For those who don’t know, Mullis is both a brilliant scientist and a crackpot. He thought up PCR while tripping on LSD (as the story goes). He testified at the OJ trial that PCR was undependable. He’s a bit off, that guy. As far as I know, he hasn’t made any contribution to anything since PCR, with the patent getting him rich through Perkin Elmer. He is kind of legendary. One of the tests for HIV is based on PCR. This, AFAIK, is his only link to the field. So a quote from him must be taken with a grain of salt.
There are plenty of scientists who deny the HIV/AIDS causality. Looking at their credentials reveals very few with training in infectious disease, virology, or immunology. But this in itself is not damning: that is the strength of science. We judge on one thing only: publication in peer-reviewed journals. They sometiems do publish, albeit in minor, non peer-reviewed journals.
And this leads to the usual clamour of conspiracy, of being shut out and ostracized from the scientific community, of being black listed, of being laughed at, etc. etc. They claim the reviewers en masse suppress what would be the biggest scientific finding of the past 50 years for some vaguely defined nefarious purpose. To me this is stretching it. A much more likely explanation is the science is shoddy and can’t stand for itself.
Looking at Peter Duesberg’s publication record reveals an odd research article in a lower-tier journal (I’ll find out whether they are peer-reviewed), but mostly correspondence, with only 3 since 1996.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=Search&DB=PubMed
This at once shows two things. The first is that he is not doing the science behind his hypothesis (or at least not publishing it). The second is that Science and Nature are quite willing to publish his letters and theories, showing that at least these, the top two general science journals, have no conspiracy to leave him without a voice.
It is true that the definitive proof of pathogenicity is fulfillment of Koch’s Postulates. The organism must be isolated and cultured from an infected source, it must be present in all cases of the disease, it must be reintroduced into animals to cause new disease, and it must be reisolated and recultured from those animals. This is pretty stringent, and for many diseases Koch’s postulates have not been shown, for instance syphilis (there is no culture condition for Treponema pallidum.)
AIDS is a more confusing and difficult than any other disease with which we have ever dealt. It is defined solely clinically, by the presence of one of a number of characteristic opportunistic infections. It is characterized by a drop of T4 cells. Neither of these are specific, and there are bound to be rare conditions which cause similar clinical pictures. This is complicated by the long HIV incubation time (no detectable disease often for over 5 years), the polymorphic nature of HIV (it is a retrovirus and depends on a relatively low-fidelity DNA polymerase, leading to many mutations), and a whole host of other factors.
We would predict that there would be people with an AIDS-like condition who are not HIV+. We would predict that there would be HIV+ people who do not get AIDS (variability of clinical presentation, mutability of HIV leading to an infection with a crippled virus, host factors which make an infected person more resistant).
But the vast majority of people with AIDS are HIV+. The vast majority of people who are HIV+ will develop AIDS without treatment. But the real nail in the coffin for me is the protease inhibitor. This class of anti-HIV drugs was introduced in 1996, after being developed as a specific inhibitor of the HIV protease (which is not found elsewhere in nature). It fits precisely in the enzyme’s active site, and has no other known targets. Before 1996, people were dependent on another class of drugs, polymerase inhibitors like AZT, which was far less efficacious. On AZT, the virus slowly became resistant and AIDS was slowed but not halted. People on their death beds who were given a triple drug cocktail including the protease inhibitors got up and went back to work. The three drugs together halts the disease in its tracks, in the process reducing HIV levels to below our limits of detection. The clinical picture fits with the laboratory picture exactly. Sure, it is circumstantial, but to deny it is totally unpragmatic, and much of modern medicine is based on pragmatism.
You may ask what harm it may do to question this. Notably, Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, used it as an excuse to prevent distributing AZT to HIV+ pregnant women. There is very good evidence that AZT minimizes transmission, and it is a relatively cheap and very cost effective way to minimize HIV transmission rates.
And if you want the argument from authority (Kary Mullis, Nobel Laureate, and this whole list of scientists here doubts that HIV can cause AIDS), you will be outgunned. The Durban Declaration is signed by over 5,000 scientists committed to the simple fact that HIV causes AIDS.
