A resistance to review 

        What I must tell you is that working as a journalist in science, after writing articles in business and economics, was a revelation.  Given privileged press access to the leaders of many scientific fields, some of whom I interviewed at length on their life's work, I discovered a dismaying fact: while many distinguished scientists were strictly truth seeking professionals, more than a few were not. 

       Sad to say, the leaders of science were not always the exemplary torchbearers of truth I had fondly imagined.   A few of them, and this included more than one Nobel prize winner, were very capable of defending the ideas on which their careers were based as if they were immune to review of the evidence, or even to logic.   In other words, these generals of science were unprofessional according to the standards that scientists implicitly profess.

        This tough resistance to review has been obvious from the late eighties among the retrovirologists of the purportedly new science of AIDS.   I came across the phenomenon as a result of a suggestion in 1988 from the editor of Nature's sister journal Biotechnology.  He alerted me to the existence of Peter Duesberg, a prominent researcher of retroviruses, and his dissenting view.  In 1987, Duesberg was assigned by the very reputable journal Cancer Research to review the new hypothesis that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus, now named Human Immunodeficiency Virus or HIV. 

    Having thoroughly reviewed the claim, he published a most unexpected conclusion.  Duesberg found no convincing evidence for the hypothesis at all.  Much more likely, he wrote, was the possibility that AIDS in the US was brought on by the toxic assaults of drugs.  Neither the lab nor the epidemiological evidence for HIV as the cause of AIDS was sufficient, or even impressive.

       As an independent writer my response to this news was to interview sources on both sides of the debate and this soon established an equally unexpected finding.  The replies of the leaders of the field to his points were hardly purely scientific.  In fact, they were consistently specious, biased and personal, rather than scientific. 

  Determined to get to the bottom of this conflict, I conveyed point and counter point between the two camps until the issues involved seemed exhausted.  In doing so I noticed a key difference in behavior.  Duesberg would act responsibly.  He would take every point raised against him into account, and answer it fully from the evidence.  His opponents would typically answer his points with disparagement and dismissal.   Politics, rather than science, was being brought to bear to repress rather than answer his arguments.

 

Power politics

     This politics of incuriosity soon extended into my own profession, I found.  There was an initial honeymoon period, in which my sense that Duesberg had a most convincing case provoked surprised interest from editors.  But eventually it became difficult to sell them on covering the dispute, despite the enormous stakes involved in terms of dollars and lives.   Eventually, prejudice became almost complete.  An editor at Science asked me if I could find something else to write about.  An editor at Omni, a popular science magazine, ordered me not to mention Duesberg's name ever again, though I did manage later to include Duesberg in a roundup article on heresy in science which is reproduced on the conference site.         

     Not all such moves were in private.  Nature's then-editor John Maddox took a part in publicly repressing Duesberg, cutting short the debate in his pages and limiting Duesberg's responses to critics.   At one point he advised his readers not to read the London Sunday Times, a British weekly newspaper that covered the dissent at length.  Maddox would inform them if anything significant was reported, he said.  On the bureaucratic level, a senior NIH official, Anthony Fauci, was quoted in an NIH newsletter warning that reporters who covered Duesberg would be cut off.

     Lacking the power to flout lack of editorial interest and the resistance of mainstream sources, I moved on to other topics.  As I checked back from time to time over the decade I found that AIDS media politics never improved.   Major reporters have won medals for coverage of AIDS which resolutely ignores Duesberg's views, and young reporters who know no better are now being warned not to cover Duesberg's equally revisionist views on the cause of cancer in case they lend him credence and "isolate" themselves. 

        For example, the editor of the California Monthly magazine at the University of Berkeley was recently put under a "Duesberg embargo" from his board of directors.  Even though the topic is now not Duesberg's AIDS heresy but his new and promising theory of cancer,  Duesberg is not to be "legitimized". The editor chafing under these guidelines is, as it happens, a long time friend of Duesberg's.  

   In that case, it may be no coincidence that Duesberg's new view of cancer contradicts the oncogene paradigm, which has proved a rich lode of funding for cancer researchers for the last fifteen years.  Duesberg's skepticism on oncogenes, genes that supposedly cause cancer, is all the more significant if we consider that he was once on the fast track to the Nobel prize for being the first scientist to isolate an oncogene, from the Rous sarcoma virus.

   The point is that this closemindedness is not the standard filtering out of an untutored crackpot whose new and iconoclastic theory is founded on ignorance.  This is remarkable ostracism of an established scientist of impeccable reputation, whose papers and results have never otherwise been questioned.  This is the establishment repressing the establishment, and suppressing the free exchange of views with an equal.

      In the battle of credentials, one might even rate Duesberg superior.  He has been a member of the National Academy of Science, the premier self-elected body in US science, longer than his major opponents in his fight against the hypothesis that HIV is the cause of AIDS.  The discoveries of two of his most powerful foes, moreover, have been questioned in two celebrated instances and their claims disproved and withdrawn.  None of Duesberg's scientific statements or work has been challenged except his skeptical view of two unproven theories-oncogenes, and of HIV as the cause of AIDS.

 

Still an open question

     There is little point here in going through all the many stark problems in the AIDS-HIV paradigm that Duesberg and others have pointed to.  But one can mention the main ones  They begin with the fact that tests for HIV were positive in only 88% of the patients sampled by Robert Gallo in the papers on which the unconventional hypothesis was founded, and HIV was claimed isolated in only 41% (26 of 63).   They end with the fact that no better proof of cause has been produced in the years since.  Instead, there have been years of accumulating outrages to common sense.  Among them: the blood of AIDS patients contains too little HIV, it infects too few T4 cells, it replicates in vitro harmlessly in the same cells, and too many AIDS patients test negative for HIV.   

  The chief difficulty for dissenters now is that virtually all of the data of the field rests on the assumption that HIV is the cause.  The presence of the virus defines AIDS.  Even its name is self-serving: Human Immunodeficiency Virus.  This circularity is one of the paradoxical complications that wall off the ruling paradigm from examination and protect it from public review. 

   A short list of the inconsistencies inherent in the paradigm is included in "The Limits of Science" on this conference's Web site, and many more can easily be found on the Internet.  The most impressive are the different symptoms in different global regions, and the strange inability of the phenomenon to behave like an infectious disease in North America, where cases are tracked by actual testing, with the number of Americans who are positive for HIV remaining steady at one million or less throughout the sharp rise and recent fall of the epidemic.  Instead, the sensationally heralded US heterosexual outbreak has never occurred, while African and Asian AIDS is reported as entirely heterosexual, actively infectious and spreading alarmingly, though confirming testing is severely limited, and the totals of all deaths in the countries concerned do not rise significantly.

  Proponents have an answer for every point, critics have an answer for them, and so on, in the manner of Ptolemaic astronomy defending itself against Copernicus.  This zig-zag of point-counterpoint makes for a logical hall of mirrors.  Added to this, the skeptics are asked to prove a negative, namely, that HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS, which is notoriously difficult as a matter of logic, and especially in this instance, since many cases where HIV is not detected are still counted as AIDS cases, because it is nonetheless assumed that HIV is present.   If it is accepted that it isn't, then the condition isn't counted as AIDS.  They are also asked to provide and prove an alternative cause, which  is also difficult when all the data gathering assumes that HIV is the cause.

        Anyone can read irrefutable documentation of this in his book, and Lang and his publishers must be congratulated for providing this overwhelming evidence for the evasions and fallibility of the establishment in this field.   

    There is other published literature where the phenomenon is clearly seen at work.  You can easily access my two verbatim interviews with Robert Gallo, the scientist originally responsible for the HIV-AIDS hypothesis.  These revealing exchanges were published in Spin, a popular US magazine, and are now carried on the Web at the virusmyth.com and duesberg.com sites.  These sites carry other interviews and articles which demonstrate arrogant indifference on the part of scientists entrenched on top of the AIDS hill, and examples of how the debate has been manipulated politically.
 

The poor level of logic employed in these defenses of his hypothesis by Gallo, while perhaps shocking, is not the point here.   What matters is the political nature of his comments and his dismissive style of discussion.  The reader can see from these texts the unprofessional way in which this scientific debate has been conducted from its beginning.
This lesson that scientists may serve interests and impulses other than the logic and measures of science is nothing new to social cynics or historians of science, of course.  Unreasonable resistance to new ideas from the leaders in medicine and science has been a notorious phenomenon for centuries.   Max Planck put it succinctly: "Science advances funeral by funeral."   As I reported in "Heresy: Three Modern Galileos", science still frequently imitates the Roman Catholic Church at the time of Galileo.  What should be intellectual debate becomes a bitter power struggle.
 

    Violent reaction was less camouflaged in the early days.  One famous case is William Harvey, who decided correctly in 1628 that blood circulated.  The accepted teaching was that the blood began in the liver and, after nourishing the body, simply disappeared in the tissues.   Detractors invented opposing evidence, his apartment was ransacked and his notes and manuscripts stolen, and he was harassed by the College of Physicians.  Harvey took to walking around with a dagger.

    Another example came in 1721, when minister Cotton Mather's house in Boston was firebombed because he supported smallpox inoculation.  Mather had learned from a slave that Africans had used it successfully, and tried it on his own son.  This, his opponents objected, indicated "distrust of God's overruling care". 

    Obviously violent prejudice against innovation is deplorable in medicine or science, which are supposedly objective professional fields.   The point, however, is that it is still with us.  Nowadays the violence is more psychic than physical.  No one has to trash Duesberg's lab.  He is ostracized and his lab is simply starved of funds.  

 

The mystery of blind acceptance

    The real surprise today is not even the resistance of leaders in science to threatening new ideas.  The interesting puzzle is: what motivates those among the rank and file, and the intelligent public, to choose blindly to accept authority in AIDS despite the many warning signs-the evidence of prejudice, the now extensive public literature questioning the hypothesis, and the obvious inconsistencies in almost every news story in AIDS as presented by authority?
 

To any skeptical mind the unquestioning acceptance of the conventional wisdom by intelligent people among the general public, in the health sciences, in medicine, and in the ranks of science reporters and writers seems unreasonably naive.  Even more credulous is the behavior of AIDS patients themselves.  In most fields, physicians are no longer treated as gods, and patients often arrive with handfuls of their own research from the Web.  Yet so many AIDS patients bow to the prescriptions of their doctors and resolutely refuse to read the literature which suggests they might be saved by taking another route.

   For example, tennis professional Arthur Ashe read about Duesberg and his views, but consciously put them aside as too late for him even as he acknowledged they were persuasive.  A writer for Vanity Fair, a national magazine in the US, had the same response when I alerted him to the full situation a few months before his death.  "I have no alternative now but to rely on my doctors," he said.

        "Formerly tyranny used the clumsy weapons of chains and hanging; nowadays even despotism, though it seemed to have nothing more to learn, has been perfected by civilization."

  Though Duesberg has not yet given up, this fairly describes the road he has travelled. 

The power of the media in modern society helps impose this kind of conformity, many agree.  

Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has pointed out that the corporate lockstep mentality that imbues the media has resulted in an epidemic of mainstream thinking in the US.   

  Anyone marching out of step is subject to the pressure of conformity in any human group, a herd instinct which no doubt reflects the survival value of group cohesion.  After all, it is adaptive for primitive social animals to coordinate their behavior, whether fleeing threats or hunting.  Apparently this applies to ideas as well as actions, and, like laughter, the mimicry tends to be contagious.  In science as elsewhere, the crowd is going to resist new ideas which disturb the shared status quo.  With this ingrained aspect of human nature to cling to the prevailing wisdom, the more widely a notion is received, the harder it will be to dislodge. 

   But this kind of bonding emotion is exactly what the principles of professional science are supposed to guard against. The outcome of a properly controlled scientific experiment is wholly independent of the wishes and fears of both the subjects and the experimenters. The thinking of any good scientist should be immune to the opinion of the crowd.

   All that should go without saying, yet it is being ignored in AIDS.   Instead, conformity acts as a wall against review, and is enhanced by institutional endorsements, prizes and awards, ostracism of the heretic, and overvaluation of public consensus.

   The current paradigm in AIDS has enjoyed unprecedented endorsement from all major institutions in science, government and health around the world, including the US federal government, the National Institutes of Health, the New York Times, the National Science Foundation, the United Nations and national governments around the world.  The now almost automatic support of overseas governments is possibly related to the prospect of expanded aid from the US and the UN if they adopt the HIV-AIDS model.  In July 2000, for example, the US announced a plan to offer $1 billion annually to sub-Saharan nations to buy American AIDS drugs and medical services.

   The outcome is a situation where the unproven claim of one individual scientist, Robert Gallo, certified by the federal government before publication, confirmation or review, has been adopted by colleagues in the field without final proof and despite contradicting review, and certified by national and international institutions around the world.

 

Self-reinforcing belief

 

   Thus the conformity reinforces itself.   Set against this universal institutional endorsement, any challenge to orthodoxy appears ridiculous to the general public.   There is a California society, for example, which holds that Alice in Wonderland was not written by Lewis Carroll, but by Queen Victoria.  In a context of universal endorsement, the challenge to the AIDS paradigm appears just as outlandish. 

   The single, rather unexpected exception to this unanimity among governments is South Africa, whose president Thabo Mbeki is a thinker who went to the Web to examine the debate for himself.   He concluded that Duesberg had a point, and convened a review panel on the topic before the AIDS conference in 2000 in Durban.       His own officials were embarrassed by his skepticism, however, as concerted detraction was brought to bear from every quarter.  The New York Times questioned his sanity, and Nature printed the "Durban Declaration", a statement signed by "over 5000 scientists including Nobel prizewinners reaffirming their faith in the HIV paradigm."  The schoolboy fallacy here, of course, was the misapprehension that science is a democracy and that its truths are decided by vote.  Some readers must have also wondered why, if the paradigm was so solidly based, it needed a group declaration of faith in its virtue.

Coopting the media

   The fallibility of science journals is another factor with which a dissenter has to contend.  The public generally assumes that anything in print in a respected scientific journal is correctly researched and argued.  After all, it is peer reviewed.  But this is not always true.   One seasoned Harvard researcher and Nobel prize winner, Walter Gilbert, once told me he always repeats experiments upon which he is going to base new research.  Even with peer review, the limits of expertise lead to error.   Statisticians point to errors in the design of published AIDS studies, and dissenters have exposed poor controls and other flaws in studies of AIDS, HIV and the drugs used to medicate AIDS.
In these days of big science, key periodicals such as Science and Nature may publish thousands of papers based on a paradigm, as they have in the case of AIDS. The investment of their authority makes the prospect of invalidation almost inconceivably embarrassing.  Perhaps this is the cause of one journal editor's overt hostility to the review of the HIV hypothesis.   I am referring to John Maddox, former editor of Nature, though he has vigorously denied the suggestion to me.

There is an experiment in social psychology which seems relevant here, a trial which found that false contradiction from an authority has greater staying power in the mind than the evidence of one's own eyes.  People were given a flawed account of some slides they had just witnessed. At first they detected the false descriptive elements and recognized them as misinformation.  Soon, however, the memories of the original slides faded, and the misinformation became dominant.

   Unfortunately, there is a general lack of independent authority in science aside from the scientists themselves.  The hard won expertise of a specialist field is the stock in trade of its members, and puts it comfortably beyond the investigation and adjudication of most outsiders.   In law, medicine and science the public is forced to trust the experts who speak the technical language and understand the data, some of whom may use jargon and special knowledge as camouflage for ignorance and incompetence.  

  Usually such system flaws are the specialty of investigative journalists, but in science there have been very few of these.  Science reporters and editors use the leaders of the scientific communities they cover as their reliable sources on new developments, and they are not usually equipped to second guess them.  The dependence of media reporters on established sources tends to make them fellow travelers.   They cannot risk alienating the top scientists they rely on for briefing and guiding them.  They need their support and recognition, and they need their quotes.

    Thus the media have become the megaphones of mainstream scientists.   The AIDS science writers of major newspapers in the US, even if aware of the problems with the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, have rarely written about them or Duesberg.   If they do report on Duesberg, mainstream reporters don't hesitate to inform us that his views ignore "overwhelming evidence" and have been "convincingly rebutted" and "debunked point by point by scientists all over the world."    

   Nor will they or other science journalists write about the one thing the public needs to know in assessing any scientific dispute: when faced with a threat to the status quo, the leaders of science will typically behave very partially.  This knowledge is commonplace among those who know science and scientists, yet it is still widely unappreciated in society at large.  Perhaps we should all reread Tolstoy, who once said:

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."

   Along with these circumstances, dissenters have to contend with the inability of outsiders to assess a clash between experts.  When experts disagree, it is often said, outsiders cannot decide who is right. The expertise that is the stock in trade of scientists, lawyers, doctors and other professionals protects their judgement from review by outsiders. 

Accessible to outsiders

But the scientific debate in AIDS, at least, is not beyond informed assessment by non-specialists.  If investigative reporters or others are able and willing to spend the time, they can read through and assess the reasoning involved in the debate.   A few courageous mainstream media reporters have interviewed and reported on dissenters and their publications, and members of the public can read their coverage of dissent, or even read the original material to advantage. 

   Reason, after all, is not the private preserve of professionals.  The data may be technical but the question is whether editors and publishers wish to devote the time and resources to the project.   Unfortunately, in the system at present, only independent reporters and filmmakers have devoted the time and effort needed to assess the issue for themselves.

   The review material in AIDS, notably the articles by Peter Duesberg in Cancer Research in 1987 and The Proceedings of the National Academy in 1988, can be read to advantage by any intelligent layman who wishes to check the reasoning involved in challenging the AIDS-HIV claim.  Significantly, virtually all the points made are still valid.

   Even in a field as thick with the accumulation of technical research as AIDS, the intelligent outsider can review the argument over the basic notion on which all that research is based.  As a reporter, I did so, and anyone can now do so by going to the Web sites mentioned above for article reprints. 

   Another important facet of US society is involved in repressing review.  The doubtful practice of divorcing business goals from moral and social responsibilities has long been a striking feature of business in the US.   Ideals of social justice and welfare are mentally set off from business concerns.   Recently, for example, the chief executive of Nike, Inc learned that the University of Oregon had joined the anti-sweatshop Workers Rights Commission.  His response was to stop attending the school's athletic events, and to withdraw his promise of a $30 million gift to the university.

   Could this happen in science?  Absolutely.  One company developing an AIDS vaccine, Immune Response of Carlsbad, California, acted in precisely the Nike manner when scientists reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that its HIV vaccine was not effective, according to a study carried out by the company itself.  Immune Response sued to block publication of the paper, threatening damages of $7 million.  JAMA published the report anyway.  The company's fears were evidently justified, for it was later abandoned by its chief sponsor, Pfizer, a drug company.

   These commercial pressures are now permeating science and medicine, and an ever more amoral and possibly antisocial mentality is spreading, as the rush to patent the genetic sequences of individual patients indicates. There seem all too few moral and social qualms as riches beckon.  In AIDS, as I noted earlier, the amount of money involved is vast.  By the end of this year over $100 billion will have been spent on HIV-AIDS research and other thus far ineffective action to combat the growth of the AIDS phenomenon.  

 

Ticket to success

    What such totals suggest is that a scientific hypothesis today can be a ticket to millions in funding and personal income to those who climb aboard the bandwagon, and that huge interests may act, visibly or not, to curb review. 

   Medicine is particularly subject to venal influences.  The commercial ties involved in drug studies and the pressure of big pharmaceutical companies on the FDA in the US have recently been deplored by Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet.  The relationship between many doctors and pharmaceutical companies is now "close to corrupt", he acknowledges.   One of his concerns is that the UK equivalent of the FDA, the Committee on Safety of Medicines, has members who personally or professionally often depend on industry money.  In December 2000, 26 of 36 members declared industry interests in the form of shares, fees, consultancies, non-executive directorships, grants and financial support to attend meetings from up to 26 companies each.

 Horton writes that "the research process itself is also immersed in a financial quagmire of conflicts of interest.  At the University of California at San Francisco a third of the faculty investigators were found to have received payments from companies for lectures and consultancies.  Prestigious medical conferences are thick with industry sponsored symposia promoting a product or a company or both."

   Studies have shown that "doctors who take money from drug companies are more like to hide anxieties about drug safety than those who keep their hands firmly in their pockets," Horton notes. "Such is the atrocious venality of modern medicine."

   As paradigm supporters accumulate riches and influence, including patent royalties, dissenters are starved of access to resources.  In AIDS, Peter Duesberg lost his unusually generous federal grant of $320,000 a year, after his peers withdrew their support when it was up for review at the National Institutes of Health.   It became increasingly difficult for him to find a platform for his views.  Sometimes invitations to lecture, or to appear on television, were withdrawn after they were extended, as his opponents intervened behind the scenes.

   There is of course the same problem of resources for any other scientist, journalist or member of the public who wishes to double check the claims of AIDS scientists, and compare them to Duesberg's review. 

  For example, owing to other priorities I have not yet had time to research fully the puzzling dispute on whether the HIV retrovirus per se actually even 0exists as a stable form.  Australian researcher Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulus and her colleagues of the Perth Group and others assert that no complete "HIV" RNA molecule or DNA genome has been identified or isolated as a stable particle, and that no photograph of an isolated HIV particle has been published.

   No doubt you think this view sounds farfetched, as do most people who hear it for the first time.  A cursory review of the debate, however, indicates the claim is argued with some expertise and a total of $50,000 in rewards is offered for anyone who establishes they have properly isolated HIV, so far not successfully claimed.  If such critics are correct the validity of AIDS tests, already very questionable, would approach zero and many positive HIV tests, known to cross-react with many other substances, and the sensational narrative of AIDS in Africa and Asia retailed by the media might be even better explained. 

   On the other hand, Duesberg finds the claim without merit, pointing to the electron micrographs of HIV published by Gallo and others, the cell lines mass-producing HIV and especially the infectious HIV DNA clones which have enriched the AIDS scientists who hold HIV patents.  Given the last, he says the prize is bogus, since he claimed it on that basis and was turned down.

  The point is that with so many other assumptions exploded I naturally find this claim interesting, yet have not made time to study the material exhaustively.  Precisely like those who reflexively dismiss dissent on the cause of AIDS, I discount the claim instinctively, though it appears at least worth attention.  This lack of time or inclination to pursue extreme dissent from a well established premise is reasonable.  None of us has unlimited time.  Yet, it is an enormous obstacle to the dissenter.

Faced with these flaws in the system and the obstacles they raise to being heard, not to mention the penalties of ostracism, ridicule and exclusion from economic and social benefits, the dissenting reviewer in science, like any other whistleblower, may simply give up.

 

Human weaknesses

   Finally, beyond the flaws and politics of the system, there are many human weaknesses that may maintain scientific paradigms against review.   

A familiar factor is the stultifying effect of high position and advancing age which make it harder in some ways for people to keep up with new material, let alone revise their ideas. For senior scientists, other priorities assert themselves and crowd out the time for personal research.   The appetite for revising the basic premises of one's work tends to weaken over time, for they form the foundation of one's lengthening career.

        Applying for grants takes up the bulk of the time of senior researchers in science; administering their labs and the projects that get funded, faculty politicking, and expanding professional horizons take up the rest.  Under such conditions, not all senior scientists do their own experiments, let alone have time to conduct a serious review of the basic premise on which their group's work is founded.

   Closemindedness may therefore become a facet of aging even in science, a field which advances only through a constructive subversiveness.  As a World Bank official recently put it:

   "Science advances by having a new paradigm overthrow the old, or at least expand its applicability in new ways. Thus inherent in the scientific outlook is a willingness to overthrow the established order of thinking, or else there will be no progress. Frequently, those who come up with the new insights are remarkably young.  Einstein was 26 when he wrote his five papers, and Dirac was 27 when he hypothesized anti-matter, and so on. This means that seniority cannot rule unchallenged."

    Not that breakthroughs are always made by the young, of course.  Oswald Avery was 67 when he made the landmark discovery that DNA is the substance of the genes.  But once a paradigm reigns, the attractions of an alternative dwindle rapidly for its leading representatives.  Its replacement means loss of status and stipend.

   In AIDS, as mentioned, there would be enormous penalties for its leading personalities in moving to a different view of the cause of AIDS.   Entire professional careers are based on the ruling idea, large laboratories have been funded, the media have put many in the limelight as authorities on AIDS trends, prizes have been awarded, royalties paid on patented tests, speaking platforms have been provided by the federal government, universities and other institutions, journals such as Nature and Science have devoted enormous space to articles, and the New York Times and other major papers and magazines have devoted acres of newsprint to uncritical stories and profiles, including the selection of one AIDS scientist as Time's Man of the Year.

   At present, conventional AIDS scientists are highly respected and well endowed.    To expect them to welcome review and demolition of their reigning hypothesis is unrealistic.   They have no practical alternative to resistance if they are to keep their perks.

 

Thinking for oneself

   Beyond aging, there are undoubtedly the same range of human weaknesses among scientists as in any other group.  Sheer intellectual laziness is surely one of them.  "Our minds are lazier than our bodies," as La Rochefoucauld remarked.  Even among experts, it is often not too hard to see that the sheer boredom and discomfort of dutifully considering skeptical counter arguments motivates prejudice against the dissenters' case.  

   I interpret this as partly the disinclination to think hard, which in my experience occurs as often among scientists as in the general public.  Thoughtfulness seems to me to be an individual genetic trait.  One indication may be that Ritalin, a drug prescribed for overexcitable children in American schools, is believed by some to enhance reasoning power among normal adults.  But daily life on its own shows us that while some people actively like to think, others avoid the effort if they can.

   Surely La Rochefoucald is right.  Most people do not like to think very hard.  In fact, despite the nature of their vocation, I believe that many scientists do not.  The easiest way of avoiding thought is, of course, to subscribe to the accepted wisdom.  As indicated, I find that in AIDS scientists, doctors and health workers question received wisdom far less than one would expect.  If generally true, this is unfortunate.  Science and medicine are essentially exploratory activities and they should attract people who have the gene for questioning what they are told, and what they 'know'.  As anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, "the scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions."

Science embracing religion     

   I am speculating, but let me pursue this thought a step further.  Religion around the world is thriving in reaction to the sterility of materialism.   Last year there were 2,657 titles on religious topics published in the United States.  There is a fervor in the US for all kinds of churches from establishment institutions to cults, and a century old tradition of pilgrimage to the East for spiritual enlightenment.  In Russia and its satellites, a renaissance of the church has followed the downfall of communism.  In China, we see a tragic determination to cling to a new spiritual movement, Falun Gong, despite fierce penalties including torture and execution by the state.  The religious impulse cannot be denied for long in any society.

  Nowadays science seems to be moved by the same social wave to rethink its divorce from religion.   Einstein once said that "science without religion is lame", and many scientists today seem to agree with him.

   One example is Robert Pollack, a biologist who heads the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia University.  He argues that religious faith and science might ally themselves without irrationality, to inform each other of the other's world.   "Nothing intrinsic to either the scientific method or the discoveries of science," he says, "precludes any person from holding to any religious faith."    Recently Pollack explained to me that he had felt the sterility of science, its lack of spiritual and emotional truths, and it was this that had sent him to religion for its lessons, from which he hoped scientists might benefit.

   A surprising number of other leading US scientists believe in God, or credit the notion that there may be a spiritual side to existence.  About 39 per cent of scientists in the US believe in a God who can answer prayer.   As many as seven per cent of the National Academy of Sciences do so.    Quite a few books are being written to try to close the gap between religion and science.   The Pope and the Dalai Lama are in dialogue with scientists.   Lecture series are mounted on the topic.  A typical recent volume is Twilight of the Clockwork Gods, which features eight scientists who argue that science must make room for a spiritual dimension of some kind.  None of them, however, are able to adduce any concrete evidence for the spiritual plane they suggest should be added to science.

   Thus we have a serious effort being made by many people to somehow bring science and religion together.  But how much science can there be in this movement?   For one thing, it flouts a great lesson of history.  Western science flourished after it was liberated from the church, while Arab science, once supreme, slept under Islam, where church and state are one. 

   I think we are safe in saying that any effort to join science and religion must be motivated more by the religious impulse than the scientific one.  As a description of the external world, religious belief can never be scientific.  Its very nature is superstitious, involving a faith in supernatural reality beyond any proof by practical investigation.   Not to be too reductionist about it, but the practice of science is like the law.  It asks, Where is the proof? or at least, Where is the evidence?  This is the question that religious faith survives and flourishes by proudly ignoring. 

As long as one is playing the role of professional scientist, religious beliefs which concern external reality must be rigorously excluded from the mind, even as one explores what evidence there may be, if any, for a spiritual plane.  Certainly the religious impulse must be prevented from making a religion out of science, and a God out of a paradigm!

   To achieve this, perhaps we need a more scientific and less excessively polite view of religious fantasy among scientists.  Many scientists are understandably reluctant to confront and rebut the claims of established religion to miracles and other influences on the material world.  Yet they would not hesitate to challenge or at least examine very closely any secular claims to astrology, dowsing, reincarnation, Feng Shi, UFO visitations, alien abductions, or ghosts.  Scientific assessment of the evidence for any factual claim must be impartial if it is to be of professional value. 

        After all, from a properly scientific point of view the factual claims of traditional Western religions or any others are no more likely than the claims of astrology or any other pseudo-science.  As a physicist pointed out recently,

    "In December of each year, nearly a billion Christians around the world celebrate the birth of a Jewish charismatic leader whom they credit with, among other things, walking on water and turning it into wine, creating bread and fish out of nothing, and bringing dead people back to life. Furthermore, he himself was supposedly born from a virgin and came back to life three days after being executed. The sole evidence for any of these wondrous events is found in a single book, written decades after this leader's death by his followers, who were promoting him as divine. This same book also describes such things as a speaking bush, the miraculous parting of the Red Sea, and a person being turned into salt."

So I think we have to disagree with Pollack.  We might have a sincere respect for religious belief for its moral influence and spiritual uplift, but we must recognize that it corrupts science insofar as it encourages the adoption of belief without evidence.  As Huxley noted, "science commits suicide when it adopts a creed."   Professional scientists must exorcise the religious impulse in their work, just as they banish any other kind of psychological bias.  No laboratory can be housed in a church.  Belief in the supernatural conflicts with the rationality and logic of naturalism.  As a habit, it may foster unquestioning faith in real world claims.

The yearning of Pollack for the spiritual comfort of religion, and for its emotional and moral content, is understandable and even admirable in human terms, but it does not imply the external existence of any kind of God.  To a scientist qua scientist, the texts of religion must remain moral metaphor, reflecting internal truths.

   What I am saying is only that the religious impulse has nothing to contribute to science except confusion.  I am not saying that religion has nothing to contribute to our lives, of course, or indeed, that science has nothing to contribute to religion.   As it happens, Einstein also observed that "religion without science is blind."   Science might very well cleanse religion of the more irrational dogma, rituals and beliefs that constrain adherents or excite prejudice and violence, and liberate the human spirit to find genuinely transcendent emotion and moral inspiration.

   Science may even already have illuminated the source of religious revelation of the experiential kind.  "In all organized religions I am aware of," writes Pollack, "revelation takes the form of a sense of being overwhelmed by sheer feeling arising within without reason or cause."   As a matter of fact, experiments at Laurentian University in Ontario have shown that a classic sense of religious revelation can be produced at will by stimulating a locus in the brain with an electromagnetic pulse.   Disappointingly reductionist to many, perhaps, but a new field of 'neurotheology' is exploring such links between feelings of spirituality and prodding the brain.

 

Mindsets in the brain

 

   If the feeling of religious epiphany is a function of how the brain works, perhaps rigid opinion has the same source.   Experiments which may be even more pertinent to our topic have been carried out by physicist Allan Snyder in Canberra, Australia, producing interesting results related to closemindedness. 

   Snyder, studying the brain patterns of autistic savants, has found that normal subjects can be induced to think as literally and non-preconceptually as savants by directing magnetic pulses into their left arterial temporal lobe, paralyzing their conceptual ability.  The objectivity in perception that results is revealed by their improved drawing of familiar objects, which is no longer interfered with by their preconceptions.

   This suggests that the unreasonable closemindedness demonstrated by so many people in scientific debate may on one level simply reflect the active functioning of their left temporal lobe.  To enable us to function in the world, Snyder now reasons, the lobe engenders preconceptions to map our perceptions.  These pre-concepts must be dismantled or shifted before our understanding can change.  If received wisdom fosters strong presumptions of this kind, this could cause imperviousness to reasoned argument.

 Snyder concludes that we must all try to escape the influence of such mindsets to achieve useful new and creative perceptions:  "Be forewarned of the blindness and the prejudice that is inseparable from your discipline," he says.

 

The need for skepticism

    Whether systemic, social, psychological or religious in nature, or simply inherent in the way our brains work, then, there is a long list of factors which may prevent effective review in science from taking place.  Yet if the heretic's will to reform is dissipated, there will be little progress in theory.  There are numerous examples of Nobel prizes won by scientists who initially suffered debilitating scorn for their revolutionary idea.

   As the case of Peter Duesberg shows, even a very well established heretical reviewer may be dismissed as a crank if he pursues the matter too long without flinching.  But, of course, it is not crankish to try and debate an open scientific issue to agreement.  Similarly, Thabo Mbeki, the South African president who independently researched the validity of AIDS heresy, is now called "irresponsible" by the New York Times.  But it is not irresponsible for a head of state to demand a review of a genuine scientific dispute with such enormous economic and health consequences for the country he leads.

   Skepticism in science is indispensable to progress and to correcting errors.   In the debate over evolution, for example, the standard theory is still resisted by proponents of "intelligent design".   Most scientists dismiss these heretics as creationists who refuse to accept the implications of scientific evidence.   But the truth is that the paradigm still has gaps in its explanation of how evolution has worked, and the opponents' review has proved useful in pointing up these and, as well, some embarrassing mistakes in leading biology textbooks.

   Design proponents have drawn attention to the 19th-century drawings of the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who claimed that the early embryonic stages of many animals, including humans, were virtually identical.  Haekel claimed that the resemblance was proof that all animals had a common ancestor.  The drawings were reproduced in textbooks for more than a century, until biologists discovered a few years ago that many were fraudulent and that the true resemblances were not nearly so striking.

   Nevertheless, some textbooks still contain them, including the third edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell, the bedrock text of the field.  The authors include Dr. Bruce Alberts, biochemist and president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Dr. James D. Watson, the geneticist who shared a Nobel Prize for unraveling the structure of DNA.  The mistake will be corrected in the next edition and the findings do not disturb the confidence of biologists in the theory of evolution.  But it was dissent that produced the correction.

 

Empowering the individual

   Once again, one has to say that none of all this proves that the HIV theory, or any other paradigm which excites mindless resistance to review, must a priori be wrong.  But unless review is given free rein, no theory can considered validated.

   Given the many origins of scorn for heresy, what is the lesson for the state and its relationship with science?   Regardless of all we have said, only if and when the HIV hypothesis is exploded once and for all will this question seem truly relevant to most of the public.  But let us acknowledge that it is relevant now, given the poor behavior of established scientists in debating that issue.

   The overall lesson is surely that in science the individual should be empowered.   Huge and centralized state funding of science magnifies the influence of the group over individual minds, and it is group influence which tends to defeat the rationality of science in almost every case we have quoted above, from network utility to the religious impulse.  Social power consolidates the ruling idea and fosters an emotional defense of it as group ideology.   Supposedly scientific and logical arguments are adduced in its favor by those under its spell, but the effect is really to awaken and reinforce blind faith.

        Not least, let us support knowledgeable dissenters from the establishment such as Peter Duesberg, who sacrifice so much in the service of the public good.   Let us unabashedly celebrate and finance the courage of this kind of public spirited heretic, who is one kind of scientific hero.

  We might even say, with one enthusiastic reader writing a review of Inventing the AIDS Virus, Duesberg's book, on Amazon.com: 
  "Dr. Duesberg stands astride the pathetic sycophants of establishment science like a colossus."

This talk was given at the Conference for Science and Democracy, Institute for Philosophical Studies, Naples, Italy on April 20, 2001.  Rewritten with additions up to Sunday, September 22, 2002.

Copyright Anthony Liversidge 2002 (email al@scientificreview.com).