[Dean's World] Dean: Another Interesting Review of Harvey's Book

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Posted by Dean:
Another Interesting Review of Harvey's Book
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1153290573.shtml


   Lynn Margulis writes:

     Duesberg's paper caused such an uproar in the medical research
     community that it led to rewriting of the rules for submission by
     members of their own scientific articles for the PNAS [note: that
     would be the [1]Proceedings of the National Academy of
     Sciences--Dean]. His questions are still valid. Lives are at stake.
     We find the paucity of evidence published in standard peer-reviewed
     primary scientific journals that leads to the conclusion that "HIV
     causes AIDS" appalling. No amount of moralizing censorship,
     rhetorical tricks, consensus of opinion, pulling rank, obfuscation,
     ad hominem attacks or blustering newspaper editorials changes this
     fact. The conflation "HIV-AIDS" may be good marketing but is it
     science? No. Yet certainly the political and economic implications
     of the term "HIV-AIDS" are staggering. (See [2]Harper's March 2006
     article "Out of Control" by Celia Farber).

     Peter Duesberg continues his splendid 35-year research career at
     the University of California at Berkeley where, since 1986 he has
     been a member of the National Academy of Sciences and hence,
     eligible to publish any of his own scientific work. Although his
     government research funds (like ours, on a far smaller scale) were
     cut from $350,000 per year to zero, he continues investigations
     into the cause of cancer with work on aneuploidy.

     Harvey Bialy's book may be hard at times for readers with little or
     no background in this arcane science, but its riveting narrative
     documents the troubling censorship and punishment of a tenacious
     scientist seeking answers. Unjustifiably labelled "denialists",
     "homophobes", "charlatans", or "Nazis", Bialy and Duesberg are
     foremost excellent scientists who follow David Bohm's adage
     "Science is the search for truth, whether we like it or not". It
     strains credulity to ascribe any other motivation to their stance.

     "Cancer keeps more people alive than it kills" claimed a colleague
     who compared the ample federal budget for cancer research to that
     for "exobiology" i.e., all NASA's life sciences investigation
     except manned spaceflight. Bialy's "aneuploidy" in the title of his
     superb account of the state of life science funding refers to
     Duesberg's turn of attention to the concept that "genes cause
     cancer". Peculiar genes, touted to be responsive to other genes
     that reverse their action are called "oncogenes". (As "onco.."
     refers to tumors, oncology is the study of cancer.) The other
     genes, to which oncogenes are responsive are called
     tumor-suppressor genes. Voilá, the onco.. gene causes the tumor,
     add the suppressor gene and the tumor disappears. This sort of
     facile equivocal language added to the universally agreed upon
     fact: tumor cells are aneuploid with high frequency, led Duesberg
     to pursue not prizes, just scientific truths.

     Cells, in their nuclei, in the bodies of animals and plants are
     "diploid". Nearly all of the billions of cells contain two sets of
     chromosomes. In humans the distinctive staining bodies, the
     chromosomes (made of protein and DNA) are present in pairs: 23
     pairs to a total of 46 where one member of a pair is inherited from
     the mother and the other member from the father. Diploid here means
     "normal". When sperm are made in men's testes and eggs are produced
     in the ovaries of women the number of chromosomes per cell is
     halved such that the sex cells have only a single set. They are
     haploid, also normal. Fertilization (23+23=46) restores the number
     to the fertile egg that becomes the embryo. Aneuploidy refers to
     abnormalities, excursions from either haploidy or diploidy: 47
     chromosomes, broken small extra chromosomes, etc. Cancer cells are
     aneuploid. Tumors form in the body at sites of chemical (nicotine,
     lungs) or mechanical (metal plates) irritation. The cells in those
     tumors tend to aneuploidy, all different kinds of aneuploidy that
     become more extreme as the tumor cells proliferate. Duesberg begins
     with these observations in his recent cancer research and ignores
     the kind of nonsense that Bialy exposes.

     In Bialy's "Hoofbeats on the road to the prize" (chapter 2) Bialy
     quotes an article by R.A. Weinberg, "The action of oncogenes in the
     cytoplasm and nucleus that summarized years of work and cost
     enormous amounts of money:

     "This review attempts to synthesize much of the currently available
     data on these issues. It is written with the belief that much of
     the information about oncogenes will eventually be understandable
     in terms of a small number of mechanisms and that the outlines of
     some of these are gradually becoming apparent." Science 230:770-776
     (1985)

     And Bialy, who supports Duesberg's contention that there is as
     little evidence for oncogenes as there is that HIV causes AIDS,
     comments: "Even for those who have raised equivocal language to new
     standards, the escape clause in this [Weinberg's] last sentence is
     truly extraordinary. With promises like these it is not surprising
     that twenty years later we are still waiting for the first
     biochemical pathway whose disruption by ...a [point or otherwise]
     mutated oncogene or genes is necessary, let alone sufficient, "for
     the crud to get its start"(Bialy, p. 47).

     As both Bialy and Duesberg emphasize, let us see the research
     results of those who show that cancer is "caused by an oncogene"
     and that "AIDS is caused by the rapidly mutating HIV virus". Please
     point us to the published evidence.

   Professor Margulis's complete review can be read [3]right here, along
   with, you will notice, positive reviews from quite a few other
   prominent scientists.

   Oh, and in case you were deeply impressed when well-known scientific
   fraud (fraud I said, and fraud I meant--the man has no business being
   allowed anywhere near a research lab) issued a supposed list of
   "errors" in the Harper's article listed above, be sure to [4]read this
   before getting snowed.

   What I find most fascinating about all this is the reaction of the
   mainstream media, which is supposedly so objective and so committed to
   neutrality. So why have they gotten away with, for over 20 years,
   covering only one side of the story? Where's that vaunted journalistic
   "objectivity" they supposedly teach in journalism school?

   By the way, more on professor Margulis and her extraordinary
   background [5]right here. It would not be surprising in the least if
   at some point she wins the Nobel prize. She certainly deserves one for
   having turned the world of evolutionary biology on its head (and
   taking much abuse for it until everyone finally grudgingly
   acknowledged that she was right).

   Even though Harvey and I often don't agree with or get along with each
   other, I continue to recommend his book [6]Oncogenes, Aeneuploidy, and
   AIDS: A Scientific Life & Times of Peter Duesberg to anyone with at
   least an undergraduate degree in biology. If nothing else, you'll walk
   away for the first time with a really full understanding of what one
   side of the war looks like. Or, actually, two wars: the war over
   whether so-called "oncogenes" are the primary mechanism of
   carcinogenesis, and whether or not HIV and HIV alone explains what we
   see of AIDS. You may also find yourself wondering how the government
   has managed to pour tens of billions of dollars into funding both
   hypotheses over the last 30 years and produced so very little as a
   result. How really? Becuase a tight little closed clique of a good-ole
   boy network that controls all the funding, approving each others's
   grants in a semi-secret, opaque "peer review" process where they get
   to censor and refuse funding for anyone who questions their cherished
   theories--and as a bonus, they get to put on halos, act like this all
   makes them saints, and how dare you question them, you little peon
   taxpayer you?!?!?

   So they get to keep all the grant money, testing kit patents, and drug
   patents for themselves. And don't answer to anyone except each other.
   It's despicable, it really is. And it won't get better until the
   general public--you know, those of us actually paying the taxes that
   pay for their research grants--demands better transparency and better
   accountability.

References

   1. http://www.pnas.org/
   2. http://www.harpers.org/OutOfControl.html
   3. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1556435312/sr=1-2/qid=1153289230/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-5154994-3381528?ie=UTF8&s=books/deansworld01-20
   4. http://www.rethinkaids.com/GalloRebuttal/overview.html
   5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis
   6. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1556435312/sr=1-2/qid=1153289230/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-5154994-3381528?ie=UTF8&s=books/deansworld01-20