HIVGATE

 

A Voyage into HIV science

 

 

By JANINE ROBERTS

 

 c2006 – free for non-profit purposes

 

 

 

 Like most of us, I never thought to question the cause of AIDS, despite friends dying of it in the early1980s. When in 1984 their illness was blamed on a virus called HIV I simply accepted this.  I had no reason to question it

 

Other issues absorbed me as an investigative journalist, in particular the plight of AustraliaÕs Aborigines. When HIV was discovered, I was out in the deserts of Australia making a film on their struggle for justice and for land. 

It was not until 1995, when my help was sought by parents worried about vaccines, that I started to learn more about viruses, bacteria and corporate medicine. The doctors that monitor vaccine safety for the UK government told me that it was impossible to guarantee that  current childhood vaccines were completely free from viral contaminants.  I learnt disturbingly that  the polio vaccine was grown on kidneys ÔharvestedÕ from wild-caught monkeys – and the viruses in these kidneys could not be completely kept out of the vaccine.

This was alarmingly verified by Dr Ben Sweet,  who helped develop the polio vaccine for Merck. He confessed to an interviewer; Ôwe didn't know what these monkey cell cultures [used for growing vaccine virus] were carrying...  But it was too late to switch gears and start using raccoon or chicken systems, because then you could be dealing with another whole set of viruses.'

 

My research on vaccines led to Channel 4 commissioning from me a ÔDispatchesÕ documentary and sending me in 1997 to an emergency scientific workshop in Washington DC summoned to consider highly disturbing medical reports from around the world  hat a monkey virus very possibly spread in the polio vaccine,  Simian Virus 40 (SV40) , was now being found in human cancers.  This workshop was at the top US health research authority, the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

 

Our production team went on to organise, with the permission of patients and their doctors,  the necessary medical tests to look for this monkey virus in UK cancers – for such tests had never been done before in this country.  Out of  11 patients tested, we found two whose cancers contained this monkey virus.  Channel Four then transmitted our ground-breaking documentary.

 

But during the NIH workshop I had been still more shocked to learn that HIV,  said to be originally a chimpanzee virus (SIV),  might have spread in the polio vaccine.   Dr Ben Sweet had confessed when he realised this; Ô'We really didn't think about it ... and now, with the theoretical links to HIV and cancer, it just blows my mind.Õ  This realisation was so late that measures to screen the polio vaccine for HIV were only put in place in 1988, some 33 years after the vaccine was introduced.

 

I realised that f HIV was spread thus,  the story of how this had happened would make an important television documentary, a powerful sequel to our film on SV40. I thus plunged into researching it.

 

There were several theories given by scientists to explain how  a chimpanzee virus could have evolved to infect humans as HIV. One of the most common was that it had happened through Africans eating chimps as Ôbush-meatÕ – but if so, I had to ask why had AIDS broken out so suddenly in the 20th century?  Chimps had been eaten for centuries in Africa.

 

No, it seemed to me much more likely that something unique must have happened in the 20th  century that forced this evolution to take place.  Could it have been the use of contaminated vaccines?  For me the fundamental issue seemed to be – was the polio vaccine grown on chimp organs.?  If they were, then chimp  viruses could easily have got into humans via the vaccine.

 

I had learnt that most viruses donÕt easily cross from one species to another.  They stay in their natural host, where they are usually harmless.  But, if monkey viruses are put by scientists into a culture of human cells,  or fed to humans in a vaccine, this might force the virus to mutate to infect us in order to survive. Many scientist thought this feasible. Such a mutated virus would be a stranger to which we have few defences  - and thus could be a great danger to us. Was this how AIDS had started?

 

I was not the only person working on this theory.  In 1999 I attended a major debate held at the Royal Society over precisely this issue.  An author, Edward Hooper, had, in a book called ÔThe RiverÓ  argued this case powerfully. He had discovered that a Washington-based polio vaccine developer, Dr. Hilary Koprowski, in the 1950s kept chimpanzees for experimental purposes in the Congo and had tried out an experimental polio vaccine on quarter of a million Congolese children – in the very part of Africa where HIV was now reported rampant.. 

 

But the evidence for Koprowski or his colleagues growing the vaccine on chimp kidneys was inconclusive. When I asked about this during the debate,  I was smilingly told by a UK government expert present Ôno wayÕ – they would never have used chimps for this.  Instead I was told that kidneys from rhesus monkeys from India were used. Affidavits were produced from the scientists involved. They all swore that they did not use chimps.

 

But afterwards I discovered an account of an experiment in which Koprowski in his Washington laboratory  had injected the poliovirus directly into the brain of a chimpanzee to see if it would grow in this tissue – and then taken an extract from the chimps brain and put it into a human cell culture. 

 

This was for me a Eureka moment.  Had I found the precise experiment that had brought about the evolution of HIV? It seemed entirely possible. I  was excited and pitched a documentary on this to Channel 4. But it seemed it was the wrong moment.  Much to my frustration, I was told their schedule did not go with a commission on this topic at this time. I would have to wait a year and re-submit.

 

But I was convinced that I was onto something here.  The assurances of the virologists involved that they would not use chimpanzees – only monkeys – did not convince me.  Why would they not use chimps if they had them?  Why would they instead import rhesus monkeys from India? They produced no evidence to sustain their position. I suspected that they would use whatever animals were to hand.

 

But at this point,  the World Health Organisation came up with another argument. They wrote that the polio vaccine could not have been involved, as chimp virus would need decades to evolve into HIV, and  thus this evolution must have started twenty years before the polio vaccine was introduced in 1954. Again they pointed to Africans eating bush meat as the cause of HIV.

 

But I was not convinced.  Everything I read about viruses showed they were  highly versatile creatures that could mutate quickly.  I wondered if the Ôslow evolutionÕ scientists were simply trying to defend the vaccine manufacturers?

 

Where else had this experimental vaccine been used? I did not know how many batches of Dr KoprowskiÕs vaccine might have been contaminated – but I found he had also used experimental polio vaccines on people in Belfast – and in Poland.

 

But  when I checked the course of the early AIDS epidemic, I came across a major problem.  All the early reports said it started not in Belfast or Poland nor in Africa but in the gay party drug-taking scenes in major western cities. I looked at medical reports from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and London. They all said AIDS started in the drug-taking gay scenes common to these cities in the late 1970s.

 

This forced me to ask how on earth could an African chimp virus come to cause AIDS in these gay communities – in cities where the experimental polio vaccine had not been used? I was forced to conclude that the vaccine could not be the primary cause of the AIDS epidemic.  But it still seemed possible to me that the vaccine had greatly helped the rapid spread of HIV in Africa.

 

But all this was very puzzling.  Just how had an African AIDS virus infected these gay communities? It was clearly ridiculous to postulate that large numbers of gay Africans had suddenly embarked to the US to have sex with gay Americans – especially since AIDS mostly affected heterosexuals in Africa!.

 

I looked to see how others explained this.  I found that Dr Robert Gallo, a leading US researcher into HIV, the head of the Cancer Tumor Laboratory at the NIH, had reported in a memo to his boss É.Õ I am speculating that it came wit the slave trade.Ó But if so, where had the virus hidden in the centuries between the slave trade and the first outbreaks of AIDS in the 1970s?  This theory seemed very unconvincing. 

 

Others suggested that the virus had travelled from Africa to the US in a single sailor or with a gay Canadian air steward – or via the gay scene in Haiti. But these  theories remained speculations. There did not seem to be any proof.  I found it particularly puzzling that  HIV  infected mostly gays in the West and heterosexuals in Africa, for no virus can select its victims by gender or by sexuality.

 

At this point I realised I knew very little about HIV. Who had first isolated it and when? Where did they find it?  Was it first isolated in Africans or in Westerners? How precisely did it work?

 

This hunt was drawing me in deeper and deeper.  I learnt that HIV was a retrovirus, and that these are extremely minute protein shells that carry short lengths of genetic code between cells.  They were nothing like what I expected. Much to my surprise I learnt that all cellular creatures make their own retroviruses,  humans, bacteria and  plants – and that these are generally harmless. The codes they have transported over aeons between our cells now constitute up to 30% of our DNA.  Evolutionary biologists are today using our DNAÕs library of retroviral genetic codes to construct an incredible 300 million year history of our evolution.

 

But this left me even more puzzled.  Why is HIV so uniquely a dangerous retrovirus? Why was it said to hijack our cells?  Why was it so unlike any other retrovirus?

 

As you might imagine or have found yourselves, there is no shortage of websites and information on the internet regarding HIV and AIDS.  When I looked for the earliest mention of HIV, I found it was at a White House conference in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France announced that the American discovered virus HTLV-111 and the French discovered virus LAV would both be called HIV – and the royalties for the HIV test shared equally.

 

This intrigued me.  Why was the White House and the French Prime Minister involved in such a scientific matter?  What lay behind their announcement?  How had HIV come to be discovered at the same moment by the French and the Americans?

 

I dug further ... and found that their decision arose from a legal dispute that went back to 1984.  It was over four scientific papers published by Dr Gallo and colleagues in the authoritative ÔScienceÕ journal on the 4th of May 1984 .   

 

Today these are the most famous papers in AIDS science. They describe experiments widely held today to have proven for all time that HIV is the cause of AIDS. These were carried out at the NIH between 1982-4 by Tumour Laboratory Chief Dr. Robert Gallo and his chief investigative scientist, Dr Mikulos Popovic. 

 

The discovery of the AIDS virus  was announced to the worldÕs by President Ronald Reagan's Health Secretary on the 23rd of April 1984. Two days later the leading science journal Nature had unambiguously headlined; 'The Cause of AIDS Identified'.  Ten days later they were published in Science. Today it is to these that scientists turn to learn how and when HIV was proven to cause AIDS.

 

In these Gallo and Popovic claim that the virus responsible for AIDS was a close relation to two retroviruses they were investigating as a cause of leukaemia.  They thus named the AIDS virus as Human T-Cell Leukaemia Virus III (HTLV-III.) 3

 

I found the dispute between the French and the Americans was over whose virus had been used in the key experiments that proved it to cause AIDS.  The French strongly suspected that it was a virus that the Pasteur Institut had loaned the Americans for study purposes, one that the French had named as LAV. They alleged that the Americans had stolen this virus, renaming it as their own HTLV-III.

 

I was gripped by this. Scientific fraud at the heart of HIV/AIDS. There was little or no mention of this in the histories of AIDS science published on the UK or US government AIDS websites.  I researched around this voraciously, and was quick to find the story. Following the accusation of theft in 1984, the US denied it out right. But in the Washington scientific community, many suspected that Gallo had stolen the virus. However hard proof was hard to come by, and so Reagan and Chirac agreed on a diplomatic compromise, to say they both found it at the same time.

 

But the story did not stop there. At the Chicago Tribune a Pullitzer winning journalist, John Crewdson, was hot on the trail. In 1999 he published a massively detailed account of the scandal, containing hard evidence that the French virus had in fact been stolen.

 

This led in 1990 to the launch in the US of the most formidable governmental investigations into scientific fraud ever conducted.10  They were was supervised by the highly prestigious National Academy of Science and Institute of Medicine  - and also by a powerful Congressional Investigative Sub-Committee. The latter even enlisted the US Secret Service, the body responsible for the security of the US President, to check the related Gallo and Popovic laboratory records in the finest forensic lab in Washington. If any were forged, it would find out.

 

I searched out the reports issued by these inquiries – and the related documentation, and was gripped.  They were astonishing.  Over four years they had systematically pulled apart Gallo and PopovicÕs research on AIDS and on the AIDS virus. 

 

They called many eminent scientists as witnesses, subpoenaed all relevant laboratory documents, and analysed in great detail every aspect of the May 1984 key Science papers. 

 

They reported finding Ô22 serious scientific errorsÕ in just the first of these papers, including many they called 'deceptions'.   They condemned as 'false and misleading' captions to photographs, descriptions of experiments and tables.[34] On top of this, the US Secret Service found many vital laboratory records had been falsified prior to being presented as evidence. After this, how could I, or anyone else, trust these papers?

 

The investigations had completely demolished the central claim made by Gallo in these famed Science papers; to have isolated HIV in dozens of AIDS patients in experiments conducted in 1982 and 1983.  They said;  'No evidence was supplied to show that any of these samples had ever been tested and found positive for HIV. In fact no such evidence existed.'[22]

 

I read on and found the investigators had scathingly concluded that, as of the 22nd February 1984, that is six weeks before the Science papers went to be published, Gallo hadn't proved any virus to cause AIDS. [11] Their  verdict was; 'Despite these repeated published claims, when Dr. Gallo was challenged to provide substantiating evidence, he did not, could not, do so;'  and that his claim to have discovered HIV prior to this date was 'scientifically impossible'.

 

Everything I read made me more and more amazed – for these papers are still credited and praised on  US and UK government health websites as discovering HIV?  How could this be?

 

But  then I found out why. I discovered at the end the investigators had concluded that, despite years of failure , in the final six weeks prior to publication  in Science,  Gallo and Popovic had secretly used the French virus sent to them by the Institut Pasteur and proved this to cause AIDS.

 

The evidence on which they based this conclusion was, they said, in a final draft the investigations had obtained of the key lead paper of the four published in Science.  This draft they said been typed up by Popovic, for it was he who had carried out the final experiments. Although Gallo later took much of the credit as Laboratory Chief, the Investigators' reported: 'Dr. Popovic single-handedly carried out the most important early HIV experiments' [35]  He had presented this draft for approval to Gallo just ten days before it went to be published.

 

This draft contained, the investigators said, clear evidence both of  the theft of the French virus, and that it had been proved to cause AIDS. But the investigators did not say much more about  this draft,  other than that Gallo had extensively changed it prior to publication, leaving me with many questions.

 

When I went back to the Crewdson investigation,  I found he did not examine the evidence for the French virus being the cause of AIDS - neither at the time nor in his  book about his investigation, Science Fictions. He apparently  presumed that, once he had eliminated the Gallo virus, the French one had to be HIV.

 

I just had to get this draft paper.  I was not interested so much in whose virus had proved to be HIV, but in how this virus was proved to cause AIDS. It was HIV I wanted to understand.

 

Although the French had suspected they may have found the AIDS virus, they had not proved this before they sent their LAV sample to Gallo and Popovic. They had stated at the time: "the role of the virus in the aetiology of AIDS remains to be determined" [12 ] 

 

Professor Montagnier, the head of the Institut Pasteur, has since confirmed this. He stated of what they sent to Gallo: 'We saw some particles but they did not have the morphology [appearance] typical of retroviruses. They were very different...What we did not have [had not proved], and I have always recognized it, was that it was truly the cause of AIDS." [19], 

 

After Crewdson published his 2002 book Science Fictions,  he made available many of the inquiry documents he had acquired much earlier under Freedom of Information legislation.  I  trawled through these,  hoping to discover the Popovic draft of the lead Science paper –and was thrilled when it turned up at the bottom of the heap.

 

 

THE SMOKING GUN

 

 

The draft  I found had been heavily edited by hand, with comments in the margin like 'Mika, you are crazy!' - Mika being what Gallo called Mikulos Popovic.  The investigators confirmed the handwritten changes were by Gallo, and said these were 'highly instructive with respect to the nature and intent of Dr. Gallo's actions'. Fortunately the underlying typed text was still mostly legible. I started to read it very carefully.

 

 On the very first page Popovic admitted the French virus 'LAV' was 'described here as HTLV-III' - thus saying that they were disguising it as their own virus. Gallo had crossed out this admission and noted alongside 'I just don't believe it.'  This deletion was no surprise to me.  It confirmed what the Investigators had said of this draft. It was conclusive proof that the French virus was secretly used.

 

I turned the page and was riveted. Popovic reported on the next page: 'Despite intensive research efforts, the causative agent of AIDS has not yet been identified.'  I read it again and again. It was in the present tense -  and thus apparently applied to  their experiments  with the French virus.  Gallo had deleted it by putting a line through it - but every word was clearly legible. This was totally unexpected.  Nothing I had read prepared me for this. No report, whether by the Investigators or by Crewdson, in scientific journals or in histories of AIDS science, had reported these words, let alone their deletion by Gallo.

 

I then checked this against the published version and found it was changed at the last moment to say exactly the opposite,  When published it read; "That a retrovirus of the HTLV family might be an etiological agent of AIDS was suggested by the findings'. 

  

Why was such a critical change not reported by the investigators? They must have seen it.   They had cited passages before and after this deletion. Was it because it brought into question the cause of AIDS? Was this one step too far for them?.

 

Just a few lines further down Popovic described as an 'assumption' (before Gallo deleted this word) Gallo's theory that 'the cause of AIDS is a retrovirus from the family of HTLV.'

 

I then looked to see how Popovic had tried to prove that the disguised French virus caused AIDS. Most of his paper described his efforts to grow the disguised French virus in cultures of cancerous T-Cells. 

 

He wrote in the draft that he measured 'the amount of released virus' by measuring 'RT activity in the culture.' There was apparently no need for any other test.

 

Today any school child who has studied biology will know that this enzyme is present in every human cell. It is also in all human retroviruses, in bacteria and in cellular debris – or so I was emphatically told by  16-year old Loren Smith,  the daughter of a friend  – but nonetheless Gallo had maintained for years that this was the guaranteed way to detect HIV, claiming that wherever RT is found, there too is the AIDS virus. On this assertion he had founded much of his AIDS science.

 

The second way that Popovic tried to detect what we now call HIV was by using a rabbit into which he injected proteins said to come from a suspect AIDS virus (from the French sample).  In reaction the rabbit produced antibodies against these proteins. He then tested blood from AIDS victims with the antibody rich rabbit serum – and if they contained anything that was attacked by these antibodies, then he deduced that the AIDS virus must be present in the patients.  But, as Loren Smith immediately and accurately said, when I described this experiment to her, Popovic would have had to first prove the proteins came from a virus that caused AIDS before he used it to test for HIV – and this he did not do.

 

But even if he had grown a possible HIV, Popovic admitted to not growing enough to prove it caused AIDS.

 

In the final paragraph of his paper, Popovic summed up in rather technical language the 'major obstacles'  to discovering the cause of AIDS. 'The transient expression of cytopathic variants of HTLV in cells from AIDS patients and lack of (illegible deleted word) proliferative cells system [lack of a culture] which would be susceptible to and permissive for the virus [in which the suspected AIDS virus would grow] represented a major obstacle in detection, isolation and elucidation of the agent of this disease. The establishment of a T-Cell population [as a culture] which, after virus infection can continuously grow and produce virus, provides the possibility of detailed biological, immunological and nucleic acid studies of this agent.'

 

These were the very last words of his paper - before Gallo rewrote them. They made clear that the vital detailed tests were for Popovic only a future ÔpossibilityÕ made easier by finding a way to grow T-Cells. Without such studies it was impossible to identify a virus as causing AIDS, as Popovic well knew - and thus his conclusion.

 

But Gallo rewrote this final paragraph, making subtle changes, adding the words 'previous', 'routine' and 'precise', to suggest the obstacles mentioned by Popovic had been overcome. When published it read:

 

 

ÔThe transient expression of cytopathic variants of HTLV in the cells from AIDS patients and the previous lack of a cell system that could maintain growth and still be susceptible and permissive for the virus represented a major obstacle in detection, isolation and elucidation of the precise causative agent of AIDS. The establishment of T-cell populations that continuously grow and produce virus after infection opens the way to the routine detection of cytopathic variants of HTLV in AIDS patients [a reference to the HIV test that Gallo was about to patent] and provides the first opportunity for detailed immunological and molecular analyses of these viruses.Õ [red text as redrafted or added by Gallo]

 

 

Gallo had removed any suggestion that the vital work needed to establish the cause of AIDS had not been done. It was thus a dramatically changed and deceptive paper that went a few days later to be published under his and Popovic's names.

 

According to the investigators' reports, this critically important draft had only survived because Popovic, disturbed by the changes Gallo had made to it, had secretly sent it to his sister in Austria for safekeeping, to serve as his insurance policy, only to be made public if needed to prove who falsified his research

 

His prudence had turned out to be necessary. He retrieved it from his sister when the investigations began - but hoped not to have to use it.  Then he was sent by mistake a tape that recorded, not just his answers to questions, but also the comments made after he left the room. This revealed that he, rather than Gallo, was to be found guilty of scientific misconduct. Next morning a lawyer acting for Popovic gave this previously unknown draft to the Inquiry.

 

When published, the rewritten lead paper was entitled; 'Detection, isolation, and continuous production of cytopathic retroviruses (HTLV-III) ['HIV'] from patients with AIDS and pre-AIDS.'  The word 'isolation' had been added. There had been in fact no isolation and no demonstration that the retroviruses present were 'cytopathic' - that is, able to kill. 

 

As for the other three Science papers, Gallo took the lead credit for the second. It focused on his claim to have 'isolated' his virus in 48 AIDS victims in 1982 - which the investigators would prove scientifically impossible. The third of the papers referred to his claim to have  identified HIV antigens in 1983 in experiments that would be later dismissed as utterly incompetent by the investigators, and the fourth included claims about antibodies against HIV - which could not have been identified if the cause of AIDS had not yet been identified, as Popovic had said.

 

 Later Gallo let it slip in the authorative journal Nature that Popovic made the rabbit serum, not by injecting it with the French HIV as they had thought, but with p24 (meaning a protein molecule with a mass 24,000 times that of a hydrogen atom).

 

Was p24 proved to be uniquely from HIV?  This was necessary for this experiment to work, but the Science papers expressly reported the opposite, that p24 is found in two other non-AIDS viruses, and  that is 'not detectable in most AIDS patients' although the same paper went on to say p24 must be a 'vital structural protein' of HIV' – apparently because so much of it was found in AIDS patients! All without  actually finding it in HIV!

 

The vital papers to my dismay were turning out to be an absolute quagmire of  illogical science.

 

This was more and more disturbing.  How could these papers be acclaimed as proving HIV caused AIDS  - if they included no proof at all of this? As for AIDS being spread by the sexual transmission of HIV, I was utterly astonished also to find that no evidence at all was presented to support this.

 

 

NoteÉ.  When in August 2005 I consulted international electron microscope expert Professor Emeritus Etienne de Harven, he told me: "In 1984 it was well known and published that reverse transcriptase (RT) is an ubiquitous enzyme, present in all living cells and therefore in all cell debris.'  The RT activity detected was 'most likely the result of the presence of contaminating cell debris...and is not acceptable evidence for the presence of any retrovirus".  (He also added that  pictures claiming to be of HIV  found on media and health institution websites are usually the product of 'considerable computer graphical embellishment' and 'never directly from a single AIDS patient.')I 

 

 

 WHERE IS HIV? – the evidence or its presence in the key experiments is missing.

 

If proteins are to be identified as coming from HIV,  they must first be found in HIV by isolating it and splitting it apart. But no such experiments are described in these papers.   Their authors simply say these proteins were found in laboratory culture near to,  'associated with',  cells that were presumed infected. Needless to say, being associated with cells is not the same as being part of a virus.

 

But the most disturbing evidence of HIV not being found by Gallo , was in a letter I found preserved in the inquiry records.  It reveals that Gallo in  March 1984 wrote to Dr Gonda, the Head of the Electron Microscopy Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, asking him to take photographs for publication of the enclosed samples that 'contain HTLV' [HIV].

 

Gonda replied on March 26th , 'I would like to point out that [some of] the "particles" ...are in debris of a degenerated cells;' and 'at least 50 per cent smaller' than they should be if they were retroviruses.. He concluded: 'I do not believe any of the particles photographed are HTLV I, II or III.' 'No other extracellular "virus-like" particles were observed.' [29] This reply went to Gallo just four days before he sent the papers to be published in Science.

 

Discovering this letter was a surprise  - as 4 photographs 'of HTLV-III'  credited to Gonda were in the published Science articles. In the accompanying text, Gallo states, without any caveats, that these are HTLV-III (HIV) - declaring them all of the right shape and correct size - although close examination reveals most are of slightly different shapes and sizes.

 

I do not know for certain if these were the photos of which Gonda had written. If they were, publishing them like this was highly misleading. In any case, no evidence for them being HIV was given.  If they were of the right size (and Gonda's letter casts doubts on this) some might possibly have been harmless human retroviruses.

 

I then discovered the investigators had ordered an independent electron microscope check on frozen samples of cultures in which Gallo had claimed to have grown HIV. This decisively reported; 'None of the ten pool [culture] samples contained a virus that looked remotely like HTLV-3B or LAV'.[30]

 

Among the correspondence unearthed was also a letter from Gallo to a scientist who could not confirm GalloÕs claims, since he could not find HTLV-III (HIV) in AIDS patients. It was dated one day before the Science papers were sent for publication,  the 29th March 1984. In this Gallo explained; 'It is extremely rare to find fresh cells expressing the virus', but far easier to find the virus in the laboratory 'probably due to removal of inhibiting factors present in the patient.'[32] Gallo has since also admitted, "We have never found HIV DNA in T-cells".[2]

 

Could it be that Gallo never found his putative HIV, even when he used the French virus?  On the evidence, I failed to see how his laboratory could have found HIV in the final weeks before the papers were published. The use of the French sample had changed nothing.

 

But the implications of this seem colossal. I was horrified by what I was learning. On the foundation of these papers was erected the entire HIV/AIDS research edifice.  Today it is almost universally held that the French HIV (LAV) was proven in these papers to be the one and only cause of AIDS.

 

 

EVIDENCE MISSING FOR HIV DAMAGE

 

All this was getting extremely perplexing. If the virus were so rare in patients, how could it be killing millions of T-cells?  The Science papers  state HIV is uniquely 'cytopathic; that is,  able to kill. But when I searched these papers for the evidence  supporting this statement,  I could only find the observation that AIDS patients typically had low numbers of T-Cells.  I could not even find in them any consideration of how HIV was transmitted. The whole question of sexual transmission was not even considered – yet within months of these papers coming out, the press were describing AIDS as certainly sexually transmitted.

 

HIV is said to cause AIDS by killing our T-Cells - a vital part of our immune system, thus opening the way to deadly opportunistic diseases.  I thought we must know how HIV did this, so was astonished when an article in Nature in 2001 reported: 'We still do not know how ... the virus {HIV] destroys CD4+ T cells...

Several hypotheses have been proposed ... some of which seem to be diametrically opposed.'2.  

 

It is widely known in science that many factors can diminish the numbers of T-cells in us - such as chronic 'poppers' (amyl nitrite) drug addiction (as proved by exposing mice to poppers), severe malnutrition and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.[33]  Sometimes even healthy people have low numbers.

 

In some frustration I went back to earlier work by Gallo to see if he had earlier proved HIV able to kill. I found before 1983, whenever he tried to grow T-cell cultures, the transplanted T-cells died. He had to throw away culture after culture.  Then the French suggested they might be dying because the AIDS virus was killing them. So it seems possible that  Gallo's theory that they were ÔcytopathicÕ  arose from his failure to grow T-cells. But where was the proof that these were killed by HIV? Many factors could be involved, such as the wrong nutrients, bacterial contamination, or, as the investigators would find in his cultures, mould.

 

Did the Science papers contain any firm evidence at all for HIV being even slightly harmful?  All I could find was a claim that it produced 'giant multinucleated cells' in cultures. Gallo suggested doctors could reliably test for HIV by looking for such cells in the blood of patients. 

 

But this idea was quickly dropped by Gallo when he realised that these are produced by cancers - not too much of a surprise since they were appearing in a culture of cancerous T-Cells. Popovic had overcome their earlier problem of having T-cell cultures constantly dying on them, by using cancerous 'immortalised' T-cells.

 

 

What then of the HIV Test?  They look for an antibody, not a virus!

 

The HIV test  we use today is still basically the one patented by Gallo in 1984. The patent application for this extensively quotes from the fraudulently changed Popovic paper.

 

The test is said to infallibly detect HIV in our blood by discovering if it contains antibodies that target certain proteins,  on the presumption that the latter are unique to HIV -  even though the Science papers admit that some of these proteins are also found in other retroviruses that do not cause AIDS!5 

 

Nevertheless,  if these antibodies are detected in our blood, we are told that HIV is also certainly present and that we are on the slippery road to a very nasty death. Again this presumption is unsafe on many grounds. Not only are the antibodies detected not proved uniquely against HIV;  antibodies can remain in our blood long after an infection has been defeated. This is the principle of vaccination.

 

Today the UK health authorities claim that as those who test HIV positive are more likely to get AIDS, as proved by an statistical association, and that this is certain proof that HIV is the cause of AIDS. This is an argument that deserved to be taken seriously. Could this be the proof that Gallo failed to obtain? I thus decided to look into how this test works in more detail. 

 

The test looks for antibodies in the blood.  These are produced by 'lymphocytes' (white blood cells) called 'B-Cells'. Every day of our lives, millions of lymphocytes are created - with us having about ten billion at any one time.

 

What happens, if after a passionate night you get worried and seek an immediate HIV test? Your doctor will tell you to come back in two months time, on the grounds that it takes this long for antibodies to appear after infection.  You may be offered instead an immediate short course of powerful antiretroviral chemotherapy-type drugs to 'prevent infection' - but although this course was recommended for use without an HIV test by the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in March 2005, this is thought to be still a rare medical practice in the UK.

 

When you return for the test,  a blood sample is taken, normally from your arm,  and sent away to be analysed. At the lab it has its red blood cells removed, and is then diluted 400 times.

 

To this are then added proteins 'from HIV'. Nowadays synthetic copies of these are used. As far as I can judge, these include copies of the proteins Gallo 'identified' as from HIV in the Science papers . If these are targeted by antibodies in your blood, then you have had a 'positive HIV test.'  However you are not told this until after two 'confirming' tests are carried out.

 

1. The First Confirmatory HIV Test –  looks for a protein, P24, not a virus.

 

This looks simply for the presence in your blood of the p24 protein claimed in the Science papers to come from the core of HIV - as described above. This is also the routine test used in screening blood supplies and for testing babies.

 

I suspect that its increasing use is because p24 is easy to find.  This is not surprising, given it is relatively common in the human population, including in healthy people! The official AID Vaccine Clinical Trials Group reported; "The presence of p24 band was common among low-risk, uninfected volunteers "

 

In another experiment, p24 was detected in seventy out of a hundred HIV-negative and healthy people;6 while, in yet another experiment, p24 was detected in only 24% of 'HIV positive' people.7

 

The UK official HIV testing guidelines admit that a positive result with this test does not prove HIV infection. Philip Mortimer, a top UK government expert, has reported; 'Experience has shown that neither HIV culture nor tests for p24 antigen are of much value in diagnostic testing.'8  No wonder, if p24 is widespread in the healthy!  It is thus disturbing, to say the very least, that, despite it not being 'of much value', the UK should approve it for deciding if infants are 'HIV positive' and made it an official confirmatory test for all.

 

 

2. THE Second Confirmatory HIV Te