Posted by Editor on April 02, 2004 at 07:47:10:
In Reply to: Whatever Happened to AIDS and Straight Men? posted by editor on March 26, 2004 at 15:35:07:
Straight AIDS Myth Shattered
New York Post
March 19, 2004
The public health experts - and their amen corner in the media - owe Helen Gurley Brown an apology.
The legendary Cosmopolitan editor was vilified in 1993 when she published a piece called "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS." But she was right.
Eleven years later, Details is asking: "Whatever Happened to AIDS and Straight Men?" The article states, "A disease-free man who has unprotected sex with a drug-free woman stands a one in 5 million chance of contracting HIV."
The story by Kevin Gray also cites a joke that made the rounds of the New York City Department of Health as statistics came in showing that the
predicted spread of AIDS to heterosexuals wasn't happening: "What do you call a man who got HIV from his girlfriend? . . . A liar."
"I feel somewhat vindicated," Brown told the Post.
Michael Fumento, who wrote the original 1990 book titled "The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS," said, "I'm not waiting for an apology. It's not going to happen."
When Basic Books published Fumento's tome, "Distributors refused to handle it," he says. "Stores refused to carry it. And at many stores that did have it, clerks left it in the basement."
Celia Farber, who wrote an AIDS column in Spin magazine, was routinely attacked because she refused to rehash the propaganda put out by AmFAR and other groups.
"Everybody who was wrong got journalism awards. Everybody who was right got all but driven from the profession," Farber said.
Farber exposed the conspiracy between profit-hungry drug companies, researchers who wanted more funding, homosexuals who didn't want the disease to be known as "the gay plague," and conservatives who wanted to turn back the sexual revolution.
"They believed in what they were doing, not what they were saying," Fumento said. "They knew it was lies. They felt the end justified the means."
At a recent editorial meeting at Seed, the new science magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Laurie Garrett supposedly threatened to quit when a colleague suggested a story about Peter Duesberg, a leading retrovirologist.
Duesberg lost his funding, his laboratory, and his students when he announced in 1987 that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. "He lost everything," said
one insider. Duesberg switched to cancer research, and is now touted to win a Nobel Prize.
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And speaking of Duesberg...
With what may ultimately prove a vindicating discovery, Duesberg and his alternative theory on cancer make the Headlines section of April's Popular Science magazine.
A Contrarian View of Cancer
Once Shunned for his AIDS Theories, Peter Duesberg is Back in the Spotlight
By Michael Stroh
Popular Science, April 2004, page 39
You might think Peter Duesberg would have learned his lesson. In 1987 the University of California virologist declared that recreational and other drugs, not the HIV virus, cause AIDS. He even offered to inject himself with the virus to prove it. The radical theory "didn't help my career," Duesberg acknowledges today. Grants dried up. Graduate students steered clear of his
lab.
But none of that has stopped Duesberg from challenging mainstream theories. Now he's taking aim at one of cancers research's most clearly held hypotheses: that deadly tumors arise when a handful of genes gone bad.
In January, Duesberg organized a scientific conference in Berkeley to debate an alternative theory. It's not faulty genes that cause cancer, he argues, but faulty chromosomes. If heıs right, his ideas could fundamentally change
how doctors screen for cancer, and could lead to earlier tumor detection.
A normal human cell contains 46 chromosomes. Most tumor cells contain double or triple that;in some, chromosomes are also missing or mangled. This condition, called aneuploidy, was first liked to cancer in 1914, but the
connection was eventually pushed aside when scientists (Duesberg among them) discovered oncogenesgenes that spur tumor growth. If a few oncogenes mutate, the theory goes, uncontrolled cell division, or cancer, will follow.
But, Duesberg argues, the disease doesnıt always follow. Scientists have genetically engineered rodents teeming with oncogenes and yet these animals, he notes, rarely become tumorous. "If the mutation theory was right," he says, "Those mice should be meatballs." Moreover, cells within the same tumor donıt always manifest the same mutated genes.
To explain these apparent gaps in cancer's central dogma, Duesberg has put forth this theory: A carcenogen, for example tobacco smoke, causes a cell to produce daughter cells with malformed chromosomes. Since a single chromosome
can host thousands of genes, the reshuffling that occurs during replication creates widespread chemical mayhem. Years or decades later the process yields a cell with a deadly combination of mutant genes.
While Duesbergıs concept of cancer is far less radical than his AIDS theory, which he still defends, many researchers remain skeptical. Aneuploidy, they contend, is little more than a side effect of cancer. Robert Weinberg, a
breast cancer researcher at the Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts says his lab has created tumor cells that have a normal set of chromosomes. "He has chosen to ignore that data," Weinberg says.
But even if Duesberg's theory proves rubbish, some scientists say he's helping to stimulate new thinking about cancer's origins. "Just because he had some weird ideas about AIDS at some point doesn't mean he's an idiot," says John Hopkins cancer researcher Christian Lengauer. "He's helped the discussion."