 Science in this country and science in the world used to be democratic. All voices could be heard to find the truth. In particular, if we don't have the truth, if a hypothesis is as totally bankrupt as the virus hypothesis that hasn't saved one single life, we are killing 180,000 people with ACT. We are paying an army of 50 to 100,000 scientists who cannot even predict the spread of AIDS. That is the time to say, where's our market economy? Does that make sense? Is the patient getting its dollars worth of treatment? The answer is clearly no. Okay, when I was starting the ARBIS, my weight was 28, my CD4 count was 66, my viral load was 750,000 copies. Since I've started the ARBIS, this is my fifth year on ARBIS, then my weight now is about 65, and then my viral load is undetectable. My CD4 count is about 850. I'm very, very much healthy and I can do everything better. Suppose you and a friend are arguing about whether or not James Earl Jones was in Conan the Barbarian. You say he wasn't, your friend says he was. You argue for a time pointing out that there is no way James Earl Jones would do such a cheesy movie after just finishing Roots and Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back. You point out it would be totally out of place to have a middle-aged African-American character in whatever setting Conan takes place. But your friend pulls up the internet movie database. He finds James Earl Jones' biography. He plays an old VHS copy of the movie and shows you the actor in several of the scenes. He shows you the credits at the end of the movie. What do you do? Do you admit you were wrong? Get on with your life, comfortable in the knowledge that you are not an expert on Conan trivia. Or do you continue to argue the points looking for flaws in the evidence? I think many of us have done this. We allow ourselves to stubbornly cling to beliefs that are contrary to evidence. That's denial. It's a natural human response to things we don't want to hear. It's different in science, however. The difference between a good scientist and a zealot or a kook is the ability to admit mistakes in the face of strong evidence. In my own graduate career, my thesis project involved a viral protein that I was certain, based on circumstantial evidence, was a key protein in activating dormant pro-virus. But experiment after experiment failed to produce the result I wanted to find. After 18 fruitless months, I had to switch projects. Admitting failure was one of the hardest things I had to do. But that's what good scientists do. We have a duty to the truth, and we admit we are wrong in the face of evidence. Peter Dusberg, a scientist at UC Berkeley, had a theory. He believed that AIDS, or grids, as it was called in the earliest days, was caused by long-term drug use, lifestyle, and especially poppers, a club drug used frequently by certain members of the male homosexual community. His theory was plausible in the absence of any other evidence. The early risk groups for the syndrome were mostly IV drug users and gay men. Very little was known about transmission and causation. It seemed like a reasonable theory and was published in journals alongside other possible explanations. But then, human immunodeficiency virus was discovered in 1983. And the epidemiology of the disease made it obvious that it was being transmitted by intimate contact and by transfusion. The first transfusion patients and the first hemophiliacs were diagnosed. Some cases were only linked by the dentist they used. Dusberg's theory was becoming less and less plausible with each new discovery. Now, a good scientist might have walked away, admitted his theory was not supported by the new evidence, and gone back to his work on cancer. If he had, the world might be a better place. Instead, he dug his heels in. Hemophiliacs are getting the disease? Well, factor 8 is immunosuppressive. Add that to the theory. What about transfusion patients like tennis athlete Arthur Ashe? They must have had some other condition. What about the 47 laboratory workers who have contracted the disease from occupational exposure? They must have all been secret homosexuals or injectable drug users. What about the millions of Africans dying from AIDS? Well, they're just sick with malaria or bacterial pathogens. Everybody knows Africans have always been sick. Add that to the theory. Dusberg had entrenched him to his position and would not be budged. His papers on the topic were initially printed. But as the evidence began to go against him, his papers and grants began to be viewed with more embarrassment. His colleagues recognized that he was too invested, that his theories were becoming more elaborate and less scientific. He responded with vitriol, accusing former friends of suppressing his research, of being complicit in a cover-up. He became more and more of a contrarian, objecting to each new discovery out of hand. He continued to attempt to publish reviews of the work of others on the topic of HIV-AIDS, poking holes and insisting on artificial standards of proof. What he didn't do was to produce positive data for his own theory. His work was never on HIV. To my knowledge, he's never had HIV in his lab at UC Berkeley. His virology experience has been on animal retroviruses unrelated to HIV, which is a specialized kind of retrovirus called the Lindy virus. So he abandoned a serious effort at research and took his pet theory directly to the public. He wrote three books, including co-writing credit on Inventing the AIDS Virus, which was published by Harvey Beali, who may be the topic of a future episode. The other co-author was a grad student in his lab, Brian Ellison. The two of them had a falling out over the content of the book, and Ellison published the book without Dewsburg's approval. Dewsburg retaliated by successfully suing Ellison. Then, according to Ellison, Dewsburg also saw to it that he was denied a PhD and was thrown out of Berkeley. In Dewsburg's book, he makes a number of assertions about HIV, most of which have been refuted. For example, the drug theory has been soundly refuted. Poppers, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin have all been examined for their possible effect on CD4 or CD8 counts, and have been shown repeatedly to have no effect. Meanwhile, HIV-positive Americans and Canadians are over 1,000 times more likely to develop AIDS-defining diseases such as PCP and Kaposi sarcoma than those who test negative. Dewsburg argues that the antiretroviral drugs, which have increased the lifespan and quality of life for so many HIV patients, is actually causing the symptoms. This is in direct contradiction to the evidence. Modern three-drug combination therapy reduced the risk of AIDS and death by over 80%. What makes Dewsburg more than just a harmless crank is his involvement in national health policy in South Africa. Quoting from Wikipedia, In 2000, Dewsburg was the most prominent AIDS denialist to sit on a 44-member Presidential Advisory Panel on HIV and AIDS convened by then-President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. The panel was scheduled to meet concurrently with the 2000 International AIDS Conference in Durban, and to convey the impression that Mbeki's doubts about HIV-AIDS science were valid and actively discussed in the scientific community. The views of the denialists on the panel, aired during the AIDS conference, received renewed attention. Mbeki later suffered substantial political fallout for his support for AIDS denialism and for opposing the treatment of pregnant HIV-positive South African women with antiretroviral medication. Two independent studies have concluded that the public health policies of Mbeki's government, shaped in part by Dewsburg's writing and advice, were responsible for over 330,000 excess AIDS deaths and many preventable infections, including those of infants. A 2008 Discover magazine feature on Dewsburg addresses Dewsburg's role in anti-HIV drug-preventable deaths in South Africa. In the article, Max Essex, a prominent HIV-AIDS expert, says that, history will judge Dewsburg as either a nut who is just a tease to the scientific community or an enabler to mass murder for the deaths of many AIDS patients in Africa. A number of scientific criticisms of Dewsburg's hypothesis were summarized in a review article in the journal Science in 1994, which presented the results of a three-month scientific investigation into some of Dewsburg's claims. In the Science article, Science writer John Cohen interviewed both HIV researchers and AIDS denialists, including Dewsburg himself, and examined the AIDS literature in addition to review articles written by Dewsburg. The article stated, although the Berkeley virologist raises provocative questions, few researchers find his basic contention that HIV is not the cause of AIDS persuasive. Mainstream AIDS researchers argue that Dewsburg's arguments are constructed by selective reading of the scientific literature, dismissing evidence that contradicts his thesis, requiring impossibly definitive proof, and dismissing outright studies marked by inconsequential weakness. The article also stated that although Dewsburg and the AIDS denialist movement have garnered support from some prominent scientists, most of this support is related to Dewsburg's right to hold a dissenting opinion rather than support of his specific claim that HIV does not cause AIDS. I'm sad for Dr. Dewsburg because he has ruined what might have been a promising career in cancer research, not for holding views in contrast to his peers, not for being controversial, but for failing to recognize when he is wrong. The legacy of his denialism makes the world a darker place.