“Endless loop - n. See
loop, endless.
Loop, endless - n. See endless loop.” Isaac Asimov
23rd April 1984, and the National Academy of
Sciences auditorium in Washington DC was packed with journalists and television crews abuzz with
anticipation. US Health Secretary Margaret Heckler emerged and greeted the
assembly, declaring: “Today we add
another miracle to the long honour roll of American medicine and science.
Today’s discovery represents the triumph of science over a dreaded disease.”
The miracle Heckler announced was that a team of virologists
led by Dr Robert Gallo had isolated a virus that was apparently causing AIDS. This was a
tremendous announcement and the enormity of Heckler’s words, coming at a time
when the climate of AIDS-induced fear was at its pinnacle, could not be
overestimated. Speaking of Gallo’s work as an all-American
miracle discovery, Heckler reminded the public of the gratitude it owed to
medicine for triumphing over this dreaded disease.
And then it was Dr Gallo’s turn: “Dr Gallo, Sir!
Dr Gallo, this way! Sir, this way!” chorused the
hordes, the whirring and flashing banks of cameras more befitting a royal
arrival. The jostling photographers vied for that special Gallo victory pose to accompany the following day’s world editorials
which would triumphantly announce: “The
beginning of the end of the scourge of AIDS!”
With no demanding questions being asked of Dr Gallo, the likeable, but rather nervous-looking doctor produced what he described as photographic evidence of the cornered virus and briefly outlined the supporting science behind his discovery. And all the time, the flashing and the whirring. Gallo’s discovery was the news of the decade, the answer the world had been yearning for, the relatively unknown doctor now quite fittingly fęted as the saviour of the human race.
But there was a big problem, as AIDS critic David Rasnick stated:
“With that
announcement, Gallo had publicly leapfrogged across the scientific process -
across peer-review and analysis, across the very checks and balances of
science.”[1]
Gallo had committed the cardinal sin as far as transparency of scientific reasoning was concerned. At the time of his press announcement, he had allowed no independent body initially to verify his claims. How very different the future of AIDS and HIV might have been, had Margaret Heckler opened the press conference thus:
“Science and research must be studied in the
context of all the interested parties involved. The questions centre on
determining the relative weight of the various allies in the ‘fact-creating’
process - e.g. funding bodies, businesses, departments of state, professions
and other scientists. In analysing scientific debates, one should
always ask what social, institutional, political and philosophical interests
lie behind often apparently ‘neutral’ and ‘technical’ knowledge claims.” [2]
An important piece of advice, ten years too late and in any case forgotten in the fanfaronade of the public canonisation of Dr Gallo. After all, for the good of mankind, science and scientists had been pulling out all the stops to bag possibly the biggest killer this planet had experienced since the bubonic plague of the 15th century.[3] And of course, in this all-out mercy mission to save so many human lives, it goes without saying that nothing improper would have been taking place… doesn’t it?
To our very great cost, and hence the reason for this book, we shall see that such trust and benevolence extended towards the science supporting AIDS and HIV are misplaced and naďve in the extreme. A special panel of the National Academy of Sciences would, a few years after the Gallo announcement, be meeting to discuss:
“…a
persistent pattern of behaviour on Dr Gallo’s part of repeated misrepresentation,
suppression and distortion of data, and the misrepresentation of findings in such
a manner that would enhance Dr Gallo’s claim to priority.” [4]
The above panel was by no means be the only one urgently convened over the years following the 1984 press conference to discuss the methodology of Dr Gallo, the founding father of the alleged HIV. What exactly was this man getting up to in the closeted, almost impenetrable world of beakers, bunsen burners and centrifugal separation? Before we visit the Gallo laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland, it might serve us firstly to examine the scientific and medical culture into which the AIDS phenomenon/crisis reared its head in the first place. Establishing what attitudes prevailed at the time concerning the theories on illness and contagious disease will highlight why the search for the cause of AIDS was so dominated by the virus hunters.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in America began in 1887 as the Hygienic Laboratory. An insignificant organisation at the time, it was actually affiliated to the Public Health Service, which itself was affiliated to the US Navy. The NIH has since retained its military connections, the Surgeon General to this day wearing a white uniform. In the 1930s Congress created the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which became the first subdivision of the NIH to focus on any particular illness, and the parent organisation thus became known as the National Institutes of Health. James Shannon became the director of the NIH in 1955, taking up his position at a time when the US was experiencing the effects of polio.
James Shannon persuaded Congress to release considerable amounts of money to fund an all-out medical war against polio. But with the natural waning of polio in the early 1960s (now showing all the signs of being an environmental affliction[5]), the many specialists trained exclusively in virology to combat the condition dropped their investigations and began to concentrate their efforts on the search for the cure for cancer. And of course, being virologists, all sought the virus that must surely lurk behind one of mankind’s biggest killers. Any notions cancer might be a toxic, metabolic, nutritional or environmentally-based disease were given short shrift.[6] Twas a virus and a virus only they hunted, nothing else considered. Gallo himself later remarked: “Sometimes we virologists have a virus in search of a disease.” [7]
As we shall see, the narrow ambitions of the virus-hunting fraternity have produced some highly embarrassing and costly medical research failures. This is particularly true of the research commissioned by Congress for Richard Nixon’s 1971 War on Cancer, the NCI announcing that same year that a vaccine against cancer would be available by 1976.[8] The dominant power the virus establishment wields and its disconcerting ability to get things badly wrong on occasions is highlighted most succinctly by South African barrister Anthony Brink:
“As we’ve all seen, when these oracles mumble and the press trumpets blare, the entire world eagerly gobbles up every word without demur. How many fake health crises have they delivered still-born into the popular consciousness? Take the idle herpes scare in the 70s, the phantom syphilis epidemic of the 30s and 40s, the great swine flu fiasco and that shining emblem of medical idiocy, the pellagra plague in the first four decades of this century, treating the people with arsenic and ruthless quarantine, which turned out to be plain malnutrition among the politically awkward droves of poor whites in [America’s] Deep South industrial towns.
We need contagious epidemics to fight. Even imagined ones. They’re tremendously psychologically useful. Germ theory so dominates contemporary medicine that it seeks germs everywhere, the more virulent the better, and especially if they can be linked to our culture’s great taboos - sex and death. Anything to avoid facing up to unappealing political realities like widespread chronic under-nourishment among a shameful number of our countrymen as the time-honoured and common-sense cause of broken health.” [9]
Regular intakes of nutritious
food? Whoever heard of such a thing? A sensible prescription lost in our
overall reverence for the pharmaceutically-driven medical model, itself intent
on blaming viruses for most of man’s ills.
When a disease fails to perform
to a given pattern, it is understandably important the medical establishment is
seen by the general populace to be in control of the situation and fully
understanding of the disease in all its complexities. It was virologist Carlton
Guidachek who first put forward the notion of the slow virus - that an invader
could gain entrance to the body, hide up and strike, even years later. Bryan
Ellison comments:
“A few virologists in
the early sixties simply invented the notion of the slow virus, [a concept] which was actually awarded the Nobel Prize in
1976. Of course, once the concept of slow viruses had come to be accepted, it
was possible to blame conceivably any disease on a virus, no matter how
uninfectious the disease was.….” [10]
Although
sounding quite plausible to the laity and even to some medical experts, the
idea of the slow virus was eventually consigned to the scrap-heap. Science has
shown the chief causes of disease are not dominated by the virus, but by
metabolic/nutritional imbalances and ongoing toxicities which affect a person’s
immunity.[11] Micro-organisms as
disease pathogens are opportunistic. The weaker the immune system due to poor
diet, lack of hydration and environmental toxicity, the greater the likelihood
of ill-health from them.[12]
Yet agencies around
the world, such as the CDC and the
EIS, daily
shape our understanding of health and disease. In a discussion on ‘shaped’
awareness and preconceived ideas, Noam Chomsky, Professor of Linguistics and
Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated that:
“Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent
every year to control the public mind.” [13]
Subliminally or otherwise, vast sums of vested-interest money influence our attitudes towards illness today. Bryan Ellison reports:
“By the time AIDS came
along, the virus hunters controlled all the reins of power in the biomedical research
establishments, and so naturally they dominated the research on AIDS. The very
first person to describe AIDS cases - Michael Gottlieb in Los
Angeles describing five homosexual men with pneumocystis carinii
pneumonia -
himself was already suggesting that it was caused by the herpes-type virus,
cytomegalovirus. [Such] was the result of
the virus hunters being in
a dominant position in the establishment.” [14]
There was no choice in the
matter. Until proven otherwise, any new and emerging disease from the early
sixties onwards was first and foremost considered viral in nature. And that was
also true for some of the well-established diseases, especially cancer.
In the early 1970s, Robert Gallo was working out of laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland, under the wing of the National Cancer Institute, and reporting to the immensely powerful Litton Bionetics. Gallo, a fully trained virologist, had been set a specific brief. Steven S Hall, author of Commotion in the Blood, says this of Gallo’s early calling:
“Gallo set the
research agenda, did the hiring and ran the lab meetings. Every lab has an
overriding mission and Gallo’s was no exception. Like many virologists, Gallo had been
looking for a human virus believed to cause several forms of human cancer…” [15]
Gallo was considering the possibility of a particularly nasty virus, a virus hidden deep perhaps, but a virus he believed existed and could be detected - the virus most likely responsible for the dreaded leukaemia.
Leukaemia is the umbrella term to denote the unrestricted growth of under-developed, ‘rogue’, immune-system white blood cells (leukocytes). In failing to mature properly, they create greater and greater numbers of themselves until they crowd out the healthy blood cells, bringing the immune system to a kind of leukaemic gridlock. In their attempt to validate the ‘leukaemia as virus’ hypothesis, Gallo’s lab technicians would obtain the cancerous leukaemia cells and concentrate primarily on trying to manufacture a ‘culture’ in which the cancerous cells might live. This would then allow the researchers time to study the cells, in order to try and identify any attacking virus.[16]
As a point of interest, more prized than isolating any virus, the virologists’ Holy Grail was independently to create in these cultures the infamous killer T-cells. Just as the alchemist pursues the life force, the ‘fifth essence’ (quintessence), and the astrophysicist the single-line equation explaining the existence of universe, so the virologist dreams of creating test-tube T-cells – those unique and incredibly complex fighters in our immune system. (“Having such killers at our beck and call would surely then make it possible for us to manipulate them, train them even and then direct them to destroy any invading cancerous cells.”) Discovering the recipe for promoting the growth of the T-cell was an ongoing pursuit. And creating the ‘culture’ in which the cells might grow was, and still is, time-consuming and expensive. The laboratory beakers containing Gallo’s precious and painstakingly prepared cultures were all meticulously labelled and kept refrigerated at the necessary low temperature.
And then, in late 1974, after almost three years of experimentation, a leukaemic virus was apparently isolated, which Gallo named Human Leukaemia 23 (HL23V). Gallo immediately reported the discovery to the local scientific community, and submitted a paper on the isolated virus to Science which was published in January 1975. Newspapers were quick to report on Gallo’s remarkable achievement, but his peers were even quicker to question his claims, asking what culture he was using, how he had prepared it and how he had gone about his experiments. Gallo hedged and would not reveal the chemistry of his culture, nor would he share the exact manner in which his virus had been isolated - only that it had. Concerning the validation of scientific claims, Geoff Watts, author of Pleasing the Patient, reminds us of traditional scientific methodology:
“Researchers are required not only to
publish their findings, but also to describe their method in sufficient detail
to allow others to repeat the work. Indeed the repeatability of an experiment
is one of the criteria by which scientists judge the claims of their peers.” [17]
Gallo’s habitual reluctance to conform to this sensible scientific
methodology served only to anger his professional colleagues. Their questions
became more forcefully posed:
“Where’s the leukaemia virus, Dr Gallo? And how did you preserve the cells?”
With pressure mounting on Gallo to produce the necessary evidence to support his ‘discovery’, suddenly… a calamity! One morning lab workers arrived to find that the refrigerator containing the supposed leukaemia virus and the precious ‘cultures’ had been mysteriously unplugged. Any evidence of the HL23V, supposedly preserved in the secret ‘culture’, known only as WHE, had now been ruined. Says Gallo of this unfortunate but quite timely disaster:
“We were screwed. We
were only able to say, ‘Honest, we had it!’ and prove it to nobody.” [18]
Popular medical literature of the day however makes no
mention of these ‘minor’ irregularities along the way, and credits Gallo with all the ‘leukaemia breakthrough’ headlines. It was Robert
Gallagher, a technician at Gallo’s lab during this period, who
later stated that they hadn’t actually
wrapped their hands around an actual
virus; rather they had inferred its presence based on a number of intricate
virological predictions.[19]
Exactly the same species of ‘virtual truth’ can be found propping up much of
what we know as quantum physics. Anyone wishing for direct evidence that
various, exotically named particles such as quarks, nuons and gluons, actually
exist are quite breezily quoted Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. “One can estimate where the particle might
be going and where it might have been, but not actually where it is.” That,
in laymen’s terms, is the central tenet of particle physics. The virtual
existence of the quark and the massive funding to track it down bears uncanny
resemblance to the chemokines and cytokines rearing their virtual heads in the
blood sciences of today - equally exotic and authoritative in name as the quark
family, but equally elusive to the rational, enquiring eye and mind. Similarly,
in the case of Gallo’s HL23V, the overriding
question: “Was there ever really a virus
in the first place?”
And what about that secret ‘culture’ known only as WHE? Gallo certainly exercised prudence in not expanding on its exact make-up. The initials stand for ‘whole human embryo’. Aborted whole foetuses, developed no further than the first trimester (3 months), had various cell extractions performed upon them, the extracted cells forming the base composite for the melted HL23V. Readers comforting themselves that foetuses not exceeding the first three months are probably just underdeveloped cell matter may be shocked to discover otherwise, as the following extract from “Love Your Unborn Neighbour” reveals:
“By the sixth week
from fertilisation, tiny fingers appear, followed within days by toes. At the
same time the eyes develop the lens and retina and the eyelids begin to
appear. Brainwaves can also be
detected. At seven weeks the child has its own fingerprints, the outer ear is
present and the inner ear, with its hearing and balancing mechanisms, is well
established. At twelve weeks the
child’s features become more defined. The unborn baby can open or close the
lips, wrinkle the forehead, raise the eyebrows and turn the head. The baby’s
sex is easy to determine, the baby measures about 90 mm and weighs 45 g and she
is also sensitive to touch.” [20]
Three years’ lucrative funding and thousands of man-hours later and finally, a virus existing only by the word of Dr Gallo, now melted. With his reputation severely dented, and Gallo still insistent that he had isolated said leukaemic micro-organism, the Maryland virologist immediately began scouring the labs for a cell specialist, someone with the necessary qualifications to resurrect his battered HL23V program. Steve Hall recounts:
“It would not be exaggerating to characterize
the mood in the lab as scientifically based hysteria. And into this dark
environment of desperation, suspicion and frantic scientific scrambling arrived
Doris Ann Morgan…” [21]
With a PhD in Biochemical Genetics, Doris Morgan joined Gallo from Litton Bionetics where she had held the post of senior scientist in cell biology. Working alongside Frank Ruscetti, her brief from Gallo was “Get me that HL23!” Steven Hall again:
“Ruscetti’s tack was to test every known bone marrow cell line and as many embryos as possible to see if he could scare up the same factor that had disappeared in the great refrigerator meltdown, and he did a prodigious amount of work. Before he finally stopped looking he had tested close to 250 cell types, all failures.
Morgan took a different tack. She decided to stick with the existing system of growing leukaemic cells and see if she couldn’t tinker with the conditions enough to nudge the cells into expanded growth. While working in Houston she had managed to keep a number of white blood cells taken from mice, known as granulocytes, in test tubes for up to 3 weeks, which at the time, was considered a phenomenally long out-of-body experience for a blood cell. The leukaemic cells Gallo studied were also granulocytic, also of myeloid (bone marrow) origin. Perhaps Morgan could tweak the system a bit.” [22]
And in March 1975, after much tweaking, Morgan noticed the appearance of cells apparently not seen before. Could they be the hallowed T-cells, the Holy Grail of immuno-biology? Said Gallo