1. Etienne de Harven. MD, Emerit. Prof. University of Toronto. Past President, Rethinking AIDS. France.
2. The Perth Group, Australia
3. Jennifer L. Craig, British Columbia, Canada
4. Dr. Henry Bauer, Virginia
5. Michael Geiger, San Diego
6. Sadun Kal, Berlin
7. Janine Roberts, UK, Author of “Fear Of The Invisible”

I wish to refute the second sentence in your promotion of the Nobel prize in physiology and medicine to Montagnier, namely “The report identified clusters of previously healthy young men who suffered from different life threatening medical conditions previously not seen in this population.” This population means, I assume, gay men. I present evidence that these young men were not healthy as they led a lifestyle that defied wellness. Their lifestyle included, the intake of: nitrite inhalers, recreational drugs, repeated antibiotics; in addition they had multiple sexual partners leading to sexually transmitted disease. Furthermore, as an outcast group, they suffered psychologically.

Homosexual men have a long history of being scorned and persecuted in Christian societies where they were, and still are by the Christian Right, seen as sinful, sick, child-molesters and doomed to die. In the Nazi era, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and those labelled as mentally retarded were thought to be a danger to the German people and were, therefore, eligible for extinction.

American psychiatrists considered homosexuality a mental illness until the 1970s and only took it off their diagnostic manual after forceful protests by the fledgling Gay Rights movement. As late as the 1990s, the World Health Organization (WHO) still classified homosexuality as an illness.

For decades same-sex acts were illegal. “In the District of Columbia alone, there were 1000 arrests each year in the early 1950s. In every state, local newspapers published names of those charged together with their place of work, resulting in many workers getting fired. The postal service opened the mail of gay men and lesbians and passed on their names. Colleges maintained lists of suspected gay students.” [1] Simple affectionate acts in public, such as two women kissing each other on greeting, could lead to arrest.

Naturally, many gay men did not openly acknowledge their same-sex desires and the term “in the closet” came into being. Social activities between gay men mainly took place in bars often run by organized crime that stood to benefit from these covert gay meeting places. Ian Young writes in his 1995 book, The Stonewall Experiment, “The Big Apple in the 1970s, any Friday night: the Anvil full of gay men, sweatily packed together, dancing, buying drinks, snorting poppers, having fun, a large percentage of them ‘ripped to the tits’, for there were a great many drugs at the Anvil. In the cellar the flickering light of the projector (for this was B.V. – Before Video) illuminated dark puddles on the stone floor, and there were black rooms and cubby-holes for sex with improper strangers. The windows were sealed, the party timeless, human voices barely audible over the disco throb.” [2]

Gay bars were frequently raided by the police. Then on June 27, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, the customers responded to a police raid by a show of mass anger that was to last several days. Lionel Wright says in his article, The Stonewall Riots – 1969, “People in the crowd started shouting “Gay Power!” And as word spread through Greenwich Village and across the city, hundreds of gay men and lesbians, black, white, Hispanic, and predominantly working class, converged on the Christopher Street area around the Stonewall Inn to join the fray.” The police brought in their crack riot-control squad who “found themselves face-to-face with their worst nightmare: a chorus line of mocking queens, their arms clasped around each other, kicking their heels in the air Rockettes-style and singing at the tops of their sardonic voices.” [3]

The Stonewall riots are considered to be the birth of Gay Liberation Movement and gay activism. Men came out of the closet in large numbers and the difficult task of becoming a distinct social group began. “No people can cohese without social guidelines, and gays, aware of it or not, sought them desperately. When they came, they took the form of commercial messages, controlled for the most part by extensive criminal networks, promoting porn stars as role models, bathhouses as the chief recreation, and drugs to put the gay consumers in the right frame of mind … the Mafia became a kind of anonymous corporate sponsor of the gay lifestyle.” [4]

Unlike the Woman’s Movement that encouraged women to honour their bodies, to respect themselves and to seek love rather than sex, Gay Lib’s slogan became “promiscuity knits together the social fabric of the gay male community”, a slogan provided by Canada’s magazine The Body Politic. Promiscuity is confirmed by many respondents interviewed for The Stonewall Experiment and for The Band Played On. A CDC study of the first 100 men in the US to come down with AIDS revealed that the median number of partners over each lifetime was 1,160. [5]

Across the US and Canada Gay Liberation spawned a $100 million industry of bathhouses and sex clubs. These bathhouses were breeding grounds for disease. “A Denver study found that an average bathhouse patron having his typical 2.2 sexual contacts a night risked a 33 percent chance of walking out of the tubs with syphilis or gonorrhoea, because about one in eight of those wandering the hallways had asymptomatic cases of these diseases.” [6] As a consequence, gay men used antibiotics for prolonged periods. Antibiotics kill off good bugs as well as bad bugs and thus decimate the intestinal flora. As the gut plays a huge role in the maintenance of a healthy immune system, overuse of antibiotics alone can be responsible for immune suppression.

A “new” sexual act among gay men in the 1970s was ‘fisting’ – the manual manipulation of the inside of a partner’s rectum and lower intestine. Not all, or even a majority of gay men engaged in fisting but those who did were over-represented among AIDS cases. Fisters used a lubricant known to inhibit the production of prostaglandin E1, a substance which helps regulate T-cell production. [7] A low T-cell count is considered to be diagnostic of AIDS.

Ian Young writes, “If fisters were over-represented among men who developed AIDS, it might well have had something to do with the massive drug intake which they shared with many other ghetto gay men, at a time when taking half a dozen drugs during a night at the disco was a common practice.” [8] A survey of 102 fisters, when such surveys were conducted on gay men, published in 1981, indicated that 99% of those polled ‘always’ or ‘almost always’ used drugs as part of fisting scenes. [9] Types of drugs used included poppers, speed, marijuana, alcohol, cocaine and LSD.

Perhaps the prime suspect as the cause of immune collapse in these young men is the inhalation of amyl nitrite, known as ‘poppers’. I remember giving amyl nitrite to patients with angina when I was a nurse in the 1950s. The solution came in little glass ampoules that looked like tiny wine bottles. We had to cover the neck of the ampoule with a piece of gauze before snapping it off. The resultant ‘pop’ gave amyl nitrite its colloquial name. Our medical use of it ended with the introduction of nitro-glycerine so that Burroughs Welcome, its pharmaceutical manufacturer, found another market in the gay ghettos where it became a staple of the new gay lifestyle. Poppers were legal and needed no prescription. [10]

Amyl nitrite dilates the blood vessels and thus enhances sexual arousal and prolongs orgasm. However, the chemical events that occur after inhalation are: a) it is converted into nitric oxide; b) in the presence of nitric oxide the blood’s capacity to transport oxygen is compromised; c) without oxygen the first areas to be damaged are the linings of the smallest blood vessels, particularly in the lungs; c) dead organic material is produced which cannot be completely removed because of the system’s weakened state; e) fungi enter the game because their role is to eat away all kinds of waste; g) pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a fungal disease, develops. [11]

Clinically, the toxic effects of amyl nitrite include: rapid flushing of the face or cyanosis, confusion, dizziness, fainting, weakness, yellow vision, low blood pressure, anaemia, strokes, thymus atrophy and chronic depletion of T-cells. The liquid is highly flammable and when spilt on the skin causes burns. Poppers have been used to commit suicide by drinking it and even to commit murder when the victim was gagged with a nitrite-soaked sock. [12]

Lauritsen explains why poppers became a mass phenomenon among gay men: they were legal as long as they were advertised as room odorizers and marketed to only gay men; at $3 a vial they were affordable; they were assumed to be harmless.

Some of the more reputable gay magazines refused to carry poppers ads and some printed warnings. For example, a researcher, Sue Watson, wrote a letter to a 1982 issue of Advocate, saying, “Our studies show that amyl nitrite strongly suppresses the segment of the immune system (cellular immunity) which normally protects individuals against Kaposi’s sarcoma, pneumocystis pneumonia, herpes virus, Candida, amebiasis, and a variety of other opportunistic infections. The upshot of this research is that persons using nitrite inhalants may be at risk for the development of AIDS”. [13]

To give you some idea of the pervasiveness of the inhalant, the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) reported that sales in just one US state added up to $50 million in 1976. At $3 per vial that equals more than 16 million bottles. [14]

The use of other drugs by gay men mirrored the increase in use of recreational drugs by everyone in that era. For example, between 1981 and 1993, the number of cocaine overdose victims delivered to hospitals in the US jumped from 3,000 to 120,000, a 4,000% increase. [15]

By 1981, an unusual assortment of disorders had arisen in the gay community: syphilis, hepatitis, cytomegalovirus, amoebiasis (increased by 7,000% since 1974), herpes and intestinal infections usually seen in the tropics.

Amyl nitrite as the cause of AIDS was the most common hypothesis before April 23, 1984. But this was in an era when it was legitimate to debate the cause of AIDS. Following the 1984 viral-cause announcement, no other hypotheses were, or are, allowed. Even to a non-researcher it is obvious that other avenues to explore in the search for the cause of AIDS are drugs – recreational, poppers, antibiotics, lubricants – lack of sleep, sexually transmitted diseases, particularly syphilis, intestinal infections, stress, and any combination of these.

1. Wright, Lionel. The Stonewall Riots – 1969. Socialism Today, #40, July 1999
2. Young, Ian. The Stonewall Experiment. Cassell, 1995, p.6
3. Wright, Lionel. The Stonewall Riots – 1969. Socialism Today, #40, July 1999
4. Ibid. p.91
5. Null, G. AIDS: a Second Opinion. Seven Stories Press, 2002, p. 129
6. Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On. St. Martin’s Press, 1987, p.19
7. Young, Ian. The Stonewall Experiment. Cassell, 1995, p.174
8. Ibid. p.173
9. Ibid. p. 173
10. Young, Ian. The Stonewall Experiment. Cassell, 1995, p.105
11. Engelbrecht, T & Köhnlein, C. Virus Mania. Trafford Publishing, 2007, p.100
12. Lauritsen, John. Queer Advertising. Address to the Queer Studies Symposium, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, Januray 15, 2000
13. Ibid. p. 108
14. Ibid. p. 102
15. Duesberg, P. Inventing the AIDS Virus. Regnery Publishing, 1996, p. 260-261

I regret having to write this email to you. But it feels necessary, because I just can't ignore what I perceive as huge problems which must be dealt with as soon as possible.

Here you can find some documents which I suspect were not taken into consideration while making the decision to award the Nobel Prize to Professor Montagnier and Professor Barré-Sinoussi for their discovery of a new retrovirus:

theperthgroup.com/montagniernobel.html

Sadly, I'm not even sure if Prof. Barré-Sinoussi is aware of the existence of these documents. The reason for my doubt is because what the Perth Group has been arguing for more than 20 years was never really discussed within the scientific community. Here's what they write in one of the documents:

Montagnier's claim as well as that of other "HIV" experts regarding the isolation of "HIV" was questioned by us from the very beginning. When neither Montagnier nor anyone else responded to our critique, in 1991 we personally made him aware of it by sending him some of our published papers. He responded "Thank you for your letter of October 7th and enclosed papers. I will certainly return to you after reading them". He did not return. In 1992, at a Symposium on HIV/AIDS held in Amsterdam, one of us (Eleni Papadopulos), questioned Montagnier in regard to the isolation of HIV. Montagnier made it clear that the only evidence for the existence of HIV is p24. All the other phenomena are non-specific. When it was pointed that p24 was also non-specific, Montagnier expressed surprise and responded that he was not aware of such evidence. Dr. Eleni Papadopulos promised to send him the evidence, which she did but Montagnier did not respond. In 1993 we published papers in which the Montagnier 1983 and four Gallo Science 1984 papers are critically analysed in detail. Neither Montagnier nor Gallo nor anyone else responded. In 2004 we published a detailed critique of Montagnier's 1983 seminal paper. Neither Montagnier nor any of the other authors responded.

As far as I can tell, if the arguments by the Perth Group against the discovery of a new virus were so insignificant and weak, someone should've already given a satisfactory answer to them years ago. But that was not the case, the situation is serious. The questions asked were ignored and those who ask condemned for questioning. At that time, it was simply the easier thing to do, since there was no pressure for clarification from the media or any organization of any significance. The pressure was in fact in the opposite direction, you can research that complex topic yourself if you wish.

I'll only mention the latest revelations related to the role Prof. Gallo plays in all this, which is of great importance. Since he was the one to establish a connection between "HIV" and "AIDS", the quality of his scientific publications also deserve some attention. Here's a summary prepared in response to this Nobel Prize decision:

fearoftheinvisible.com/nobel

In short, journalist Janine Roberts finds out after examining the old documents that Prof. Gallo "changed the paper to hide their failure to prove the French virus the cause of AIDS and their total failure to prove it in the slightest bit dangerous." On that website, to the left, you can find links to the related documents with much more detailed explanation. This adds a new dimension to the discussion about the significance of what Prof. Montagnier and Prof. Barré-Sinoussi observed in 1983. The scientists from the Perth Group, as you will see once you read their papers, were already questioning how Prof. Gallo reached the conclusions he reached in those papers, before they were even aware that such fraud took place.

Again, it is worth pointing out that the media avoids mentioning this sort of information, in a displeasing harmony with the majority of the scientific community, who refuse to see this reality.

My sincere appeal to you for now is only that you start to learn about these different points of view, that you think about these and that you really discuss this issue. Contact the scientists from Rethinking AIDS, ask questions, look for answers, consult your friends, inform others. Delay some decisions you made if it's the right thing to do, do whatever you can to clarify these important scientific questions But please, don't keep on living your lives as if nothing is wrong just because it's easier and more comfortable. Be brave, be responsible and take action.

My influence alone may not feel enough to motivate you. What is a single email from an insignificant little guy after all? You can simply delete and forget all about it.

But you must understand that this isn't about you or me. Your actions will influence the lives of millions. Think about the future of science, the future of the entire humanity. Your feeling of responsibilty should arise independent from outside influences like this email, you won't be cornered by the public or the media to take action either. You should feel responsible simply because there is an obvious problem which potentially has incredible implications for your lives, and you have an influence on how all this will continue. You can act as if you never read this email, or you can turn the problem into a unique oppurtunity for progress by bringing the scientific method back to science. By defending free scientific inquiry, independent research and vigorous scientific debates.

And for your information, I'm not a scientist (yet). I've just been observing this debate surrounding HIV/AIDS and the picture I saw became more and more frightening the longer I looked. As a lifetime admirer of the universe around me and the wonders science can bring into our lives, I felt great disappointment and concern when I realized that not all is as graceful and as secure with science as I naively used to believe. I know humans are not perfect, I know that sometimes our ignoble desires get the best of us, but still, I'm sure we can do much better than this

I'll leave you with this quote from a former Nobel Prize winner, Richard P. Feynman, for whom the glare of the prize was meaningless compared to the pleasure gained from furthering our understanding of our reality:

In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming "This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!

We will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.

It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations."

The rest is up to you. Please do your best not to feel intimidated or threatened by this. In the end we all will grow if this can be openly discussed, independent from what the final outcome might be.

With hope and highest regards,
Sadun Kal

This award is, to a large extent, based on a paper published by the laureates et al. in May 1983, in «Science» (vol 220, pp 868-871). The conclusions presented in this paper result, in a large part, from observations made by transmission electron microscopy. Having been responsible for research on electron microscopy of retroviruses, at the Sloan Kettering Institute of New York from 1956 until 1981, I do have scientific competence to raise the following questions related to the significance of the paper under reference.

This 1983 paper is illustrated (Fig. 2) by an electron microscopy image of thin sections of virus-producing cord lymphocytes. Three day old cultures of T lymphocytes from two umbilical cords had been «infected with the cell-free supernatant of the infected coculture». This «coculture» consisted of cultured human normal T lymphocytes admixed with lymphocytes that originated from the lymph node biopsy from one patient «at risk for acquired immune deficiency (AIDS)». The author’s interpretation of Fig.2 is that it demontrates that cord blood lymphocytes had been successfully infected by retroviruses from that patient.

Unquestionably, Fig 2 illustrates typical retroviruses (C-type), budding from the surface of a lymphocyte.

Highly questionable, however, is the origin of these retroviruses.

The authors of the report claim that they originate from the patient lymph node, via the «cell-free supernatant» of the coculture.

This interpretation is not satisfactorily supported by the data presented.

Indeed, if this interpretation was correct, one would have expected :

1) evidence, by electron microscopy, of the multiplication of retroviruses in this «coculture», and
2) evidence, again by electron microscopy, for the presence of retroviral particles in the «cell-free supernatant of the infected coculture».

Since 1) and 2) evidences are totally missing, how could the authors of this paper justify their claim for having «infected» the cord lymphocytes with the «cell-free supernatant of the coculture» ?

The authors have regarded their «coculture» as «infected» only on the basis of reverse transcriptase activity in sucrose fractions from the supernatant. Sucrose fractions at density around 1.16, however, are known to contain large amounts of cell debris that can readily account for the observed transcriptase activity. In short, one is asked to believe that cord blood lymphocytes have been sucessfully infected with the supernatant of a coculture the viral infection of which has not been demonstrated.

As indicated above, Fig. 2 of the paper shows typical retroviruses (C-type) budding from the surface of a lymphocyte. Where are they coming from, if it is not from the «cell-free supernatant of the coculture» ?

There is another possible explanation for the viral electron microscopy evidence of Fig. 2, an explanation that did not, obviously, received the slightest attention from Barre-Sinoussi, Montagnier et al.

The observed cultured lymphocytes came from cord blood, and therefore originate from the placenta. It is well known, since the late 1970’s (Sandra Panem’s work, in Current Top Pathol, 1979, 66 :175-189), that the normal human placenta contains loads of C type retroviruses (HERVs). Placental lymphocytes are, therefore, likely to contain the same HERVs that, when placed under stimulating culture conditions, may bud from cell surfaces and form complete retroviral particles (C-type) recognizable with the electron microscope (Fig. 2). Barre-Sinoussi et al. avoided to explain why their experiment apparently wouldn’t work with lymphocytes from the peripheral blood, instead of those from cord blood? The simple explanation is that human peripheral blood lymphocytes do not harbor HERVs.

In my opinion, Fig. 2 illustrating the paper under consideration totally fails to convincingly demonstrate that the observed retroviruses originated in the lymph node of one patient «at risk of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome». There is no scientific reason, therefore, to refer to these particles as «LAV» nor as «HIV». Referring to these particles as «LAV» or «HIV» mislead the Nobel Committee, and resulted in a seriously questionable award of the Nobel prize.

Etienne de Harven, MD, Emerit. Prof, Univ. of Toronto.