February 24th, 2010[Emphasis in original.]
Dear Professor Duesberg,
I am writing regarding your article: ‘HIV-AIDS hypothesis out of touch with South African AIDS – A new perspective’, which was withdrawn as a Medical Hypotheses Article-in-Press in August 2009.
As you know, following the recommendations of the external expert panel, the article was sent out for independent peer review, under the management of the Lancet editorial team. The article was sent to five external reviewers; the reviewers’ reports are also being sent to you along with this letter.
In light of the unanimous ‘reject’ recommendations by the reviewers, the Panel has recommended to Elsevier that your article should be permanently withdrawn. We are following this recommendation, and will adjust our withdrawal notice to read as follows:
“This Article-in-Press has been permanently withdrawn.
The editorial policy of MEDICAL HYPOTHESES makes it clear that the journal considers “radical, speculative, and non-mainstream scientific ideas”, and articles will only be acceptable if they are “coherent and clearly expressed.” However, we received serious expressions of concern about the quality of this article, which contains highly controversial opinions about the causes of AIDS, opinions that could potentially be damaging to global public health.
Given these important signals of concern, we commissioned an external expert panel to investigate the circumstances in which this article came to be published online. The panel recommended that the article should be externally peer-reviewed. Following a peer-review process managed by The Lancet editorial team, all five external reviewers recommended rejection, as a result of which the expert panel recommended permanent withdrawal.
The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause.”
Sincerely yours,
Chris Lloyd
VP Health Sciences Journals
Elsevier
[Adventures in Reaction]
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Duesberg's Paper Permanently Withdrawn
Since I've covered this issue, and in case any of you still care, here's a letter notifying Peter Duesberg that his and his co-authors' paper has been dropped into the memory hole, never to return.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I wish they had spelled out the exact sequence of events by which publishing the article would be "damaging to public health."
ReplyDeleteIt would be hard to do without sounding immensely paranoid.
...opinions that could potentially be damaging to global public health.
ReplyDeleteHow can an opinion be damaging to health?
Had Duesberg truly believed what he is saying, he would have infected himself long ago - in the safety of his home, he could simply engage in a a little blood transfusion with the HIV-positive person. This would not in any way violate any rules by his employer.
ReplyDeleteInstead, he spent over 20 years engaged in the business of selective citations.
Why would he have wanted to do that? He doesn't say that he has 100%, godlike certainty. And "selective citation"? Please, do you have any idea how large the medical literature is? All citation is selective.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Duesberg's censors are hardly disinterested observers, and whether he's right or wrong, the whole thing smells of a witch hunt.
There are others who have 100% godlike certainty in Duesberg's assertions. As long as they see his ideas as being valid, they are far less likely to take sensible precautions in situations where HIV may be present.
ReplyDeleteIt is indeed a risk to present Duesberg's ideas as on the same level as verified and replicated research. In medicine where life and death are involved, the burden of proof is very high on researchers.
Duesberg's research on other topics may be top notch, but on the topic of HIV he reminds me of Mbeki.
Witch hunt? Who is going after Duesberg in an attempt to kill him or to have him fired from his cushy tenured Berkeley position? No one.
There is no right to be published in someone else's journal. Duesberg has enough disciples by now that he could start his own online journal with a significant following.
There's no right to demand that another scientist's journal articles be stricken from the public record.
ReplyDeleteWhy would he have wanted to do that? He doesn't say that he has 100%, godlike certainty.
ReplyDeleteHe write like he does. With near 100& certainty. His - by far - best chance of proving himself right was/is with self-infection. Intentional self-infection has a long and proud tradition in biomedical science. But he knows that his contrarian hypothesis is BS - he simply can't admit it. Some people are like that.
And "selective citation"? Please, do you have any idea how large the medical literature is? All citation is selective.
I do. And that means I know 95-99% of all immediately relevant and recent literature on the subject I write a paper about. Duesberg knows literature too, no doubt! It's not very difficult, particularly now. He just opts to cite only what suits him and disregards everything that does not. Not an honest thing to do in science. Here is a small example in that paper: they first propose that AZT can't even possibly work and affect HIV propagation (by pretty inane argument, citing Duesberg as one of the key evidence and not citing tons of work to the contrary) then cite a paper that concluded that all cause mortality is unchanged by AZT. Except that this very same cited paper clearly shows that AZT does affect viral loads significantly!
Anyway, Duesberg's censors are hardly disinterested observers, and whether he's right or wrong, the whole thing smells of a witch hunt.
I somewhat agree. Except for 1) the issue of cherry-picking citations and 2) lack of explicit discussion of testable predictions, the paper meets stated formal requirements of the journal.
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteThere are others who have 100% godlike certainty in Duesberg's assertions. As long as they see his ideas as being valid, they are far less likely to take sensible precautions in situations where HIV may be present."
That isn't the public. That's a few people who follow dissident (or fringe, if you like) medical research. If they land in trouble as a result, they have no one to blame but themselves.
However, the vast majority of the public have likely never even heard the name Duesberg. Do you mean to say that some heroin addict in a Vancouver shooting gallery is going to say to himself "Hey, I just read this article in a scientific journal published by Elsevier, and it says there's no link between HIV and AIDS, so maybe I won't bother using a clean needle"? Preposterous! And while you're asking this canadian junkie, or for that matter, a thai prostitute, or a zambian migrant laborer what they think of the latest research published in "Medical Hypothesis", ask them for me what they think about the division of labor in ancient Sumeria, or the search for the Higgs Boson. Seeing as they're so erudite and all.
Of course we all know that scientific concensus is never wrong. Why Al Gore was telling us that just the other day. Al? You there? Yoo-hoo.
Martin B: You get the comment of the day award. It startles me how willing so many people are to completely dismiss Duesberg, as if the consensus was always right.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget, cholesterol causes heart disease, low-fat diets are "healthy", and everyone should avoid sun exposure...
It would be interesting to read the responses from the peer reviewers and to know more about them and how they were selected.
ReplyDeletePeer review can be a legitimate part of research publication. But the reviewers should stick to the aspects of a paper that outsiders can reasonably judge: for instance, whether the experimental design and statistical analysis were valid; whether the citations from other studies accurately reflect the findings of those other studies; whether relevant, uncited studies contradict the author's conclusions; that kind of thing. Otherwise, the peer reviewers should not be encouraged to express their agreement or disagreement.
I also wonder who the peer reviewers are. An "old boy" network with longstanding ties to the journal? Researchers whose views are already known to the editor?
Why shouldn't peer reviews be randomized, like participants in studies of new medicines? Keep a list of everyone with the qualifications to review a paper, whether or not they have any connection with the journal. Have a computer select five (or however many) reviewers at random.
Rick: all the reviewers in this case were from The Lancet, that is to say from the ranks of mainstream medicine, and it would have been surprising if they had come to any other conclusion.
ReplyDeleteI am perpetually astonished at the likes of Anonymous, Nanonymous, and their ilk who blather about matters of science without apparently knowing much about it. Almost all peer review is based on the prevailing established consensus and discriminates against genuine novelty; most spectacular advances were fiercely opposed at first (Barber, SCIENCE 1961, "Resistance by scientists to scientific discovery"). Duesberg is like all other overachieving scientists in being less than judicious about his pet ideas: that's what it takes to overcome the sniping of lesser talents and the bureaucrats who manage academe and science; the lesser talents wo are supporters of the mainstream HIV/AIDS theory are at least as dogmatic about it as Duesberg is about his own views, with less justification because they have persistently failed to cite the publications that are supposed to prove that HIV causes AIDS, or even publications reporting the isolation of pure virions of HIV. The full story of the Elsevier affair remains to be told, but what has long been clear is that a vice-president with unknown scientific qualifications was so terrified by an e-mail from a Nobel-Prize winner that he withdrew the articles within three days without ever having asked advice from the journal's editor or its editorial board, let alone the authors of the article. The notion that such an article represents a threat to global public health deserves to be featured on the Daily Show; your commentator who tries to defend that reveals only the typical paternalistic hubris of those who know better than anyone else how others should behave, all those others who can't be trusted to think for themselves. The absurd suggestion that Duesberg should inject himself with what people claim to be something containing a culture-derived retrovirus might be paralleled by a suggestion that those who synthesize and those who prescribe antiretrovirals should personally take a course of them --- especially now that such "prophylaxis" is being touted as a way of totally eradicating HIV; after all, "everyone is at risk", presumably very much so those who are courageous enough to work with preparations of "HIV" in the laboratory, a necessary part of testing antiretrovirals for efficacy.
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for your blog, Dennis Mangan, an unusually rational part of the Internet.
Henry Bauer
www.henryhbauer.homestead.com
and their ilk who blather about matters of science without apparently knowing much about it
ReplyDeleteLOL. A good start... And based on what, exactly, did you conclude that? I haven't said a single word about peer review. Yes, the current peer review system sucks - but it does not mean that it always sucks. Nor it means that every claim that goes against mainstream is correct (in fact, most are wrong).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that - remember? Duesberg claim is clearly extraordinary but his evidence is not only weak but also dishonest. It's that simple.
And, by the way, do you really want to get into the pissing contest "who here knows more about science"? You seem to be a guy who believes in UFOs, paranormal phenomena and Loch Ness monster. Is there a kookery that you do not believe in??? Before you started as proponent of kookery, you were scientist. Trouble is, your objective scientific output is pretty pathetic: for the years 1965-1979, an h-index of 11, an average 7.7 citations per paper, the most cited paper ever has 50 citations. By any standard of a research professor, this record totally sucks. Tenure is a wonderful thing, right? (Sorry, you asked for it by being rude - unreasonably so and totally uncalled-for).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that - remember? Duesberg claim is clearly extraordinary but his evidence is not only weak but also dishonest. It's that simple.
ReplyDeleteFor starters, please knock off calling Duesberg or anyone else for that matter "dishonest" unless you can present some evidence for that. I get many comments (in general) that contain elements of fair criticism but also ad hominem attacks. People just can't seem to help themselves and need to insult or smear opponents. (Often the target of the attacks is me.)
In any case, I'd say that it is precisely Duesberg's position that the conventional wisdom on HIV/AIDS is quite extraordinary. The relatively low infectiousness of HIV, that there are few if any examples of otherwise healthy HIV positive people and who are untreated with toxic drugs developing AIDS, that all AIDS symptoms can be ascribed to other illnesses (Kaposi's sarcoma, cryptococcus, pneumocystis, etc.), that most African AIDS patients have never had HIV tests - these and more mean that if HIV truly is both necessary and sufficient to cause AIDS, then this situation is virtually unique in the annals of medicine. That's what requires extraordinary evidence.
PS: if anyone wants to critique what I just wrote, please don't repeat the conventional wisdom on HIV/AIDS. We all know what it is.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence....
ReplyDeleteAs Dennis pointed out, that begs the question. And since you like nifty aphorisms, here's one for you: falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus. What's the AIDS Establishment's record of truthfulness?
"Without massive federal AIDS intervention, there may be no one left," shouts Donna Shalala, Clinton's former Secretary of Health and Human Services. (Wash. Times, 6/8/99.)
"By 1991, 1 in 10 babies may be AIDS victims," reads a headline from USA Today in 1988.
The head honcho of AIDS research, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Health, states, "By 1996, 3 to 5 million Americans will be HIV positive, and 1 million will be dead of AIDS." (NY Times, 1/14/86.)
These were hysterical and outrageous falsehoods.
For starters, please knock off calling Duesberg or anyone else for that matter "dishonest" unless you can present some evidence for that.
ReplyDeleteI already did. It's in my posts above. But I can repeat: cherry-picking citations is a dishonest scientific practice. The paper in question provides an example: they first propose that AZT can't even possibly work and affect HIV propagation (by pretty inane argument, citing Duesberg as one of the key evidence and not citing tons of work to the contrary) then cite a paper that concluded that all cause mortality is unchanged by AZT. Except that this latter paper clearly shows that AZT does affect viral loads significantly! And except that the paper cited does not say what the authors say it says!
I can guarantee you that I can find many more examples. I've seen many of them - just never bothered to document. But I am sure someone did. Yes, here you are:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20058063
(This is an explicit and very detailed response to the withdrawn paper; seriously, please read it - it may change what you think.)
I'd say that it is precisely Duesberg's position that the conventional wisdom on HIV/AIDS is quite extraordinary.
Then you have pretty unusual definition of extraordinary. In the discussed context, it is the mainstream orthodoxy that is ordinary (= usual, regular, commonplace, established). Extraordinary is what is beyond ordinary – in this case, Duesberg.
if anyone wants to critique what I just wrote, please don't repeat the conventional wisdom on HIV/AIDS. We all know what it is.
Well, that is rather jesuit demand, don't you think? How can anyone critique your unorthodox claims without invoking orthodox facts that contradict them? You write: "all AIDS symptoms can be ascribed to other illnesses". FYI: that is patently wrong. Decrease of T-helper cells count is a well-documented symptom, strongly correlated with HIV infection and consistent with an incredible amount of in vitro data on lymphocyte and HIV biology. You very likely heard that CD4+ cells are a key part of our immune system and I am sure you know that the immune system is important. Then you shouldn't be surprised by opportunistic infections. Wait, I am repeating the conventional wisdom on HIV/AIDS. Oh, well. (The truth is most likely a lot more complicated than just destroying CD4+ cells but that's irrelevant here).
falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus
ReplyDeleteThat is a legal principle, not scientific. (And no, it's not the same as the falsifiability principle). It is absolutely not applicable to any experimental science.
These were hysterical and outrageous falsehoods.
Yes, they were. I am sure there were many more. But there is an incredible amount of bullshit published in scientific journals - that does not mean we should disregard everything published in them - right? Shalala was probably lying outright - that's politics as usual. As for Fauci - who knows? On one hand, he was administrator with vested interest of making the problem sounding bad. On the other hand, back in 1986 we knew squat about HIV and I remember distinctly that from the little that was known, it sounded really scary. In 1986, probably 90% of virologists would have agreed with such dire prediction.
During the 1980s and early 90s I was a part-time cabdriver in Chicago at night during the summer months. Many of my customers were members of the male homosexual community who spent all night cruising from homosexual bar to homosexual bar having anal sex in the toilets with strangers. Such intimate contact with strangers on such a wide scale naturally leads to multiple infections of varied types. Unhealthy behavior has consequences. Every person I knew who died diagnosed with AIDS was a male homosexual - seven in my apartment complex alone. In Saudi Arabia I worked at an institute where there were only two non-homosexual full-time employees.The assistant director's idea of a good-time was to go to parking lots and receive cluster sex from groups of Bangladeshi parking lot attendants.
ReplyDeleteThe definition of AIDS is have any one of many illnesses plus being HIV positive. Having all of these illnesses but being HIV negative means you are merely dying.
Sounds like the anthropogenic global warming scam to me.
Unless you were there in the early days of AIDs and the discovery of HIV, it is difficult to understand how uneasy and uncertain the virology, epidemiology, and infectious disease establishments were between 1980 and 2000.
ReplyDeleteBack in the late 80s or early 90s, Duesberg's ideas were not so far out from what other researchers were considering.
But a lot of time and experience has passed since then. Consensus in the area of infectious disease means that a lot of professionals have faced the same set of problems and have compared notes on what seems to work and what doesn't.
The time span of an HIV case can be measured in years and decades. ID specialists have gone through a lot of cases over the past 25 years. They've run a lot of tests and tried a lot of treatments. These were not computer models, they were diseased people.
The time span of a single climate change cycle on the other hand can be measured in hundreds of thousands of years if not longer. We only have reliable data over a matter of decades (with a relevant time scale of hundreds of thousands of years). You can see the difference in what "consensus" might mean between the two fields.
HIV AIDS is a young field in medicine, but compared to climate science, the knowledge base of HIV AIDS is vast and ancient.
That is a legal principle, not scientific. (And no, it's not the same as the falsifiability principle). It is absolutely not applicable to any experimental science.
ReplyDeleteWell, no kidding. You're TOTALLY missing the point. The point is how laymen receive and interpret information from the experts. And, of course, the proper way to do it is similar to the way in which evidence is adduced at trial.
I have no time to read all the literature; I have to rely on experts. It's obvious, however, that the AIDS establishment's experts have been incompetent and/or dishonest, so we need new experts. Maybe Duesberg qualifies -- let's hear what he has to say!
Unless you were there in the early days of AIDs and the discovery of HIV, it is difficult to understand how uneasy and uncertain the virology, epidemiology, and infectious disease establishments were between 1980 and 2000.
It was clear to me by 1988 that HIV could not spread through the heterosexual population. The transmission rates were just too low, especially from female to male.
Why were the "experts" unable to figure the same things out? Conformity, grant allocation, politics, the usual mundane stuff, I guess. But we're supposed to believe there's less of that now with another 20 years of entrenchment of the orthodoxy?
Give me a break.
It was clear to me by 1988 that HIV could not spread through the heterosexual population. The transmission rates were just too low, especially from female to male.
ReplyDeleteLOL. In which case in 1988 you were the only one in the world to know the rate with any degree of certainty.