AIDS, HIV, and BitTorrent

My October 3 post about an LA Times story about AIDS "dissident" Christine Maggiore provoked one of the longer and more lively discussion threads in recent weeks at Hit & Run. I mentioned in passing Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg, by Harvey Bialy.

Bialy, who entered the thread to the October 3 post, has since written to me about his just-released hypertext CD that compiles links to a 1992 Duesberg article on the connection between HIV and AIDS and various other articles and excerpts by Duesberg and Bialy. Explains Bialy:

Of all the accusations that have been leveled against my friend, Peter Duesberg… the one that is most frequently heard in scientific circles, and one that is impossible to counter except by extended debate, either at a scientific forum or in the journals (something that for some reason has never occurred) is that "Peter abuses the literature". Either he cites so many papers that no one can read them all, or, and much worse, he misquotes and draws inferences that are not appropriate from the data in the papers he cites. The latter, as I said, has been a damning accusation, impossible to refute -- until now….

I was able to compile a CD that contains the complete text of [a 1992 review of the state of HIV/AIDS research]…with hyperlinks to approximately 85% of the hundreds of references….

I would now like to make it widely available to all serious scientists as the ultimate tool for deciding, for themselves, the questions of what the literature actually says, and what proper inferences may be drawn from the data in the scientific papers….

I haven't read the '92 article mentioned above and I haven't checked out the CD either. But given the interest in the topic, I figured I'd pass along info on how to get it. You can buy it for $10 or download it for free via BitTorrent. For details, go here.

Comments

[Abdul]

"Of all the accusations that have been leveled against my friend, Peter Duesberg... the one that is most frequently heard in scientific circles, and one that is impossible to counter except by extended debate, either at a scientific forum or in the journals (something that for some reason has never occurred) is that "Peter abuses the literature". "

One time, in middle school, my friend walked in my bedroom unannounced and caught me abusing the literature. I never heard the end of it.

[Nat Echols]

Great. It's not enough that I endure Duesburg's tenured quackery on a regular basis as a member of his department, now I have to read about him on a website I used to trust for calm, common-sense analysis. I can only assume that Gillespie's contrarianism and opposition to Big Government got the better of him. Anything that makes publicly-funded scientists look bad must be right, huh?

Everyone here recognizes that Duesburg is wicked smart, but he's taken extreme positions that often direclty contradict real data - which he conveniently chooses to ignore. Although I haven't seen Duesburg himself use this tactic, many of his defenders simply excuse this by claiming a global conspiracy of scientists and Big Pharma to suppress the truth. Some of the things he's said recently are just flat-out wrong, but people here have given up trying to correct him, even when undergraduates are at the receiving end.

I'm not talking about "abusing the literature" - perhaps "lying" would be a better term. Thankfully, Duesberg has started to back off from his most extreme positions.

[Akira MacKenzie]

Great. It's not enough that I endure Duesburg's tenured quackery on a regular basis as a member of his department, now I have to read about him on a website I used to trust for calm, common-sense analysis. I can only assume that Gillespie's contrarianism and opposition to Big Government got the better of him. Anything that makes publicly-funded scientists look bad must be right, huh?

I tut-tuted Nick the last time he brought up this pseudoscience. I'm sad to see libertarians confuse their fight against "the Man" with actual scientific authority.

I suppose along with the AIDS-deniers we're now going to be buried by the conspiracy kooks, alternative medicince quacks, UFO-watchers, creationsists, and weirdos who think Uri Geller can bend spoons with his mind.

[AML]

...because nothing has changed in the world of HIV/AIDS since 1992.
Bring on the spoon benders!