists doing the right thing even when that did not
immediately serve their personal purposes. In the new era of corporate
science, the desires of individuals to serve the public good do not
suffice to ensure that corporate actions will serve the public good.

Notes

1 As to unreliability, Malan (2001, 2003) has given chapter and verse
about how misleading and contrary to evidence are the official releases
from UNAIDS. When UNAIDS announced that 250,000 South Africans had died
of AIDS in 1999, that figure turned out to be the output of a computer
model, which in subsequent "refinements" of the model reduced the number
to 65,000. No count was made of relevant death certificates. Similarly,
in the 2004 Global Report (UNAIDS, 2004), the text speaks of an alarming
spread of the epidemic while the tables contain estimates based on
doubtful assumptions and a tentative computer model. For an example of
an incompetent report, see CGCED (2000). Data in the figures do not
correspond to statements in the text, the labeling of graph axes is
unsound, and citations are imprecise.

2 The most widely cited of Parkinson’s Laws is that work expands to fill
the time available. But Parkinson’s books contain many other Laws and
corollaries that afford timeless insights into bureaucratic ways.

3 Sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), (in)famous as proponent of
Social Darwinism, argued that all of life should take its essential
lessons from the findings of science. T. H. Huxley (1825–1895) preached
for the Church of Science (Knight, 1986).

4 There is a distinction to be made between dysfunction in the internal
workings of science itself and a dysfunctional social role played by
science. Those distinguishable aspects are not independent of one
another, however, one feeds on the other, and for the present purpose
these complications have to be ignored.

5 Price founded scientometrics, the investigation of scientific activity
in quantitative terms: counts of papers, journals, costs, citations,
etc. He showed that after WWII, the cost of science was increasing as
the square of the amount of science being done. Under the pressures of
costs and competition for the best people, the focus of science would no
longer be directed by the state of scientific knowledge; it would follow
social and political demands. The accuracy of his prediction is
illustrated by, for example, the war on cancer.

6 Enunciated in the 1940s by sociologist Robert K. Merton.

7 As Ziman puts it, scientists were traditionally rewarded by the CUDOS
accrued for practicing Communalism, Universalism, Disinterestedness,

{p. 655} Originality, Skepticism. In the corporate world, scientists are
rewarded in the work-PLACE for results that are Proprietary, Local,
under Authoritarian command, Commissioned, carried out Expertly.

8 The typical contemporary response from within science to queries about
such anomalous claims is not informed by accurately detailed knowledge
of what the claims and the presented evidence actually are. Sometimes
this ignorance is openly admitted, as when critics of Velikovsky’s books
boasted of not having read them (Bauer, 1986).

9 Early modern science saw many contributions from ordained ministers
who explored the workings of the world as a natural accompaniment to
worship of the Creator.

10 Modern science made its greatest early strides under social
conditions that allowed free association and entrepreneurial activity by
independent individuals. Following Galileo’s unhappy experience with the
Catholic Church, the major advances in science came in Protestant
Northwest Europe, chiefly Holland and Britain.

11 Through the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House
Science and Technology Committee.

12 For example,
http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04- 051.html.
Accessed 17 July 2004.

13 http://ori.dhhs.gov/html/about/historical.asp. Accessed 17 July 2004.

14 Accountability in Research (ISSN 0898-9621) has been published since
1989, Science and Engineering Ethics (ISSN 1471-5546) since 1995. There
exists ARENA (http://www.primr.org/arena.html), the Applied Research
Ethics National Organization. The web-site onlineethics.org was set up
in 1995 with government support. Centers and institutes concerned with
professional or research ethics have been created at a number of
universities over the last decade or two. A collection of relevant web
pages is at http://www.web-miner.com/ researchethics.htm#top (accessed
17 July 2004). For a bibliography (up to 1997) about research ethics,
see http://www.chem.vt.edu/chem-ed/ethics/ (the last line of the initial
page gives an incorrect date of 1 January 1970 for the last update,
which was actually in 1997).

15 Pace President Eisenhower’s warning about the dangers of the
industrial-military complex.

16 This point alone deserves its own book. Here are a few examples among
many possible ones: Statin drugs like Lipitor and Crestor are
aggressively marketed and earn billions of dollars (Reuters, 2002) even
as the fine print in their advertisements has to acknowledge that there
is no evidence that they decrease the risk of heart attack or heart
disease. One statin (Baycol) was withdrawn because of more than 100
deaths and 785 lawsuits (http://www.adrugrecall.com/baycol/
baycol.html). The serious cited side effects include liver damage and
muscle wastage (rhabdomyolysis). It is known that other statins, which
continue to be

{p. 656} widely touted and prescribed, have similar side effects
(http://www.fda.gov/ cder/drug/infopage/baycol/baycol-qa.htm, point 9 at
bottom of page). Aspirin superseders, so-called NSAIDs and Cox-2
inhibitors, turn out to have more serious side effects than aspirin
(http://www.adrugrecall.com/ vioxx/vioxx.html; Hensley, 2004).

17 The dissident opinions on HIV/AIDS or global warming, for example,
can be found most commonly in publications associated with conservative
political views, for instance the Spectator (UK), the Washington Times,
or books from publishers like Regnery. In the early 1990s, the Sunday
Times (UK) and its editor, Andrew Neil, were roundly and widely
criticized—including by that supposed epitome of scientific decorum,
Nature—for printing articles by Neville Hodgkinson that explained the
views of HIV/AIDS dissidents and their evidentiary basis.

18 Indeed, the "Acknowledgments" sections in the cited reports (CGCED,
2000; UNAIDS, 2004) reflect bureaucrats’ mutual back-scratching rather
than technically competent peer review.

19 These waivers indicate a scientistic belief that "the scientific
method" is an impersonal formula for getting true knowledge. Were that
so, then people could not avoid seeing the true results of the method
even if they were unpalatable. But that method is a myth (Bauer, 1992),
and human beings, scientists among them, are very good at not seeing
what they do not like and imagining that they do see what they would
like to see.

20 In 1978, the Chemistry Department at the University of Kentucky
surveyed the recent experience of its faculty in getting grants. It
turned out that we were writing about 10 grant proposals for every 1
funded by the National Science Foundation. Ten years earlier, the ratio
had been 2 to 1.

21 For example, in the 1970s the National Science Foundation flirted
with "university-industry cooperative ventures". Those of us who tried
to participate found it difficult or impossible to resolve conflicts
between our desire to publish our work and industrial pressure to keep
results secret and proprietary. As Ziman (1994: 272, 265) points out,
"The scientific enterprise . . . runs on trust, which depends on
reasonable conformity with the norm of ‘disinterestedness’. . . . This
norm is not compatible with commercial practices. . . . A shotgun
marriage between such different cultures may produce offspring that are
much less intellectually or technologically fertile than either of their
parents".

22 To adopt Alan Greenspan’s description of the stock market in the
heyday of the techno-bio-dot.com bubble.

23 An historical landmark was Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report to the
President, Science—The Endless Frontier, widely credited for stimulating
massive federal funding of research.

24 Price (1963/1986) found that quality in science is proportional to
the square root of quantity. To double the number of excellent
scientists, the total number of all scientists must be quadrupled.

{p. 657} 25 I suspect that many contemporary graduate students and
faculty will not find easy to believe just how idealistic a large
proportion of students and practitioners of science were up to some
period following WWII. A decade ago, when I was giving seminars on
research ethics, a department head of my generation told me that he was
still having his graduate students read Arrowsmith (Lewis, 1925), whose
heroes preach selfless devotion to science and whose villains put
personal advancement first. Innumerable other anecdotes of idealism can
be found in reminiscences of scientists. Andrew Szent-Gy rgyi recalls
that his cousin, Nobelist Albert Szent-Gy rgyi, "taught me that doing
science is a privilege worth sacrificing everything for" (Hargittai,
2004). I still recall, half a century later, how very shocked my cohort
of graduate students was when we read The Struggles of Albert Woods
(Cooper, 1952), which suggested that politicking rather than merit led
to such awards as a Fellowship of the Royal Society (F.R.S.). So upset
were 2 of us that—in a less than sober moment—we accosted Professor A.
G. Ogston, F.R.S., to enquire whether this was true to life. (Ogston,
the very exemplar of modesty and a practicing Quaker, was very kind and
understanding. My companion on that occasion, Anthony W. "Tony" Linnane,
later earned his F.R.S. entirely on merit.)

26 Some time ago, this euphemism replaced the earlier term, "overhead".

27 In 1966, the Research Division at the University of Kentucky re-wrote
the budget of my application for a grant from the National Science
Foundation from $50,000 over 2 years to $250,000, asking for
reimbursement for part of my academic-year salary as well as
proportionate benefits, and much "overhead". To my protests, the
Director explained that the Federal Government was using these grants as
general support for universities. From the 1960s on, many colleges
developed the ambition to become research universities by trading in
this fashion on the availability of federal grants and fellowships for
graduate students. There had been 107 doctorate-granting universities in
the United States in the 1940s; 30 years later, there were 307 (National
Academy of Sciences, 1978). Expenditures for scientific research in
universities increased from $31 million in 1940 to $3 billion by 1980
(Krimsky, 2003: 27).

28 "[I]n our time a successful cancer researcher is not one who ‘solves
the riddle,’ but rather one who gets a lot of money to do so" (Chargaff,
1977: 89). The University of Kentucky (Wethington, 1997) and Virginia
Polytechnic Institute & State University (Steger, 2000)—no doubt among
others—have announced the ambition to become one of the 20 or 30
(respectively) "top research universities", a ranking that depends
solely on the total amount of research dollars expended. In the 1980s at
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, the criteria for
tenure and promotion in the College of Engineering were stated by its
Dean, in meetings of the University Promotion and Tenure Committee, to

{p. 658} be about $100,000 annual research support from external sources
for tenure, and about 3 times that amount for promotion to full professor.

29 Elsewhere I plan to publish a detailed critique of the first World
Bank report (CGCED, 2000) that I ever read. I was led to read others
that proved to be of equally poor quality, unreliable as to data,
interpretation, and citation of sources.

30 Root-Bernstein (1995a) found the period from infection by HIV to
actual illness—that is, developing AIDS—to differ profoundly between
different groups: 6 months for babies, 2 years for transplant
recipients, 6 years for recipients of blood, 10 years for gay men and
old severe hemophiliacs, 14 years for young severe hemophiliacs, more
than 20 years for mild hemophiliacs. To compare with the UNAIDS
guesstimate of 9 6 1 years, Root-Bernstein’s numbers must have added to
them the time from developing AIDS to death. That period is itself
highly variable. Avoiding AZT and other anti-retroviral drugs, Michael
Callen lived for 12 active years after being diagnosed with full-blown
AIDS (Hodgkinson, 1996: 14), while Richard Berkowitz was still living 2
decades after his diagnosis (Berkowitz, 2003). For more on long-time
survival in excellent health after diagnosis as HIVpositive, see
Maggiore (2000).

31 As noted earlier, it is by no means easy nowadays to find competent
reviewers without severe conflicts of interest. But institutions like
the World Bank or UNAIDS give no indication that they even attempt to
have their reports examined critically by outsiders before they are
issued. It is not the sort of thing that bureaucracies do.

32 For instance, Fleischmann and Pons over cold fusion in 1989.

33 As shown by public-opinion polls, for instance
http://www.americans-world.
org/digest/global_issues/global_warming/gw_summary.cfm. Accessed 13 July
2004.

34 See, for instance, the Science&Environmental Project
(http://www.sepp.org/), whose president is S. Fred Singer, a
distinguished environmental scientist.

35 A letter to this effect co-written by a couple of dozen well-known
cosmologists was refused publication in Nature but was eventually
published in New Scientist (2004). Mainstream dogma can pour scorn on
such views simply by pointing out that "Nature refused to publish this
letter", which most people would accept forthwith as casting grave doubt
on the letter’s credibility.

36 See http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/group.htm. Accessed 19 July 2004.

]37 "Aid for HIV/AIDS Crisis in Africa: A strong majority supports US
aid to address the problem of HIV/AIDS in Africa. An overwhelming
majority considers the crisis quite serious and believes that it will
effect [sic] Americans, thought [sic] the public is divided on whether
it threatens US national security. About half of the public feels the US
should do more to help, but strong majorities think other actors such as
the Africans, pharmaceutical companies and the UN should do more. A
majority feels the US should get

{p. 659} involved in the problem of AIDS orphans";
http://www.americans-world.org/
digest/regional_issues/africa/africa_sum.cfm. Accessed 13 July 2004.

38 For example, on PRI International, often heard during August and
September 2004 on AM 1260, Christiansburg (VA).

39 See http://www.piercelaw.edu/risk/vol4/spring/bibliography.htm: "The
Science Court: A Bibliography" by Jon R. Cavicchi. Accessed 19 July 2004.

40 "Ombudsman" implies independent and disinterested.

41 A very real risk, as Robert Gallo explicitly warned journalist Celia
Farber (Hodgkinson, 1996: 160, citing Lauritsen [1994]).

Acknowledgments

I was helped immeasurably by constructive criticism and moral support
from Patrick Huyghe and Sharon Begley as I was groping to bring together
the various strands of my concerns. Further and valuable comments on
various drafts came from Neville Hodgkinson, Joel Kauffman, and Joe
Pitt. When I thought I had finished, Jim Collier set me straight and
pointed me in the right direction.

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