Subject: Nature's way of telling you
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 1995 03:31:59 -0700 (74 lines of text)
From: todd33 at ix.netcom.com (Todd Miller )



    The editorial in the September 7, 1995 issue of _Nature_,
which accompanied the hemophilia study that the press is
touting as "definitive" proof that HIV causes AIDS, contains
some strong admonitions to those doubting the role of HIV.
A few selected quotes that I will try to keep in context.

Opening line:

"Not much has recently been heard from those who hold that HIV
has nothing or little to do with the causation of AIDS."

Later:

"It is well known that no amount of statistical argument can
by itself prove that a disease is actually caused by the agent
with which it is statistically associated.  That is why some
people still believe that cigarette smoking is not a cause of
lung cancer and cardiovascular disease, for example.  Even now,
there will be ingenious people constructing hypotheses by which
the association described can be explained by mechanisms other
than those that appear to stare one in the face."

"The view that AIDS is caused not by HIV as such but by the
injection of drugs of various kinds, "recreational drugs"
particularly, and also drugs used as medicines, will nevertheless
be more difficult to sustain in the light of the evidence from
Darby et al."

"Yet is is safe to predict that there will be complaints from
the obstinate community of the unconvinced that Darby et al.
have failed to provide full details of the drug regimen followed
by the 6,000 people on the register, and that until they do,
their conclusion has no force."

"The mistake in that opinion, if voiced, would be twofold.
First, the data now published are of interest and importance
in their own right, as further evidence (if such were needed)
that HIV is almost invariably linked with AIDS.  As such, they
are addressed to the research and medical community at large,
not to the company of the unconvinced.  Second, the sad truth
about debates on controversial issues in science is that there
may come a point at which dissenters forfeit the right to make
claims on other people's time and trouble by the poverty of
their arguments and the exasperation they have caused.  The
world (to judge from Nature's postbag) is full of people who
believe that Einstein's relativity is a pack of lies, but who
cannot make the claim on other people's attention they would wish."

"The tragedy, in the case of HIV and AIDS, is that disbelief in
the role of HIV in AIDS has spread from beyond a small company
in the research community to large part of the AIDS community
itself.  The reasons are unremarkable and pathetic in the strict
sense of that word: it is at least uncomfortable for an infected
person to know that HIV infection will lead eventually to AIDS.
Not for nothing is the knowledge often called a "death sentence".
The remedy is not, of course, to pander to wish-fufilment, but
to redouble the effort in the laboratory and the clinic.  Those
who have made the running in the long controversy over HIV in
AIDS, Dr Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, California, in particular,
have a heavy responsibility that can only be discharged by a
public acknowledgement or [sic?] error, honest or otherwise.
And the sooner the better."

Seems like an awful lot of rhetoric directed at those who are
being painted as way out in left field.  If the dissidents are
that far removed, why bother even addressing the issue at all?
This editorial suggests to me that there are some who are very
concerned about the growing challenges to the HIV->AIDS theory.


Todd Miller