Subject: Background on Dr. J. Sonnabend

Background on Dr. Joseph Sonnabend,
New York physician and virologist

See also:

<36> for information on Sonnabend's AIDS theory


Dr. Joseph Sonnabend is an eminent virologist best known for
his work with interferon <19>. But these days he's practising
medicine in a rundown tenement building located in New York's
Chelsey district, a poor working class area beside Greenwich
Village.

There's nothing classy about this place. It's spotless but jammed
with stacks of boxes and medical files. In one room the examining
table is pushed against a closet door. Piles of old research papers
tumble down from a shelf the moment they're touched.

Sonnabend himself looks like anything but a doctor. He's wearing
worn-out white running shoes, faded grey Levi jeans and a speckled
black sweater with a striped shirt.  When he wears his glasses they
seem to sit perpetually at the tip of his nose.

It wasn't always like this.

Sonnabend used to run his practice in an upper middle class area
of New York.  He was well respected for the work he did editing the
AIDS Research Journal and for his interferon <19> studies.

Then he came to a point where he refused to accept the theory
that HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) <17> causes AIDS.

His unswerving position that many different environmental and
behavioral factors cause AIDS <36>, not HIV, was the beginning
of his demise.

He lost his editing job.  Research dollars dried up.  He was forced
to move his medical practice into a poor working class district
because tenants in his building objected to the gay patients who came
to him for help.

"I've certainly been castigated.  My professional life and my
activities have certainly been made incredibly difficult because I've
rejected the HIV (theory)," he said.

At the time he rejected HIV as the AIDS cause the research he was
doing was funded by the AIDS Medical Foundation.  "I resigned because I
couldn't go along with HIV spreading through the heterosexual
community around the world," he said.

Since 1983 Sonnabend has never changed his opinion that HIV has
nothing to do with AIDS.

He argues there are other factors involved.  He uses what he calls
a multifactoral model to explain how AIDS is caused.  It suggests that
it's the environment people live in and the lifestyles they lead that
are the real reasons why they get AIDS - not infection with the HIV
virus.  He does not use the term cofactor <11> to describe other
things that might result in AIDS.  He sees various causes of the
syndrome knit together and interacting with one another <23>.

Sonnabend doesn't think AIDS is a new disease or that it's caused
by any single event in the sense that measles is caused by the measles
virus, or polio by the polio virus <32>.

"I believe that AIDS comes about as a result of cumulative or
repeated exposures to environmental factors," he said.
These multiple environmental factors, he said, interact to
produce a range of biological abnormalities which in turn are
responsible for the syndrome that we label AIDS.