Kary Mullis -- The Full Interview (1996)

Summary

In this captivating 1996 interview, Nobel laureate Kary Mullis discusses the complex relationship between science, society, and skepticism. Known for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), Mullis offers a critical perspective on how science is sometimes treated as a modern religion and questions its authority on moral issues. The interview delves into controversial topics, including the scientific community's handling of AIDS research and Mullis's libertarian views on personal freedom and responsibility. Additionally, Mullis reflects on humanity's limitations in understanding the universe, drawing parallels between scientific inquiry and religious belief.

Highlights

• Mullis argues that science has taken on the role of religion in society, with scientists seen as modern-day priests 🙌🔬.
• He questions the effectiveness and safety of antiretroviral drugs used in AIDS treatment, suggesting they might cause more harm than good ❓💊.
• Mullis is skeptical of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis and criticizes the scientific establishment for uncritically accepting it without sufficient evidence 🧬❗.
• The interview touches on the potential misuse of public funds in scientific research, with Mullis advocating for accountability and transparency 💰🔍.
• Mullis humorously discusses the potential pitfalls of human overconfidence in scientific understanding and decision-making 😂🔍.

Key Takeaways

• Kary Mullis challenges the perception of science as the ultimate authority, comparing it to a modern religion 👨‍🔬🙏.
• Mullis is critical of the way AIDS research has been conducted, questioning the prevailing scientific narrative and calling for more scrutiny 🦠🔍.
• He advocates for more freedom in scientific research, suggesting that scientists should pursue their own goals without strict oversight 🎓🔗.
• Mullis emphasizes the importance of skepticism and warns against blindly following scientific consensus 🤔🚫.
• He reflects on human limitations in understanding the complexities of the universe, advocating for a mindset of continuous inquiry and humility 🌌🧠.

Overview

In this thought-provoking interview with Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist reflects on the state of science and its intersection with societal norms. Mullis candidly critiques the scientific community for sometimes acting as a gatekeeper of morality and truth, akin to a modern-day religion. He expresses concern over how science is currently conducted, particularly in fields like AIDS research, where he sees a lack of critical inquiry.

Mullis doesn't shy away from controversy, openly challenging the prevailing scientific viewpoint on HIV and AIDS. He questions the foundation of the HIV-AIDS link and the efficacy of antiretroviral drugs, arguing that these treatments could potentially do more harm than good. His libertarian perspective shines through as he champions individual freedom, both in personal health decisions and scientific pursuits.

Throughout the interview, Mullis encourages a mindset of skepticism and inquiry. He explores human limitations in comprehending the complexities of the universe, drawing intriguing parallels between science and religion. Mullis's perspective is both refreshing and challenging, urging scientists and the public alike to think critically and remain open to questioning established norms.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Interview Location The chapter begins with the sound of music, setting the tone for the content that follows. There's no conversation or narration, indicating perhaps an introductory sequence or scene-setting moment before the interview commences. Details about the interview's location and content are yet to be described, suggesting this is an opening segment focusing on ambiance or establishing context.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Science as a Final Arbiter The chapter discusses the perspective of Professor Kerry Mullis, a Nobel Prize winner, on the role of science as a final arbiter of truth. The interview, conducted at Mullis's home by the ocean, explores the notion of whether society has elevated science to a position where it dictates what is considered right, influencing how both the public and scientists perceive the role of science in decision-making and truth-seeking.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Responsibility and Decision Making The chapter discusses the role of responsibility and decision-making, particularly in the context of determining right and wrong behavior. It raises the question of how we make decisions about what is acceptable and what is not. The dialogue suggests that science has played a part in the decline of certain traditional institutions, such as the Protestant Church, which became too entangled in historical matters, thereby allowing science to challenge and debunk them.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Mandating Medical Procedures and Personal Choice This chapter explores the shift in personal beliefs and societal norms regarding religion and science. The author discusses how Christianity transitioned from a faith-based practice to something more mythological, causing a gap in people's psychological and spiritual lives as they moved away from church attendance. This void, the chapter suggests, has been partially filled by a growing ecological consciousness, sometimes characterized as madness, where scientists play a significant role.
• 03:30 - 04:30: Critique of Authority in Science The chapter titled 'Critique of Authority in Science' challenges the perceived authority of scientists, likening them to modern-day priests who dictate what is beneficial or detrimental for the planet without genuine understanding. The text critiques how scientists, symbolized by their white lab coats, are seen as final authorities on environmental matters, similar to how religious figures convey divine will. It suggests that this blind following arises from an inherent human need to have authoritative figures dictating actions, even if the understanding behind those actions is lacking.
• 04:30 - 05:30: Peter Duesberg and Scientific Marginalization The chapter discusses the concept of religion and its appeal of making individuals feel part of a larger, meaningful group, potentially offering a sense of belonging and purpose beyond one’s personal life. It raises the question of personal responsibility and decision-making in the context of natural evolution, suggesting that an individual’s ability to manage their own decisions was crucial to their survival and sense of agency.
• 05:30 - 06:30: HIV/AIDS Testing and Misconceptions The chapter explores the topic of HIV/AIDS testing and addresses common misconceptions surrounding it. It delves into the reliance on pharmaceutical models for healing and discusses how the current medical approach often overlooks innate knowledge and natural healing methods. People tend to trust medical advice without questioning, which contrasts with nature's inherent healing capabilities. Medicine, at times, seems to mistrust nature and individuals' innate ability to heal.
• 06:30 - 07:30: Challenges in Proving HIV Causes AIDS This chapter delves into the complexities and difficulties encountered in establishing a definitive link between HIV and AIDS. It discusses how people have traditionally made decisions with limited information, and highlights that this issue persists in modern times, albeit in different contexts and with evolved societal frameworks. Despite advancements, the fundamental challenge of making informed decisions remains a critical concern, particularly in understanding and proving the causative relationship between HIV and AIDS.
• 07:30 - 08:30: Media Representation and Public Perception This chapter delves into the relationship between media representations and public perceptions, exploring how hierarchical structures have been a constant from ancient times to modern society. It suggests that, historically, there has always been an acknowledgment of authority, with anthropological evidence pointing to a consistent hierarchy across different eras, even dating back to primitive cave societies. The chapter also touches upon how contemporary literature addresses these themes, specifically in relation to varying life energies and their influence on societal structures.
• 08:30 - 09:30: Science, Beliefs, and Evidence The chapter opens with a critique of the media's reporting on HIV-related health mandates, specifically referencing a recent story from sources like The New York Times. The main point of concern is the mandate for pregnancy tests to determine if mothers or their babies have HIV, leading to the administration of antiretrovirals like AZT to the infants. The narrative challenges this approach, emphasizing that newborns, due to their undeveloped immune systems, should ideally be breastfed to aid in immune development. The author argues that it takes years for a baby's immune system to fully develop, and premature introduction of antiretrovirals could be contentious.
• 09:30 - 10:30: The Nature of Scientific Inquiry The chapter discusses the complexities and ethical considerations of scientific practices, particularly focusing on vaccinations and the implications of mandating medical treatments. It highlights the uncertainties in determining the effectiveness of vaccines for every individual and questions the regulations surrounding vaccination requirements for travel, education, and public safety. The conversation suggests skepticism about the absolute efficacy and necessity of such mandates, emphasizing the nuanced nature of scientific inquiry.
• 10:30 - 11:30: Reflection on Scientific Practice The chapter delves into the potential consequences of side effects, emphasizing the importance of evaluating who may be harmed by them. It highlights the speaker's libertarian perspective, expressing a strong commitment to preserving individual freedoms even in the face of grand societal causes. The speaker is skeptical and concerned about the possibility of freedoms being eroded, acknowledging that there might be individuals in society who support such measures.
• 11:30 - 12:30: Impact of Scientific Errors The chapter discusses the influence of certain individuals in scientific and health leadership positions, notably someone compared to a surgeon general, who exhibits authoritarian tendencies. This person is described as having a personality reminiscent of a 'nazi,' being overly authoritative, and even suggesting bureaucratic uniformity within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Despite this, the individual is noted to have some redeeming social values.
• 12:30 - 13:30: Social Behavior and Disease Transmission The chapter discusses the moral and ethical considerations of mandating medical treatment for children, specifically in the context of administering AZT or chemotherapy for diseases such as AIDS or cancer. It explores the role of state agencies in intervening when parents, armed with informed knowledge, decide against such treatments for their children. The state’s responsibility to protect children, even against parental wishes, is a key theme, highlighting a tension between parental rights and child welfare.
• 13:30 - 14:30: Lifestyle and Health Consequences The chapter "Lifestyle and Health Consequences" discusses how historical misunderstandings of diseases, like Pellagra in the late 19th and early 20th century, led to incorrect conclusions about parental fitness. Pellagra, mistaken as an infectious disease, was actually caused by a lack of niacin in diets that relied heavily on corn instead of wheat. This misconception resulted in children being removed from homes under the belief that their parents were unfit, highlighting the repercussions of misinformation on lifestyle and health.
• 14:30 - 15:30: Homosexuality and Health Misconceptions The chapter discusses misconceptions in public health, specifically focusing on historical misunderstandings surrounding diseases and health interventions. It describes how orphans were given niacin until someone identified that certain diseases were not infectious, challenging existing beliefs. A researcher, mentioned as Goldberg, played a crucial role in changing the narrative by using more scientific reasoning to alter the approach toward tackling the disease, highlighting the necessity of challenging dominant yet incorrect medical beliefs.
• 15:30 - 16:30: Conspiracy Theories in Science This chapter discusses the idea that science has become a kind of state religion, where people often rely on scientists to make important decisions on various issues, such as cancer. This reliance on scientific authority is viewed critically by some, who feel that it is overused in decision-making processes.
• 16:30 - 17:30: Role of Funding and Profit in Research The chapter explores the dynamics around how funding and profit can affect research directions and outcomes. It delves into the idea that medical professionals are often perceived as infallible next to their patients, even if the latter have valuable insights or knowledge themselves. Personal anecdotes illustrate this, such as a son who, despite having some medical expertise, is overlooked as his mother trusts her doctors implicitly. The narrative touches on broader themes of authority and the need for potential changes in how research is influenced by financial incentives, suggesting a complicated relationship between profit motives and the pure pursuit of knowledge.
• 17:30 - 18:30: Critique of Scientific Community In this chapter, the author critiques the scientific community, suggesting that it should be less responsive to central authority. The argument is made for a more autonomous approach to scientific funding, where scientists are not required to justify their projects in detail in advance, but rather are given the resources to explore and innovate freely. The author advocates for a system where scientists can work without having to constantly explain and validate their plans to funding bodies, promoting greater creativity and discovery.
• 18:30 - 19:30: Human Nature and Scientific Understanding The chapter titled 'Human Nature and Scientific Understanding' explores the concept of giving scientists the freedom to pursue their own research goals. It argues that allowing scientists to decide on their research leads to better scientific outcomes and more vigorous discussion on methodologies, which is essential in addressing specific problems. The current system is criticized as being outdated and overly controlling, likened to medieval times.

Kary Mullis -- The Full Interview (1996) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] [Music]
• 00:30 - 01:00 professor kerry mullis is one of the most unique minds in america he won the nobel prize we did this interview late at night at his home on the ocean do you believe that we have made science our final arbiter and what is right and as a result we continue to look at science and scientists hold themselves
• 01:00 - 01:30 up to make the decision that this is right behavior that's wrong behavior you can do this you can't do that it's a good question and i think the answer is definitely that science in a way having led to this sort of decline of the of the of let's say the protestant church i mean the protestants got a little bit too involved in history and left themselves open there for scientists to come in and say to debunk
• 01:30 - 02:00 christianity because it became a mythological kind of thing rather than a then only by faith kind of thing and you know it became a it's not a real religion in the sense of like buddhism or something science having been involved in that people said well we're not going to go to church anymore it left a big hole in a lot of people's psychological makeup that has i think been filled to some degree by the ecological madness that people have got jumped into and there the scientists are like you say there
• 02:00 - 02:30 they are considered the final arbiters of what's good for the planet or what's bad for the planet and and they hadn't got the slightest idea instead of wearing white robes they wear white lab coats you know instead of like bringing you the word of god they bring in the word of the the epa or whatever and and and they don't have to understand what it is that they are making you do in fact and people you know just i think they fall naturally into it because there is a need in in humanity for something like
• 02:30 - 03:00 a religion something that makes you feel a part of some larger kind of group something that you think in spite of your wormy little life makes you a part of something good something big something that that makes sense but doesn't it also happen that when when people were naturally evolving it was necessary for them to take responsibility for a major part of their life if they didn't if they couldn't make their own decisions about their own sense of
• 03:00 - 03:30 reality in significant ways then they would have succumbed today very few people make many decisions that are really significant if they if they feel something's wrong they go to a doctor the doctor frequently will tell them this is your condition and this is how to treat it people are not questioning innate knowledge or innate healing and as a result we've relied upon a pharmaceutical model for all of our healing in fact medicine doesn't mistrust nature mistrust the person's
• 03:30 - 04:00 own ability to have their own healing experience well i i think people are still responsible for their decisions and they still make them just like they always have and they do it with insufficient information just like they always have it's just that the world's a little different now than say two million years ago when maybe it was a matter of do we go down there with the family next door or are we going to stay up here in the canopy or whatever i mean the decisions that people make are
• 04:00 - 04:30 important to their lives and they they certainly uh [Music] proceed to authority a lot but i think that's always been the i don't know if there's ever there's no evidence in my mind for the time you know from anthropological stuff that there weren't always rulers and people we've always had a hierarchical order right even in the caves we've had a higher recorder i believe there's like my new books just on that very topic on life energies or each problem with a different life energy i uh
• 04:30 - 05:00 i'm very concerned when the media publishes a story that came out recently in the new york times and all the other papers that now it's being mandated that that there's going to be pregnancy tests to determine if they mothers have hiv if the babies have hiv and then put the babies on antiretrovirals like azt well if you have a baby that has no developed immune system of its own should be getting breast fed to develop an immune system it's going to take many months in fact several years to really fully develop and you're going to start giving
• 05:00 - 05:30 a child that's completely healthy just as an antibody in their system and you give them a toxic chemotherapy drug and then we are not going to be mandated by law that's why they they're not that dumb are they i mean they they to mandate what what states well they've mandated vaccines you can't get into some college you can't take it have your kid go to school you can't travel to certain countries unless you've had vaccines and it's never been shown that vaccines can be predictive of who they're going to help and what the
• 05:30 - 06:00 consequences of side effects are going to be for who hurts yeah i i i'm you know i'm a libertarian true right to the heart and i i do not like to see freedoms eroded at all for whatever grand cause and i that would just that that would almost i mean i i can't believe that they would that i mean i can believe there would be some people in society that might like to to do that like that guy who used to be the head of uh
• 06:00 - 06:30 the uh was he the surgeon general that's uh he's written yeah yeah he's a he's a bit on the sort of like a little bit like a nazi kind of a guy in a way and although he has he's got his he has his name he has some redeeming social value but the man is you know just a little bit too much into i mean he thought everybody in the in the nih should start wearing uniforms you know and that sort of that kind of a personality
• 06:30 - 07:00 is is capable i think also thinking yes and we do have the moral right to make you give your kid azt because it's our job to protect your child even if you don't want to do that state agencies have taken kids away from parents when the parent based upon informed knowledge chose not to give their child either azt or other chemotherapy agents either for aids or cancer and these were parents who knew more than the average parent
• 07:00 - 07:30 and based upon their knowledge made an informed choice and those parents were deemed unfit and abusive parents and their kids were taken put into a foster home i you know what in the night in the 19th early 20th century actually or late 19th century in the south pelegra was thought to be a an infectious disease it was a lack of niacin because southerners were eating corn instead of wheat the poor farmers were and they were taking kids out of houses homes there thinking it was an infectious disease because everybody in the family was
• 07:30 - 08:00 getting it put the kids in an orphanage and the orphanage the kid would get a little bit of niacin because they'd have some wheat and he wouldn't get pellegra so it made real sense took some guy you know i took him a government uh research station in south carolina finally got a somebody some gold goldberg goldberg some jewish guy came down there with a little brains and said wait a minute this is not an infectious disease you know it's somebody had to they had to throw out all the idiots that were running that but that was a
• 08:00 - 08:30 long it was a long time and they did the same thing they took kids out of homes all he needed to do was bring in a little bread a little little whole wheat bread does it bother you at all every time we need a decision made we're always looking for some scientist to tell us what to do whether it's on cancer or almost any issue where science science becomes has become a state religion i i it does it bothers me when when i see like people you know my mother's a good example of doing that sort of just you know that
• 08:30 - 09:00 her doctors are never questioned at all even though her son is sort of a medical person himself and sometimes disagrees with him because i'm her son of course i don't have any brains and you know her her little physicians are always telling her weird things yeah it bothers it doesn't bother me so much i like this planet you know i'm not upset about it at all i'm not a crusader if i had my my uh my way i would make a few changes and i would
• 09:00 - 09:30 make them slowly and carefully i wouldn't make any radical kinds of changes i would change science to be more res like just to be a little less responsive to central authority make it more like if you're going to fund a scientist for something that he says here's what i'll do for my for you you give me 200 000 next year and i'll do this i think well okay why don't you just give him the two hundred thousand let him do what he wants to it don't find no don't make him tell you what he's doing don't make him convince
• 09:30 - 10:00 his colleagues that what he's gonna work on if he's good enough to give it to him for one thing just give it to him and let him decide because you'll get a lot better science that way and a lot more freedom for scientists to actually pursue their own goals and a lot more discussion which is really important issue today about what is the proper way to go about what particular problem you know the way it's done now is by it's rather medieval and it counts on
• 10:00 - 10:30 the fact that it's not true anymore but scientists never lie that scientists will always be honest and that they aren't each other's competitor that they're each other's colleague you know the way we do the way papers get published the way grants get funded all of that stuff is like ancient it's the is the the the structure that worked in the 17th century maybe but it doesn't work now it works very very much against science which is i think one of the better institutions on the on the planet
• 10:30 - 11:00 i mean science is why we are sitting here with you know lights and stuff like that empirical science but not it was it was it's always it's almost always flourished better when you know descent was was expected and in fact encouraged to have a central authority like the nih doing all the medical making all the medical decisions is kind of ridiculous very prone to political um positions that it shouldn't be taking in science
• 11:00 - 11:30 that adulterates the science oh yeah it's very very much i mean if you i mean we knew if we studied hegel at all that after the 60s there was going to be a swing back to a repressive government right i mean it just was gonna happen there was nothing you could do to stop it i don't think it swung farther than i thought it would ever go but we definitely got into it and and that's i mean the whole business of aids if you want to look at it as a in a big
• 11:30 - 12:00 picture aids is a hegelian you know it's the pendulum swinging back to the right saying less uh permissiveness you know people that don't pay attention to their grandmother's code of ethics are going to suffer for it all right and if you you can figure out all the little mechanisms of how that happened but you can also just look at it in the big picture and say yeah that was going to happen and now it's going to come a time
• 12:00 - 12:30 pretty soon when it's going to go back the other way hopefully the swings i'm afraid that you'll make them weak have some sex and enjoy it you know i i never i never stopped i didn't say i said those guys aren't going to tell me what to do with my personal life i mean and i'm not and i know enough about the details of it to where if somebody wants to debate me about it i can do it but and i would always try to be informed before i would make that decision but also just if you were just if you didn't know anything at all
• 12:30 - 13:00 about the science of biology and you just looked at it from a sociological point of view you should have been ready for the 80s is it going to happen it always does now hagel probably i think he he had the impression that the the oscillations get less and less it's sort of a damped pendulum you know it finally settles on something that's great i think he missed there i mean it it could it's it's chaotic it's it's like he had he had the wrong geometry it's gonna but it will go back and forth
• 13:00 - 13:30 and it will because that's the way that that is in fact it's probably important to to the success of any species that it that it try some you know experiments but it never goes too far from something that has survived right yeah i mean you can see it as sort of it's like a it's an evolutionary uh standard in a sense the idea that society will swing back and forth experimenting a little bit but
• 13:30 - 14:00 then returning across some line that's that has worked in the past you don't want to just keep going in one direction because you might just end up falling off a cliff you destabilize basic institutional control stabilize basic institutional control uh you mean as a in the in the course of history individual yes individuals can make radical adjustments in their own lifestyles institutions never do there's never been major institutions that make radical shifts because they'd be
• 14:00 - 14:30 shifting their power base the whole effort of an institution is to maintain its power and stability of power so anything that threatens that stability is considered it uh yeah i understand i would agree with that but i mean the institutions do go they have this this is this shifting sort of thing but they don't go very far very very small i try to stay out of that stuff my smell as best as i can but personally but it looks like this is peter doosberg right yeah inventing the aids virus
• 14:30 - 15:00 here's a man the fair-haired scientist who was considered a poster boy of of science right california scientist of the year in 1974 i think it was and now he's a pariah not in this house no but in in this state and in that university because when i filmed him in his laboratory three years ago the laboratory had no funding now he doesn't even have that laboratory i know they they have they've made it and he
• 15:00 - 15:30 was monitored him basically he was tenured yeah oh tenured and also the most one of the most brilliant people in i'm surely the most brilliant virologist possibly the most brilliant you know molecular biologists around peter is a very scholarly person in addition to being brilliant too he's very careful he doesn't say anything that he can't support or usually i mean you can catch him in a weak moment and he might say something against the board but he was a really well thought of guy too because of his ideas the whole field i mean in cancer
• 15:30 - 16:00 he's the guy that led him into the whole oncogene thing you know big research bonanza anybody who could order a little kit from some company and and our couple of technicians could be a cancer researcher because of things that peter opened up and then peter says no i don't think that's actually the cause of cancer and that made those guys a little bit angry and then he comes along and does the same thing for aids he said you know i think we're on the wrong track here and for some reason you know the second time it was almost
• 16:00 - 16:30 like nobody even had to argue with him oh it's just peter again ruining our fun telling us that all this easy research stuff that we we know we can do now for years and the american people will pay for it that we can't we're not that we shouldn't be doing that and peter did that again he did that twice we need a lot more peters we don't have enough people like him and i you know the system doesn't really that it doesn't work it doesn't work
• 16:30 - 17:00 peter has been marginalized the media will not uh quote him without having a challenge quote yeah there was a time when whatever you said was like any other major scientist would have been accepted on its face value now he is considered the controversial they always preface the controversial you know oh yeah yeah ex-professor oh yeah nature states and just over and over again if peter duisberg can be shown to be an idiot then hiv causes
• 17:00 - 17:30 aids that's that's what the argument comes down to in in a lot of the media it has nothing to do with they don't talk about you know the issues at all nobody has ever come up with with the arguments that need to be brought up to decide whether hiv has any effect on anything but let's just look at a few of those arguments for for a few moments if if they are right they meaning the nih nci gallo
• 17:30 - 18:00 falci if they're right then their predictions should be right also that we would have a pandemic worldwide an epidemic in america an infectious disease sexually transmitted that hetero and homosexual equally be susceptible to that's their first argument based upon that everybody got terrified you mean we could get sex have sex and get aids and die then we chil put the big chill
• 18:00 - 18:30 on promiscuity in any form and then we started making accusations about who caused this and then started blaming has any of those initial predictions come true well hiv according to the cdc if you look at the and this is anybody can buy the the the annual medical yearbook from britannica 39 bucks or something like that and look in there and see there's always an article in there about aids and it's used there's somebody from cdc giving a
• 18:30 - 19:00 number saying here's the number of north americans infected with this virus the articles usually preface i mean the headlines is hiv spreads into some new area right spreads into heterosexual spreads into women spreading into teenagers but the number has always been the same since they started measuring it and estimating the number of north americans infected by this virus it has remained constant at approximately 1 million for 10 years that is not an epidemic no it's okay
• 19:00 - 19:30 this is right they had to drop it because they had realized all the false positives were ruining we're starting to really mount up when they got into a into a population that did not have a lot of positives and then the false positives become predominant and you know what this is the craziest thing i've ever i cannot believe this when you catch a find a kid like a 19 year old boy from montana is joining the air force he turns up hiv positive and he's not been around the block too often nobody's ever bothered to check his mother
• 19:30 - 20:00 to see if his mother is also hiv positive in spite of the fact that we all know that if a mother is hiv positive there's a 20 to 30 chance that all of our offspring will be right i mean everybody accepts that but for some reason they can't see the simple reverse of that and say wait a minute this kid in montana who's come raised on a farm or something who's hiv positive probably didn't get it from you know hanging out in the bath houses in l.a he got it somewhere why don't we just
• 20:00 - 20:30 look at his mother and see if he got it because all you need is about 10 or 15 mothers of 19 year old boys that have hiv and did when the kid was born to blow that theory right out of the water no one's ever done that work i don't understand why i contacted the cdc and i asked them did you do blood workups on all the people that you claimed were included in the aids figures from day one the answer was no no they didn't about 25 of those figures were based
• 20:30 - 21:00 upon symptoms then i said yeah i presumed as a presumed diagnosis of hiv that was just like and i said but if if you're presuming it's a hiv hence aids you must presume then that you have a gold standard nothing else could have caused the same symptoms and i said there are at least seven other [Music] friendly fun yeah and i said there are at least seven other diseases that have the same identical symptoms of aids such as
• 21:00 - 21:30 tuberculosis and malaria and and as and also cytomegaloviruses advanced age and tertiary syphilis and i was going through some of the diseases i had found that have this and they kind of shrug their shoulders and didn't address the issue at all they just avoided it then i asked about africa and i said no and in this documentary there's five countries in africa that have that you will see where doctors who spend much of their life in africa their
• 21:30 - 22:00 whole life as professional physicians in africa haven't seen a single case of babies right no they have to think it's a big joke i mean it's a bad joke but it is in the epicenter they're saying yes we have malaria we have tb and they're not being treated because we're not getting any money and they can be prevented and we could cure these people we don't have fresh drinking water they're drinking and you'll see in the film people drinking right out of septic water i mean you'll see human debris right on the water they scoot it aside and drink
• 22:00 - 22:30 the water and then they get parasites and they get diarrhea well if you drank out of infected feces water you're going to get diarrhea and you're going to get tuberculosis in that environment and you're malnourished yeah and you're going to have a dry non-productive cough lose about 10 of your body weight and you're going to be classified as aids and he says but if we give money for aids then suddenly you'll see these new cars driving through the the you know the highways here with loads of condoms
• 22:30 - 23:00 and pamphlets yeah but not a single antibiotic to help anyone with tuberculosis or aids or with uh the world health organization has totally messed up so i mean following the lead of the nih they've i mean and those things the article i read this article about it was a year ago i think in nature that just i could not believe that it was in there it had about about 10 10 or 15 doctors with their names on it they study the prostitutes in um
• 23:00 - 23:30 see some little eastern african country right above liberia i forgot the name of it's a coastal country they had gone there five years before and found that 75 of the prostitutes were hiv positive they predicted if they came back in five years half of them would be dead right so they come back in five years and there's no bodies to count there's no dead prostitutes to to do autopsies on they're still hiv positive according to their tests which there's cross-reactivity with all kinds of things and their conclusion in the paper was
• 23:30 - 24:00 that when when that should have told them right there i said wait a minute hiv doesn't seem to be hurting these people the conclusion was these people have got a this is in nature a special strain of hiv which number one does not cause any disease number two it protects you from the strains that are rampant throughout africa that do cause disease and we ought to study these people further because we might be able to develop a vaccine out of this that that was published in nature and
• 24:00 - 24:30 and it is on its face i mean even a sixth grader i think looking at the logic there would say wait a minute these guys they the emperor has no clothes here there's some there's something serious wrong with the mind of these people you know they they come in with a conclusion and they just won't ever examine it they don't and when they see direct evidence that their conclusion is wrong they just make up some ridiculous thing like that and the who gives them money to come back there and you know they
• 24:30 - 25:00 probably have nice hotels on the beach there but it's and and doctors like to go on little vacations to collect blood things like that which don't take a lot of time and then take it back home and study it for all year and when they said that it was remember about four years ago they said that uh aids is now becoming an epidemic in the black community and that all these uh black women heterosexuals also that's when it started to make its move it they suddenly became heterosexuals but they said it was black
• 25:00 - 25:30 heterosexual so i went into the hospitals in connecticut in pennsylvania and started contacting hospitals around the united states not inner city hospitals regular hospitals couldn't find any cases of aids or hiv infected babies i went to hall hospital in brooklyn which is exclusively inner city very depressed poor people and a lot of intravenous drug users and i spoke with one of the in fact i spoke with several of the physicians
• 25:30 - 26:00 including one of the head of pediatrics and the woman said yes we have a lot of women who come in here who are iv drug users they're malnourished they've got tuberculosis they are they would normally be dead if we didn't get them off the street and give them some treatment because normally drug drug users who are heavy mainline they die you know they've always died you know this is they're not in optimal health and she said yes the babies will be positive and most are black so hence they take one hospital
• 26:00 - 26:30 and they make all the statistics from that hospital as if it related to all the blacks in america we are dealing with less than hundredth of one percent of blacks in the total country but you make that suddenly represent a population group and how you manipulate that statistic by not showing that it's all hospitals and it's all blacks and that these are iv drug users suddenly the iv drug user becomes representative of heterosexual transmission yeah i mean i mean
• 26:30 - 27:00 i can't understand why no one's challenging this i well you know i've been challenging it but not real loud because this is the first time pbs has come into my house and said hey what do you think about this you know i've had to fight really hard you know to get anybody like usually i'll go to go to a i mean until this year when things are slowly starting to change i think people are starting to realize this is serious and these guys have been have been have got big woolen bags over
• 27:00 - 27:30 their heads or something they've been fooling us they know you know the people that are age researchers now are getting neurotic if you ask them any questions there was a time when i first started asking questions so that all i wanted was where are the papers just tell me the papers that you read that convince you that hiv was a cause of age because i need to reference those papers in some of those i was working on a test for hiv with pcr and i needed to write a little report to the nih and say here's the progress we've made and the first line
• 27:30 - 28:00 of it was hiv is the probable cause of aids and i thought that was true this is before i got into involved and i said what's the reference for that quote and i looked for it for about two or three years and i never could find it and by the end of two years i'd ask everybody at every meeting that i'd gone to that talked about aids i'd ask you know ever i'd look through every computer database there is no reference there is nobody who should get credit for that statement and that's a pretty weird situation in science where getting credit for a discovery is the most
• 28:00 - 28:30 important thing in your life as a scientist you want your work to be associated with you especially if it's got to do with something that's so important in the world that they're spending billions of dollars on it we ought to know who was it that should get credit for pointing out to us that hiv was the probable cause of eight and probable is not a very powerful word but there is no such person there is no paper there's no group of papers they can say well it's in there somewhere but it's not in there somewhere gallo couldn't find it gallow wouldn't talk to
• 28:30 - 29:00 me but montagne couldn't find it for me martinier said why don't you after first they say look at the cdc report okay they're talking about the bulletin of mortality and morbidity that comes out every couple of weeks that's not a scientific publication in the sense of here's the data here's the arguments here's the conclusion that's just a little thing that goes to doctors and say when you see somebody come into your office with this kind of symptoms you report it to us because it's possibly this or that kind of thing it's not a scientific thing it's not what you the guy that wrote that that bulletin that month doesn't get the nobel prize for
• 29:00 - 29:30 having discovered that hiv is the probable cause of aids right i mean it's just it's it's ridiculous to quote that thing and then he's i said i told him i said i know i read that i don't think that was very i mean i'm talking about where did science come by the notion you know who came who brought that up who who showed it to us who explained it to you where did you come up with the idea he said well there's this siv stuff and i said yeah that was last month we've known this for a long time who is
• 29:30 - 30:00 responsible for us knowing it don't we want to know that person's name he walked away i figured that was the last person i ever had so i asked a whole lot of people in that that two or three years when i was certain at first that there must be an answer wasn't it i mean you know i was in a different field slightly i figured the virologists had that one taken care of but they didn't there wasn't a soul and there still isn't and the more you ask of now you ask if you can get thrown out of a dinner party i mean you sit around if you go to some
• 30:00 - 30:30 virologist's house and start talking about questions like that or even you know people that aren't virologists people that are just ordinary people that are completely ignorant of the details will get mad at you if you start talking about the fact that aids may not be caused by hiv just say something simple like it may not be caused because i can't find any evidence that it is uh these people that are being being treated with azt a fairly lethal drug if you take enough of it they may be taking the drug that's killing i mean you think
• 30:30 - 31:00 the oklahoma bomber is a bad guy right there's nobody in the united states that doesn't think the guy that kills 200 people in oklahoma for no good reason you know shouldn't be sentenced to death probably i think we all agree if he did it he ought to be killed now is it not criminal just as bad and maybe worse just then it's a whole lot of other people i mean these people we are there there are people dying just because of azt i mean that's that's proven in big
• 31:00 - 31:30 studies big studies like the concord study the conclusion of the concrete study was this stuff is not good for you you know the little skeleton on the little crossbars crossbones the you know the skeleton and crossbones on on the bottle says probably wouldn't be a good idea to take this stuff unless you've got a good reason to now there i would say that probably if you you know they've been i don't know how many of the people who have died so-called of aids have actually died of azt because it certainly would wreck your immune
• 31:30 - 32:00 system to take that stuff for a few years it's like if you started taking any other chemotherapeutic agent for the rest of your life it would be that agent probably that killed you you know when you give chemotherapy to somebody with cancer you give them a round of it for maybe 14 days or a few days hopefully you're not going to kill the patient you're going to kill the cancer patient's going to survive but you don't keep giving it to him until he dies because he certainly will and azt is just like those things it's a little more lethal than most of the anti-cancer things that
• 32:00 - 32:30 people take for that everybody knows that those things you wouldn't want to just keep taking them until you died why would they i mean how can somebody say take this drug it's not making you well by the way it's making you feel terrible but you just we don't have anything else to give you and and this is going to cost you eight thousand dollars a year and uh someone someone postulated that the azt would stimulate t cells and then it was shown that uh it did not stimulate t
• 32:30 - 33:00 cells that it was caught in a healthy way that it was causing the body to have a hyper immune reaction i didn't know somebody thought it was going to stimulate t cells i thought they figured it's going to kill that virus because it's going to terminate dna reproduction but that's what it does and it certainly does that and it does that quite well in a lot of places that are not viral i mean it does that in normal immune system any rapidly growing tissue just like any other chemotherapeutic type agent hypothetical situation
• 33:00 - 33:30 how many let's assume for a moment that hiv is the cause of aids just for arguments okay how many hiv cells are there generally compared to healthy cells you mean how many cells are infected by the virus in somebody that's that fairly yes the numbers vary wildly around you know all kinds of i i wouldn't ever i mean there used to be a time when people said one out of 10 to the fourth then they went to when i attended there are some papers that say one out of ten and one out of a hundred it's not like it's got them all for sure
• 33:30 - 34:00 and i don't think that that means it can't cause a disease because you know it could do something subtle and it might not have to be in every cell it's just that if there isn't any evidence for that and you know you well what is the benefit of killing a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand healthy cells to kill one six cell well if that one six cell had something property about it that was going to get you but has that been shown to be the case well if it was you know it's let's say you had a if you had a way of
• 34:00 - 34:30 if you if you when you kill when you try to kill cancer cells you kill a lot of healthy cells too it's not a very effective treatment but the argument is you're gonna you've got nothing else to do you're gonna try to kill the cancer hopefully it's more susceptible to the chemical than the healthy cells now in this case they have the same argument except for the fact that they say you're going to keep on using this drug knowing that it's killing your healthy cells until you die you're not going to take it for two weeks and then hope that you've killed
• 34:30 - 35:00 all the hiv and now you will be alive it's it's not like that they said no we're going to do the same thing that we do to cancer but we're just going to keep on doing it until you die and hopefully it's going to prolong your life well if it doesn't prolong your life what they look for is surrogate markers now you heard that term battered about surrogate markers means well it doesn't seem to do anything for the disease but it does every now and then do something for the level of cd4 cell that we measure or does something for this or that
• 35:00 - 35:30 not that anybody really knows whether you want more or less cd4 cells at any particular time in your life a lot of diseases cause cd4 to go up a lot of diseases cause them to go down nobody's even sure if a cd4 cell is always a cd4 cell just it's a marker on the cell at the time that they do this little counting procedure which is the stick of fluorescent tag on there and say the ones that light up have cd4 on the outside and we don't really know what those cells do the immune system is incredibly complicated an immune immunologists brains are not
• 35:30 - 36:00 nearly complicated enough to deal with it we have these little you know their theories all over the place but no real competent immune immunologist would tell you that cd4 levels was a sufficient a surrogate market for anything until we know more about it but that's what they're using that's what the fda said yeah you don't have to show that it helps them these protease inhibitors the same thing don't have to show that it helps the patient you don't have to show a single life saved all you have to do is show some
• 36:00 - 36:30 little clinical indicator has changed in a way that somebody is hoping is going to make you better you know i mean around i took a group some of individuals who were hiv positive husband and wife they've both been intravenous drug users for about eight years put them on a detoxification program gave them a protocol under physician where they were using ozone vitamin c drips bitter melon several times a day liver flushes blood cleansing with a lot
• 36:30 - 37:00 of chlorophyll-rich juices and glutathione intravenous at the end of one year the woman cereal converted to negative and her t cells went from around 400 to 1200 the husbands were at zero both are ideally healthy there's not a single opportunistic infection not only that there's no indicator infections for instance they had cytomegalovirus they don't have it herpes they don't have it herpes 6 and mycoplasma don't have it so here's two people he's a construction
• 37:00 - 37:30 market right totally healthy she's totally healthy he has zero t cells she has a lot of t cells hers went up his went down and so clearly in this case the t cells were irrelevant i i mean you know nobody was counting those cells with those little the markers like cd4 cd2 cd8 that kind of stuff those had just become available to god leave i think is the guy that did it in los angeles when as aids came about okay he had about five patients
• 37:30 - 38:00 that were aids patients he he his his personal research interest was in using these new antibodies okay for okay eight that somebody in japan had made that could distinguish types of t cells i was just a research interest of his he wanted to see what what those would what they would tell him you know what they did and then they said they came up with names from like helpers and suppressors and that kind of stuff later but they really didn't know they didn't have any experience there was no experience there
• 38:00 - 38:30 was no log of whether how what a cd4 level meant before they before aids came along and then they decided low cd4 bad icd4 good go to the andes look at somebody who's never had an infectious disease how about you they don't have any cd4 cells at all they don't need them probably they maybe have a couple waiting i mean we don't know those those kind of i took a group of marathon runners who were terribly healthy never had any risk factors at all
• 38:30 - 39:00 vegetarian [Music] and they were running a marathon all of their cd4 sales were very low in fact so low even though they were totally healthy getting ready for the marathon that had they gone in with any kind of experience of a symptom and someone measured their blood they'd have said oh you're a candidate for aids so that and so there are many conditions cytomegalovirus will bring your tcv4 down epstein-barr virus ubiquitous in our population 90 the public have
• 39:00 - 39:30 herpes will bring your cd4 down malaria brings your cd4 down tb throws some clear down into the cellar so when something is so inaccurate to make that a gold standard that concerns me also it's ridiculous is what it is and it's it the question really is whether it should be considered criminal behavior on the part of people who have the public trust you know i mean it is criminal behavior to set off a bomb in a federal building is it criminal behavior just start
• 39:30 - 40:00 passing out poisons to people who have no real diagnosable diseases to babies for instance and you know the question i think we get often the details a lot in this thing and it has been probably the worst part of the from the point of view of the public there's only one real question that's relevant and it didn't you don't have to think about cd4 cells you don't have to think about all these other diseases with latin names and stuff you have to think about one thing who
• 40:00 - 40:30 is it and where is the paper that he wrote it down in who figured out that hiv was the cause of aids right who is that guy if there's no person who can stand up in front of a scientific body and say i'm that person or this team of us did that and here's how we showed it you know you don't have to get into the details you don't have to worry about the hemophiliacs in africa you don't have to worry about all the sort of subterfuges in a way that just keep
• 40:30 - 41:00 coming up to complicate what is really a very simple situation here we have a bunch of people that are definitely sick for some reason it's likely that their behavior was so so radically different than with behavior that had gone it was an experimental kind of behavior in a way it's not unu it's not unlikely that they would have some kind of problem some health problems people stop sleeping and eating people start using all kinds of substances instead of food and and and they're they're associating
• 41:00 - 41:30 with the world is getting more and more densely populated and we're spreading more and more diseases around it's not totally shocking that those people should come down with some some diseases that will kill them so we don't need to postulate that there was an infection going on since nobody actually did show that there was what's the fuss why do we have to even think about cd4 why do we have to think about you know all the details that they keep mercilessly bringing up why do we have to think about the whole genome of this little
• 41:30 - 42:00 organism that has not yet been shown by anybody definitively or even even really probably to cause a disease what is it what what is it about the humanity that that wants to go to all the details and stuff and listen you know these guys like fauci get up there and start talking you know he don't know anything really about anything and i'd say that to his face nothing the man thinks you can take a blood sample and stick it in an electron microscope and if it's got a virus in
• 42:00 - 42:30 there you'll know it he doesn't understand electron microscopy and he doesn't understand medicine and that he should not be in a position like he's in most of those guys up there on the top are just total administrative people and they don't know anything about what's going on in the bottom but the simple the simplest person on the planet can say well if we know that this disease is caused by hiv how do we know that who figured it out is it in the bible you know or is it in
• 42:30 - 43:00 the journal of the american medical association is it some place where we can all look at it that's what science is supposed to do it's empirical science that's what we do i ask um i think a more fundamental question if you're saying that hiv not you but rhetorically to the scientific community saying hiv is the cause of aids then are you saying that hiv by itself is the cause of aids they say yes
• 43:00 - 43:30 then i say show me where any study has ever been published where hiv by itself has caused any illness at all now you're saying it causes 29 illnesses including kaposi sarcoma and i say show me the evidence that in the absence of any other risk factor in the other antigen hiv causes kaposi's sarcoma think they've given up on kaposi's haven't they they can't you can you can propagate caposis in mice and you don't
• 43:30 - 44:00 happen to get hiv following it but i mean that and that one is probably an alkyl nitrite kind of a problematic even even gallow himself but that was originally what they hung the hat about oh yeah sure pneumocystis those are the one two and getting them assistant you know how you give pneumocystis to a rat if you want to put him on a low protein diet and give him some steroids for about six weeks and he'll get he'll get pneumocystis these guys are doing that same thing low protein diet and a lot of steroids i
• 44:00 - 44:30 mean all kinds of steroids and that's the known way i mean that's that's what the people that study pneumocystis that's the way they produce a rat model for pneumocystis it's it's it's it's like uh but you don't again like we i don't think it's worth my time to worry about the details in this thing because the really big fact is missing why do we think just because bob gallo gets up takes like sunglasses up and
• 44:30 - 45:00 says gentlemen you discovered the cause of aids that's all we have new york times article cdc report that's all we have that's not enough that's not enough to you know that is not sufficient to to like publish even a meager little scientific paper somewhere that isn't enough for scientists to believe some inconsequential fact about some star 50 light years away you know that's certainly not enough to treat at the cost of millions billions of
• 45:00 - 45:30 dollars a year and at the cost of a lot of lives and anguish and just destroyed you know lives have just been totally ruined by this thing on the basis of some flimsy little statement made by a guy who's known to be a crook in lots of other ways he lied about a whole lot of other stuff why we trust him there if he was a witness in a courtroom we wouldn't trust his testimony we've caught him in too many lies you don't trust him anymore we don't trust we don't trust gallop we don't trust him
• 45:30 - 46:00 nobody should trust gallo gals we caught too many times making up stuff okay who do we trust fauci thought she doesn't know enough to you know if that she wants to get on television with somebody who knows a little bit about this stuff and debate him he could easily do it because he's been asked i mean i've had a lot of people president of the university of south carolina asked about you if you'd come down there and debate me on the stage in front of the student body because i wanted somebody who was from the other side to come down there and balance my
• 46:00 - 46:30 because i felt like well these guys can listen to me but i need to have somebody else down here that's going to tell me the other side but eventually didn't want to do it they want to talk about it based based upon the hiv equals eight hypothesis they didn't give us the test now they didn't give it to us they sold it to us yeah who sold it to us who owns who gets gallow himself was getting quite a bit off but he had to give a lot back to to montagne when it was was finally proven that he stole the virus from montgomery in the first place
• 46:30 - 47:00 but montagne and the pastor institute are getting a dollar i think they're so every time that somebody gets an hiv test how's that is that testicles will it only identify this hiv virus if you get it twice in a row you have a pretty good chance of getting a plus one time and a minus the next i mean it is not it's nothing even if the virus were a deadly virus we wouldn't want to use that test to test it i mean that the wet that just was responsible that's why they thought
• 47:00 - 47:30 for a while that it was widespread in africa because it cross-reacted with antibodies to malaria you know that was the big and they didn't they never went back and said you know what we just made a mistake there because we couldn't find the hiv one in the first place when we looked up for it we looked for the organism and after we didn't find it so we found something else that was close enough 33 difference in sequence it's not closed at all not for retroviruses they found something else says it's hiv two we're gonna call this for a while now they just drop that whole thing they
• 47:30 - 48:00 don't look for it at all anymore you go into any kind of a of a like most a lot of places in africa the only kind of place you can get any medical treatment is that wh o hospital that's there for aids right so anything you come in there for you cut your knee with a machete you're an aids patient in some little book somewhere you know it's just and presumably you have hiv too so how in the world could scientists today legislators physicians public health officials
• 48:00 - 48:30 give any legitimacy to a test that's determining predictive of a person going to die of a condition and hence be put on almost insisting to put them on antiretrovirals when there's no gold standard if a test cross reacts with flu backed by vaccines malaria a lupus some arthritis conditions uh and connective cell conditions uh leprosy with all these other conditions it can cross-react with
• 48:30 - 49:00 then it's not a gold standard is it no it's not but you know i mean the the general public doesn't understand the idea of a gold standard here not neither do doctors physicians i mean you know you could you just pull the average physician away from his if his convention someplace in cincinnati or something and sit down and have dinner with him and talk to him about this kind of a situation and see how much he really knows like does he know what a western does does he know what a western blot actually does i mean is it how is it different from this elisa test does he understand how
• 49:00 - 49:30 analyze the test is operated does he understand anything about the statistics associated with the times when they've been tried no he doesn't and he doesn't give a damn either what he knows about is that when he has a patient he charges them a certain amount of money for every treatment that he does for every little prescription that he writes and he likes to have a lot of patience and the county health department also knows that due to the ryan white act for every single person who is diagnosed as having aids in the county twenty five hundred dollars a
• 49:30 - 50:00 year from the federal government so the county health department is actually pressuring doctors by their little subtle ways they're not coming over and beating them but don't miss an aids case you report it to us if it's if it's if it's a positive test on the hiv you report it to us because it's 2500 in our pocket every year i mean it's kind of a i mean there's plenty of reasons why they're doing it but you know one of them is not that doctors are intelligent
• 50:00 - 50:30 people in this particular i mean the doctors have been dumb the people that have taken the drug have been idiots also i mean they really already go to some doctor if he gives you a drug when you're not even feeling bad sometimes you start taking it and you start feeling worse or you start feeling bad for the first time keep on taking it because otherwise you're going to get sick and then you know you read about it it's not like you can't find out about azt
• 50:30 - 51:00 you know you can find out about looking it's not that hard to look in books like the manual and stuff i can see what is this stuff what's it used for why why are they using it here how did it get approved why is it that they would allow western blot to be used in the united states when it's been discontinued in england because it's worthless why is it that they're allowing a test that there's no two countries that have the same standard of how many bands it has to be cross compatibly reactive with it's two in one
• 51:00 - 51:30 country three in another and four in another country making it very easy to test positive one country a little more difficult in another country if they didn't allow them to charge so much for it i think there'll be a lot less use of it you know i i think that money is the main the only you know it's just like in political scandals follow the money trail figure out who's getting paid for this who's getting the money for those western blinds there's your person who's going to always come down on the side of yeah you got a confirmatory western blonde they call it
• 51:30 - 52:00 you want to do a confirmatory with my well let's see and those things are so hokey it's just ridiculous i didn't know they did they had not they don't even do them in england anymore no they not since 1992 it's it's totally it's and ask a doctor how it works the doctor who prescribed it says gotta have a western blot to confirm this a lie is a positive figure how does that work doctor uh sir how what what are they now measuring about me that's different from what they measured with the elisa test you wouldn't know he's not got any idea i'll bet you
• 52:00 - 52:30 there's scarcely 50 physicians in this country that know what a western blot really is they know when to order it and they know they get a kickback on it probably they make some money from having to take the blood or whatever and they make money after by prescribing azt they get money every time they turn around they get money and money is what makes it interpret the tests also well of course why is why is it that a person would get a vaccine shot like hepatitis or measles to create antibodies to get
• 52:30 - 53:00 an antigen reaction so the body will now have a memory cell so that when they're exposed in the future they will be able to call upon that immune response but when you have an antibody to the hiv virus it's always predictive of causing the disease it was because i would say they didn't have well enough developed a way to look for the virus itself at the very beginning they could only look for the antibodies to it at first pcr came along right
• 53:00 - 53:30 about the same time that hiv did and i was it was in that cetus that people started looking with pcr for hiv that was the only way to see it except for culture which was a long protracted procedure which a lot of times didn't turn up the the right the results there weren't very good contamination oh the cultures the whole method that hope that cell biology is a bunch of magic half the time and those culture you know that people that say they can do quantitative estimations of hiv from
• 53:30 - 54:00 cultures are just they're fooling themselves but i would say the the answer to the question is the antibody test was something they could quickly develop that's what that's what gallow did and sell and so he did and he said we're going to make a lot of money off this everybody in the world is going to have to take this test and find out who's going to die of the plague and and a lot of people did take it and he got a lot of money for it i mean there's all kind of people all the way down the line getting paid for doing something this is absolutely insane
• 54:00 - 54:30 i mean now where is john q public you know he's busy playing video games or something he's not not he's just asleep at the wheel he's not saying what are these guys trying to pull i thought antibodies when i was in high school we're good for you isn't that what cures your diseases and if we're going to make a vaccine for this thing it's not going to make antibodies to it wouldn't that be the way a vaccine would work so if you get if you take a vaccine for hiv don't you yeah anybody can smith it's
• 54:30 - 55:00 like ridiculous if we had a vaccine out there widely used and everybody that had taken he said well see how do you tell whether they don't have it or not but you're talking about a hundred thousand scientists who are making six billion dollars this year more than on cancer and heart disease combined you'll have probably five to fifteen thousand studies written and published over the next year and a half to two years on this phenomena everyone wants to be a part of that action why is it there's only a small handful of scientists like yourself and
• 55:00 - 55:30 and gilbert and duesberg who are willing to challenge this why don't you do that one thing that makes me different is i don't have to answer to anybody for money see i don't work for some organization like that tony fauci happens to be the head of a lot of people like berg had the intellectual integrity knowing that he was going to catch it knowing that they were going to just have a heyday pulling his grant he
• 55:30 - 56:00 went ahead and said it and he got he's basically he's been martyred okay they couldn't touch me because they weren't paying me they can laugh at me they can they can write stupid little articles in nature but they'll learn eventually to feel foolish about having done that i know that was going to happen duesberg knows that one of these days these idiots are going to have to face the music i hope that he's kept that in his heart all along i think he has he knows one of these days because you can see the insanity you
• 56:00 - 56:30 know and when they make stupid comments like john maddox one of these days john maddox is going to have to you know eat it basically because he's been just personally without matt max didn't know nothing about biology he doesn't barely know anything about physics i know more about physics than he does and considers himself a physicist he writes these dumb little editorials and stuff like that and then these stupid attack personal attacks on duesberg seem to be like scientifically justifiable somehow to the editor of the foremost scientific
• 56:30 - 57:00 what used to be the foremost scientific journal in english language it's not anymore in my eyes i still take the thing but you know i just look through there occasionally i don't read it with seriousness to find out anything does it bother that there there is censorship in scientific publications and even in the major media yeah it bothered me when nature rejected right after i got the nobel prize in chemistry man i can't even write a short four-page hypothesis about what might in
• 57:00 - 57:30 fact be a probable cause of aid a hypothesis that was a useful one because it suggested a way to disprove it or prove it you know that's what a hypothesis is for is to sort of suggest experiments that will try to disprove the hypothesis are if you can't disprove it you start slowly accepting it and and so lancet nature science those people we don't need a hypothesis directed at understanding what might be causing aids we already know
• 57:30 - 58:00 take and i call back the editors and say now wait a minute this is you gotta like in in in atlanta there's got a section called medical hypotheses that's that's a that's a type of an article you can submit i said this is a hypothesis this is a very good hypothesis not only can it be proven or disproven easily with rats or mice but if in fact it's it shows if it turns out that this does cause aids you'll have a model system an animal model system which would be worth billions of dollars to the pharmaceutical industry
• 58:00 - 58:30 you know it was a beautiful little hypothesis cute little thing it wouldn't have taken a lot of work to prove or just prove it but it wouldn't take any anywhere to publish it but not anybody would touch it you know i finally published it in some kind of i think genetically finally published it and it may or may not be the cause of aids but it doesn't the fact that it wasn't that you can't even assist it was it has it's it's a sort of a variation it's a i thought a clever one on on the idea that you have overloaded
• 58:30 - 59:00 your immune system these people if you think about time in terms of evolutionary time and you see the population of humans growing like it has the chances of you getting human virus today are a hell of a lot higher than they were say 10 000 years ago and they and and it goes up in a funny way if you are hanging out with us let's just say that there are an infinite number of retroviruses in the the world because they're changing so fast you couldn't really count them okay
• 59:00 - 59:30 so there's a total there's a number of retroviruses that's basically a function of the mass of human flesh human retroviruses and and and and also it's it's proportional to how much that flesh interacts as it starts to get dense more and more people are in your life you got more and more chances of getting retroviruses now they all might be harmless the chances are good that they are because they're just barely alive but if you hang out with a thousand people a year in a way that would maybe get
• 59:30 - 60:00 allow you to get some or most of their retroviruses and they hang out with a thousand people a year and they hang out with a thousand people a year you're hanging out with a fourth of the human race you're getting all the retroviruses from all over the planet now it might be that none of those things by themselves is going to heart hurt you but we know that some of them do grow in your immune cells right and they come in they come in at very low multiplicity you don't make an immune response every time you get a retrovirus inside of you somewhere but if you have a cell in your immune system
• 60:00 - 60:30 that has a retrovirus in it and you promote that to clonality because it's going to be a part of an immune response that cell then the retrovirus will definitely escape it will flower in a sense and it will then have to be dealt with by the immune system because there'll be enough of it showing in the blood that the immune system will go for it well now if you've got enough harmless but different retroviruses in your immune cells such that every time you may mount a new immune response which means you probably take about 500
• 60:30 - 61:00 different immune cells and make a million copies out of each one of them if you've got enough retroviruses in your immune system such that one of those 500 is going to have a retrovirus in it that you've never made an immune response to before you're going to have to make an immune response to it this time because it will if you make a million copies of the cell it's sure the retrovirus is certain to to flower to like make infectious bodies right then you have to make another immune response right it's called a chain reaction so it's all you have to do is have
• 61:00 - 61:30 enough retroviruses in your immune cells and we know that they can get in there right and we know that there's an infinite number of them out there and we know there must be some level of contact with humanity that will cause you individually during your life to accumulate so many different retroviruses in your immune system in the real risk group which is the people that were under the people that were exposing themselves to a lot of other humans and environments where viruses could be easily passed around if they were i mean
• 61:30 - 62:00 there's a whole bunch of things about those guys that was different than normal people once they got outside of the of the inner city homosexual iv drug using population and started sampling kids going into the army at 19 that's when the latency started going up fast because what they should have said uh-oh it's not got anything to do with hiv does it uh because the thing's not gonna change like that honest also it's very interesting that they predicted approximately a million north americans were infected in 1984 i think it was and
• 62:00 - 62:30 it stayed the same right on through 1996. that's not an epidemic the number of cases reported went up epidemically you know exponentially because the number of tests that was done went up exponentially i asked the first time i ever saw one of these cdc graphs that showed this thing going off the page you know i went up after that and i said how did you disentangle the the i mean did you divide the number that you've got here by the number of tests that were done i mean can we
• 62:30 - 63:00 believe that this line that you've drawn here about number of positive tests reported is that really indicative of of the spread of this virus is the virus getting is there being more of it or are there more tests if you divide by the number of tests you do you don't get any kind of a curve going up it's just how many doctors knew about hiv in 1983 too how many knew about it in 1985. say 500. how many knew how many knew about it in
• 63:00 - 63:30 1986. 40 000. so that's where the curve came from how many tests were done same thing how many tests they could've just said how many how much money did we make off of hiv this year and they could apply to that and it would look the same you know and they could say it's an epidemic because we're making more and more money off of it every year but does it bother anyone that we haven't had an epidemic that it's not in heterosexual community it's uh it's still in the same basic risk groups and the risk factors that caused it back then are the in ones that
• 63:30 - 64:00 are indicated today from all the people i've interviewed well the only person i know of has changed their mind on this issue is my mother she finally said carrie you know what you were right because i told her a long time ago i said mother quit worrying about my sexual habits okay there's a couple of of diseases that you can get by having promiscuous sex life they're they're both curable by penicillin and there's nothing out there that's
• 64:00 - 64:30 fatal and deadly and in fact sex is probably pretty healthy something we've been doing as a race for a long time you know it might be very unhealthy to go for long periods of time without it we don't know that but we do know that that the venereal diseases that are around can be cured now so what's the big scare you know and she's well hey i bet it's not shown to be so she's funny i mean i don't know anybody else who's actually come across i mean but i don't know everybody who's thought about it but i i i feel like a lot of people are starting to learn but
• 64:30 - 65:00 a lot of people have got will be just like it's simply it'll be like trying to get a catholic to give up catholicism because somebody has proven that uh they can't they can make a vacuum and inside that could not possibly be a god because it's nothing in a vacuum right now with a 17th century issue that the the church if aids is supposed to be an infectious disease then why does it not represent the same model of behavior as any other known
• 65:00 - 65:30 infectious agent well now it could be that it's absolutely unique i mean flossy wong style thinks so you know but i i just i found that kind of you know it's not it is not on the other hand necessary to have a plausibility argument for something that you've got proof for if i could show you that it did cause aids then you could ask me that question and actually i don't know why it does it that way but it does cause it because here's the facts you give that stuff to somebody who doesn't have aids
• 65:30 - 66:00 he gets aids or some experiment that showed you definitely that but you can't show me an animal model well i can't believe that can i because if every damn champ that's ever been injected with it you know it's lived in the chimp for a while trump gets rid of it makes antibodies by definition the champs got aids at that point if he starts to like if it's uterine cancer and it's a female chip he's now got aids but none of those chimps died of aids i mean they're still alive and happy there's no evidence but if there were evidence see
• 66:00 - 66:30 if they were this is one of the things i think i would if i could produce evidence that hiv caused aids it could cause it by some weird mechanism that we never heard of totally implausible but if you're saying biology it wouldn't matter if i had evidence but there isn't any evidence but if you're if you're suggesting for instance as fouch you suggested in gallon all the rest that it's sexually transmitted all right i went out and i charted for the last five years the prevalence and increase of sexually transmitted disease
• 66:30 - 67:00 chlamydia syphilis gonorrhea herpes and and papilloma and trigomonis i then charted in the same risk groups aids hiv infection here is sexually transmitted disease is going down yeah and here is aids going down yeah yeah that uh that's that's that's pretty good proof that it's that it's not a sexually transmitted disease isn't it it was i mean why was it a sexually transmitted disease why did they say it
• 67:00 - 67:30 was sexually transmitted first thing they said this is a homosexual disease right yeah so if you looked at you look back at the early kind of discussions of it it's probably anal intercourse right we don't want to talk about it at dinner but that's probably what it's caused by right so somebody in the cdc probably said you know what if that's the way it's transmitted then congress is going to say good we don't need those guys anyhow we're not going to spend a lot of money trying to cure him of this thing that's caused by their bad habit
• 67:30 - 68:00 right i mean it's just not going to be a big public outcry to do anything at all about it if it's just caused by needles or it's just caused by homosexual activities you're not going to really get a whole long sustained public outcry against it and nobody's going to want to spend 6 billion a year they're going to say well we really didn't like those people anyhow the pendulum swinging back toward the 90s great i can't think of a better solution to the homosexual problem than a disease that will kill them all i mean there
• 68:00 - 68:30 would be congressmen that would talk about that quietly not on television so the cdc had to say we can't say that we kind of say it's going to be it's got to be heterosexually transmitted there's no proof that it's transmitted at all at that point so why not just say oh it's heterosexually transmitted too it must be in semen and when they look for it and see me they didn't find it they had no evidence that it was sexually transmitted or any other way transmitted they just said it because that made it a play again the cdc needed one the cdc hadn't had a good plague since polio their funding was probably
• 68:30 - 69:00 going to be cut back if they didn't come up with one the guy that was the head of the cdc in fact wrote memos that have been obtained you know that where he describes this is hot stuff just like they're playing with this ridiculous ebola virus stuff trying to frighten people there that's like coop probably loves that he'd love to see ebola come into florida and start sweeping across the southeast he could take his uniform troops they get a barricade it could be just like in the movie you know those guys have got an agenda which is not what we would like them to have being
• 69:00 - 69:30 that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way they've got a personal kind of agenda they make up their own rules as they go they change them when they want to and they smuggly like tony fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people that pay his salary and lie directly into the camera i mean did you ever meet linus pauling i unfortunately did not bother to go down there just like i didn't go up to to see richard feynman until he was dead because there were two people i wish i
• 69:30 - 70:00 just said hi just like shake your hand because you're cool people i knew i knew linus pauling for a long time and i found it interesting that of all the nobel laureates in the united states and around the world he having two unshared i'm not aware of any other american to have two unshared nobel prizes was never respected again by mainstream medicine or science
• 70:00 - 70:30 when he supported that vitamin c could cause an improvement in people with terminal cancer and i watched i watched all this funding dried up even though he was one of the founding members of the national academy of science he couldn't even get a grant from them and it took him almost 14 years just to get a mediocre grant to study cancer even when the mayo clinic uh supposedly reproduced his results that he obtained at the veil of levin hospital in scotland where a doctor he and dr ewan
• 70:30 - 71:00 cameron took a group of terminally ill cancer patients divided them in half gave half 10 000 milligrams of vitamin c every day of their life another group got a placebo and there was a statistically significant improvement in people receiving vitamin c they turned around did it at the mayo clinic but they didn't use the same criteria polling says don't use people who have chemotherapy to knock the liver out they use people with chemotherapy polling says you have to give vitamin c every single day they didn't
• 71:00 - 71:30 and so it was not the same study yet they published it saying they duplicated his work then when they went to publish the results of what is a terribly flawed study they didn't even give him the courtesy of saying here's the results would you like to examine it and all he was given was a letter to the editor of new england journal medicine long after the study and i saw at that time how you can take one of the best and brightest in america much as they did our greatest living scientists of this century who was destroyed dr andrew ivey
• 71:30 - 72:00 there was never a scientist who's been more cited in the scientific literature than dr ivy he was he was he was a jurist he was a physician he was a scientist he was everything but he supported corbison and he supported corbyson in a correct manner and they destroyed him and that's been shown now i'm looking at what the media has done to you projecting you as a flippant
• 72:00 - 72:30 drug-taking drug-taking womanizing a person who hasn't who everyone has to wonder how you even got through college let alone got a nobel prize and i'm thinking my god haven't we learned haven't we learned from andrew ivey and linus pauling and peter duisberg what they'll do to the best and brightest well you know you can't expect the sheep to really respect the best and the brightest they don't know the difference really i mean i i like humans don't don't get
• 72:30 - 73:00 me wrong but basically there is a there's a there's a vast the vast majority of them do not possess the the ability to judge who is and who isn't a really good scientist i mean that's a problem that's a main problem actually with science i'd say in this century because science is being judged by people and funding is being done by people who don't understand it people i mean i'm sure a lot of people could sit down with linus pauling and not realize that he was a brilliant man
• 73:00 - 73:30 i mean most people wouldn't know him from you know somebody who who uh you know just a little taller or something nobody knows richard feynman or richard did finally showed a few people that you know when he said you know here's the o-ring here's some cold water see what happens that at least you had i mean but most people don't understand what a brilliant guy that feynman was there's a a handful of people at any one time in the world who are capable of really doing innovation innovative things and
• 73:30 - 74:00 usually those people turn out to care for their fellow man you know they respect them in a way although they don't think that those that most of the people the great masses of people really are going to be able to understand what it is they're doing you know it's got a before and before the transistor radio most people didn't really understand who john bardeen was right john bardeen didn't know who paul john von neumann was who was 50 miles away he needed those transistors really bad with xenia
• 74:00 - 74:30 i mean there's not a lot of specialized scientists are not you don't expect everybody to understand what it is you did i i don't expect you my you know my mother to really understand how clever pcr was i just i can't explain to it but it was only a few people you know that really could see what what a clever idea that was at first now everybody says well it's a wonderful thing because we hear about it all over the place but but see what i'm saying is
• 74:30 - 75:00 if you're one of these people like linus pauling i'm sure linus did not expect to be appreciated you know i i find the the scorn of the masses to be sort of a you know they they i mean if if they love you too much you're probably doing something wrong don't you think i mean the guys that if they if they're willing to elect a president who lies right right in front of him and says i just put it in my mouth i didn't inhale it and and by the way mr
• 75:00 - 75:30 president it's illegal to have it in your mouth too whether you're inhaler or not you know but somehow some people say well such a clever way of getting around that issue what is he he's a real diplomat right he's a lion bastard is what he is but we elected him you know there wasn't a whole lot of other possibilities there never is it's but that's the kind of people that you don't expect them to know whether linus pauling would be you know linus's first paper about that business of ascorbic acid is all it took to convince
• 75:30 - 76:00 me just the theory he says look here's where we came from 20 million years ago we're eating the tops of green plants the little leaves we're doing it all day long it's a very it's not a very rich substance it's got a lot of vitamins in it and we don't cook it so to destroy the vitamin c now we don't make our own we got used to getting it from those leaves we come back down the tree maybe we need it you know it it maybe we don't need it
• 76:00 - 76:30 because it's probably a good chance that you know you got to look into it see if you do because you change your diet drastically and the vitamin c is the one one of those things is you know the vitamin you cook your food and you lose it it's not stable to heat i thought it i immediately started taking vitamin c and it tastes pretty good you know and it doesn't hurt you unless you take if i take more than five grams a day i start getting diarrhea so i don't take any more but um the chance the facts the fact that it won't hurt you
• 76:30 - 77:00 and that there's a good chance that it does something that's here's this very some very smart people say it's very good for you and they have good reasons to say that i'd say it's worth the you know it's worth the money that it costs i take a lot of items just because it's a good chance that that our diet right now is not really optimal for our body it would be unusual if it were because we've changed our habitat completely and it takes a long time for biochemistry to catch up with animals they're fast you know they don't just sit in the same
• 77:00 - 77:30 spot all the time and we have to think about we're animals and we're changing our behavior all the time we might just need something from our last environment and that one seemed to me like pretty simple reasonable that that was a good idea that's all it took for me and then he had all kinds of data but if he just said take this poison here until you die because i think you need it i mean that's what the cdc pulled off take this poison here until you die
• 77:30 - 78:00 because i think otherwise you might die what do you say to the american public about stopping believing in the myth of aids well in the first place i would say don't think of it as a belief science isn't a set of beliefs it's not like methodists and catholics those people can believe whatever they want to and they say i will believe it i'll stick by my story till i die right i'm a methodist pure and simple that's okay for that kind of stuff scientists
• 78:00 - 78:30 are not supposed to believe anything scientists are supposed to have some evidence that leads them tentatively to some conclusion or to some action they're supposed to be able to show that to other scientists any interested person in fact who's willing to understand what it is that was used as evidence should be able to say yeah i agree with that that makes sense using rules of inference that we've used for since aristotle okay and there's not it's not complicated at all you learn it in the
• 78:30 - 79:00 sixth grade most scientists forget it pretty quickly but science is not a set of beliefs i mean there's only one belief in science that has you have to retreat to commitment at a certain point you have to say we do believe that if a implies b and b implies c then a implies c and we do believe that if p is a proposition which is true then not p is a proposition that is false that's all we have to believe in science the rest of it is tentative awaiting further study and almost every single thing that is
• 79:00 - 79:30 considered to be a fact in the 20th century in another 200 000 years will look very silly you know if you just think picture yourself being a real bright egyptian mathematician and thinking that you really understand math and then see what you'd look like from the point of view of somebody in the year 2000 did you really understand math nope was any of it right nope it was all wrong in just a little way here a little bit there a little there were things wrong with it i wouldn't be surprised if 200 000 years ago from now
• 79:30 - 80:00 aristotelian logic turned out to not be you know it's already starting to look kind of funny because of quantum mechanics sometimes things are true and not true at the same time some things sometimes affect precedes cause time isn't quite what we think it is either nothing is certain in science there are there's no room for beliefs beliefs are for people beliefs are for things where you want to have a belief that helps
• 80:00 - 80:30 bolster your courage in something in order to act so that's what religion's for you know that there you say i'm going to believe in something that's going to help me to get through this mess out here that i've got to get through and i'm going to do that because it's useful for me to believe that and the harder i believe in it the more powerful i get in a way especially if i want to start be bossing a lot of people around and i can get them to believe the same thing that's a belief the difference between that and science
• 80:30 - 81:00 was established clearly at least in england in the 17th century by the royal society the founding of the royal oil society is still around now they probably don't don't remember this that same bunch of that people won't accept my papers anymore but they said there's a big difference between empirical science empirical science is something that can be done in front of other people you can show it on a stage i can do my experiment in front of anybody who is interested in seeing the results and we should all agree on the results we don't have to
• 81:00 - 81:30 worry about why you know we really don't we don't ever if you if you why long enough you'll always come to a big because and you won't be able to always know but you can know what you showed you can say if i take this ball and i roll it down an inclined plane it rolls down at a certain rate it has to do i think with some kind of force we're going to call gravity but i don't have to really know why it does i can just show you it does every time we can make cannons that will drop balls on people's heads with the same principle
• 81:30 - 82:00 it works i can show you that it works by making the can and i can show you by repeating the experiment i don't have to know why and i don't have to believe in balls because i can throw one at you you know i don't believe in them they are there because i can pick them up i have them in my hand i don't believe in science i don't believe in polio do you believe in polio i mean we are under the impression that there was a disease called polio that it caught and it caused certain then it got into
• 82:00 - 82:30 your brain it was terrible for you and some people died from it we have evidence for it but we don't believe in it it's not in some church somewhere and if somebody came along 100 years from now studied the whole thing and said you know what there wasn't ever a disease called polio it was a mistake it was something else it wasn't a disease it was just you know i mean then you change your your mind about it in science you're always ready to have your favorite theory proven wrong and if you're not you shouldn't be doing science in fact most of the people that
• 82:30 - 83:00 are doing science shouldn't be there children should not be encouraged to go into science by the way children should be encouraged to avoid it unless they just can't stand not being scientists it's not a wonderful area where everybody is happy and and heroes there are very few of us they get the chance to go over to stockholm and pick up a prize it's a hard job there are a lot better jobs for people that have belief systems i mean if you want to believe in something you can be a lawyer
• 83:00 - 83:30 you can believe in a law there's a lot of places in law where you can believe it's okay you can be in church you can be a church person you can believe there you can be lots of other professions well you could be in real estate where you believe things you don't do too well in real estate if you use too strict a belief system but science is a place for people that just are too ornery to believe in anything they say show me show me why you think this is one way and i'll try to show you another way and
• 83:30 - 84:00 we'll both do this and we'll enjoy doing that we'll debate about what is the the actual outcome of the experiment we'll do it over and over again until we all agree then we'll move on to the next step make some gun powder something like that make cars you know we don't make we don't believe in cars it's not a belief they're there you can get run over by one you don't have to believe in them we believe in things like god you know
• 84:00 - 84:30 the catholics have sort of forgotten that and that's why they sort of took a hit by science it's just the last century it's a belief thing it's faith that's totally different from science it's it's silly to hear people saying you don't believe that hiv causes age you don't believe that i mean it's just a word but it's a very very important distinction i think that that you know that's why it and it's becoming a very emotional kind of thing because people actually they get personally committed
• 84:30 - 85:00 to what really is a body of evidence that can be analyzed you know by lots of people and at this point there's so much of it out there nobody can really analyze it all of it but nobody can write a review of it that says hiv causes aids because of this you know if a post doc were to write a review of their literature that showed without much doubt that hiv was the cause of aids that guy would be famous now there's a hundred thousand guys out there who've had the opportunity
• 85:00 - 85:30 it's ten years has passed we've been waiting for this star postdoctoral fellow to distinguish himself forever and get a lifelong grant from tony fauci but he hasn't shown up no one has bothered to write a definitive review any journal would take it that right there proves that hiv does not cause aids by induction then what have we seen the photograph in the photograph have we photographed aids do we have aids in a test tube
• 85:30 - 86:00 because if we haven't proven hiv causes aids then can we show that what we're calling hiv is an actual organism nobody has actually purified hiv there's no little bottle of hiv anywhere on the planet that's just got hiv in it they have cell lines that they think that it's growing in there are a lot of people who think it's not even there at all but i mean i i wouldn't doubt that it's there i i think anything you can imagine is there somewhere you know but whether it's there or not
• 86:00 - 86:30 is not the question the question is does it do anything with regard to these set of diseases that we've now called aids and it's it's such it's such a bit of me it's such a it's a it's a tangled web of madness by calling all those things aids by just making it more and more and more complicated to figure out what causes what see it's like that's not the way science works it's a real bizarre thing to have a hundred thousand people being paid
• 86:30 - 87:00 to do something that's strange to take a whole bunch of diseases to lump them all into this one big thing this great i mean pretty soon there won't be anything that's not aged if they keep going at the rate they're going you say well let's see what'll happen in 100 years how many diseases will be on that list they put uterine cancer on there that was stretching the imagination quite a ways wasn't it throw uterine cancer in there as one of the indicator diseases you got uterine cancer and hiv antibodies you got aids honey and we need some more females by the way
• 87:00 - 87:30 with aids don't we what do you think of them giving social security benefits uh disability cards for automobiles uh free play tickets free bus rides free meals to people who test positive for the hiv antibody and show any indication like night sweats but will and by the way then a person never has to work again for the rest of their life and in england they give them a free car to drive and if here with cancer with
• 87:30 - 88:00 alzheimer's and with major disabilities that clearly are disabilities they don't give you anything yeah i i've heard about all that stuff and it is very difficult to understand from the point of view of the so-called the uh the neutral observer why that would happen but if you look at the details of it you'll find out why because this guy gets some money this guy gets some money and this guy gets the money this guy gets they give me a free parking sticker down at the uh
• 88:00 - 88:30 the parking lot by the scripps pier because i'm a nobel prize winner if they did i'd take it and i would i don't know whether i should have one or not but i like to surf down there and i like to park in that a lot but i mean people will take things if you give them to them and if the process of of giving out the money always you everybody's always skimming it right i mean the government hand out things if somebody's always making money off the process of giving it away don't you think i mean and it's it's it's become such a just uh
• 88:30 - 89:00 the issue of this ridiculous thing is this whole it's like it it it may be that we'll never understand how we got into that because it's so complicated but we got into this mess i mean it had it was a reaction to the 60s and the early 70s can we afford to be honest about aids is it too late for us to extract ourselves because of liability
• 89:00 - 89:30 and acknowledging that there may have been medical genocide committed the first time i heard charlie thomas say this i thought thomas you're being a little bit too rude there but i started thinking about it and i never said the way to get rid of aids is to stop funding it just stop every everything that's called a cold aids research somebody tries to get a grant for aids research say we don't do it anymore we don't have aids if you want to study pneumocystis care nia we'll maybe look at your paper and see
• 89:30 - 90:00 if you've got you know something to say about that you want to study any one of those diseases by itself try to cure it we'll talk about that but we're not going to talk about aids anymore just like in the 17th century they decided to stop talking about god in science it was too complicated it started a war you know i mean you get catholicism gets confused with science you have trouble and i think here we've got similar kind of problem we've got a religious phenomenon almost a large segment of the population that has very strong opinions
• 90:00 - 90:30 about something and beliefs right i mean that's a religious kind of a thing and it's tangled up with science it needs to be untangled the way to untangle it is to use the analytic kind of method that we used before pick them apart don't talk about this overall disease called aids say have you got pneumocystis caronia have i got pneumocystis scarring that's a question we can answer we know that organism we can detect it what do you do about that you know
• 90:30 - 91:00 that's that's a reasonable question but whether or not you have aids or not is not because the definition of aids is so complicated that nobody can understand it you know and it's like it's the same kind of thing that was it's like it becomes when beliefs get tangled up with facts matters of fact become matters of religious kind of significance where somebody gets mad at you for asking him a question in a scientific meeting or says i'm not we're never never going to have kerry mullis at the european union of whatever kind
• 91:00 - 91:30 of scientist or they put it in nature because he came in there and had the audacity to tell people that it might not be that bad to have sex that aids might not be something you get from sex that i don't see any evidence for it is all i said i don't see any evidence for it why you can't tell young people that we'll never have you in europe again i mean that was actually that sort of kind of thing see that's a religious thing that's what you that's what you walk into a a
• 91:30 - 92:00 coffee house in the 17th century in england and say i don't think we should uh worship the pope here anymore i don't think we should pay any attention to him some people would get get mad at you that's religion same thing with aids it's religion go up to los angeles to some of these meetings like any where there's a whole bunch of of guys that are that are that have it have had aids type diseases or have friend friends die and say i don't really think there's such a thing as age i think you guys are suffering from the results of a lot of
• 92:00 - 92:30 things that you have done yourselves it's not like god just smiled on us and not on you and dropped the virus on you it's because you've been not eating well you have not been sleeping very much and you have let yourself get run down you've also gotten into a panic about the whole thing you've fallen for their stuff man you've taken their poison science is a big institution and most of the people there aren't scientists what do you think of all these people now who are willing to take what sometimes are
• 92:30 - 93:00 very brilliant minds and apply it specifically just to helping a major industry market a product even when the results of what that company need do not always match the actual science behind it i mean the you're talking about the marketing people the marketing people well you got to be a little cynical to be a good marketing person probably you know i mean a little bit so i and i but i don't think i'm a
• 93:00 - 93:30 libertarian in that regard too i think let them do it it's not you know they're not forcing you if you're dumb enough to watch that box over there and do what it says to do then that's your problem it's not mine and i think it's all right for people to try to you know suspend your good judgment for long enough to get your wallet out whatever i mean i think that's okay people should be subjected to marketing they shouldn't think that it's i mean what the most
• 93:30 - 94:00 people actually distrust marketing they see it just for what it is they don't realize that when tony factory gets up and starts talking he's marketing too they don't and that's what they really need to learn and i think come back go back to something you said about uh when you get up to give a lecture with people with aids in some of the age organizations they're willing to cut you to pieces oh a lot of them just get angry if you suggest that it's got anything to do with the behavior if it's possible that it's a behavioral thing you know i had those these guys lived
• 94:00 - 94:30 next door to me in berkeley long time ago and they were homosexuals and i used we played cards together out front a long time and then the bath house stuff started happening those guys started going over to the bath houses and and i was waiting for the heterosexual bath houses to happen but they never did i didn't go over there but i noticed over a couple of years that those guys got paler and thinner but that you know they're coming in at five in the morning you know take a little amphetamine go to work
• 94:30 - 95:00 don't eat very much come home at night head out to the bath houses i mean it was a place it was a fascinating place to be at that point that was a wonderful time in their lives and i mean i sort of regretted that i wasn't homosexual myself but i saw that those guys were sick you know i mean i could tell just by looking at them because i'd known them before they started doing that they weren't normal healthy males between the ages of 24 and 45. it was obvious to them i think that they were abusing themselves
• 95:00 - 95:30 i mean if i go two nights without sleep i know i've done something bad to my health my little cuts don't heal quite as well if i don't sleep and all kind of things everybody knows that those guys somehow decided when they started dying that it wasn't their lifestyle which was radically different from other people's that was causing it it was something else and then here comes fat i mean here comes gallo and mountain yay and the nih then that's right it's something else it's something you didn't have you're not responsible for it
• 95:30 - 96:00 you're just the beginning of it we're all going to get it and they liked that so much because they said we can go right ahead and do what we're doing we just have to do a few little things differently and then we'll be okay they they cling to that you know and and they think if you suggest that it's their activity the way they live their life that you're a homophobe or something you're some kind of an idiot there's something wrong with you there's some of them that aren't that stupid but you know there's a lot of them that are religiously associated with the notion
• 96:00 - 96:30 they believe in the notion that it is an infectious thing that will eventually sweep across the planet and kill everybody that's what they've been they've been hearing that and they like that better than the idea that maybe this experiment you know in a radically different style of life failed maybe there were some things in that lurking in there that weren't really going to work and it seems reasonable when you start doing a whole lot of different things
• 96:30 - 97:00 that something might just go wrong i mean it's a complicated system a whole bunch of you know people just quickly changing all their habits and starting to do all kinds of things that they haven't done generations before have you ever had a time in your life i want to add on to some i want you to go a little further but in a little different way have you ever had a time in your life where you really burned everything out you just couldn't stop whatever you were doing i mean if it was having sex or staying up late or drinking or whatever maybe for a week or
• 97:00 - 97:30 two weeks you just went on a real rip last week [Laughter] how did it feel yeah i i felt don't let me i don't even coke out of here okay yeah um my own my co-author on this book was in town for a week and a half and we just you know we spent a lot of time we'd work every day for about five and a half hours and then we'd play really
• 97:30 - 98:00 hard and by you know we really started with on cinco de mayo that weekend cinco de mayo we started around thursday and by monday i felt like we had just about got to the edge of death that if we went any further with that kind of a you know with no sleep no real food lots of tequila just you know crazy wonderful women just happened to be coming through all the time and it was a lovely time but i knew and david did too we got to the end if we'd go and push that any further it
• 98:00 - 98:30 would be really bad so i don't do that very often no wait i'm not finished yet all right that's the first part now let's say that we gave you hepatitis not once not twice but five times and then when you woke up in the morning before you had the cigarettes and the alcohol we gave you a handful of antibiotics let's say we give you a bunch of penicillin and then then we also gave you some rectal infusion of sperm which we know
• 98:30 - 99:00 is immunosuppressive and we also gave you every kind of drug imaginable ecstasy and poppers so you could keep having your erections and sex all night unless you just didn't have two or three sexual acts let's say you had five ten sexual acts per night but it didn't end on the day that you and your buddy felt it was gonna end you did that for the next two years every day i i would not expect to live through it i mean you know i i wouldn't expect to
• 99:00 - 99:30 live through even the minor incursions that i make into like you know ryan's living if i kept it up very long i know i can't if i go i could go without sleep for two nights and then i start bumping into things i can't start dropping because i know i'm i'm really i mean i don't mean going completely without sleep i mean like going to bed at 3 30 and waking up at six o'clock to go surfing that kind of thing that's not enough for me i need more than that i need to have you know a
• 99:30 - 100:00 fairly decent diet i think all the way well then where is the surprise of guys who did this for three and four years at the same level and more intense than you did and now they come down with one of these 29 or multiple 29 opportunistic infections i don't think where is the surprise those guys that live next door to me they i mean i talked to them they were they were i said you guys looking awfully pale aren't you out in the sun anymore the answer is no we're working or we're you know we're in the i mean on the weekends we're hanging out at the bath house and it's fun why don't you come over there
• 100:00 - 100:30 we'll show you but i mean i don't think anybody should have been really surprised that's that's that's the shock of the whole thing actually when you look back and say why did they think it was just some virus that this guy montene pulled out of the lymph node he could have pulled anything out of that lymph node it probably had a hundred different things in there that he could have identified just pulled out now why did anybody fall for that they wanted they wanted like hell to keep going what doing what they were doing you get you
• 100:30 - 101:00 get you know used to things that they didn't start all that stuff on one day they started a little at a time too you know they didn't all of a sudden one day say we're going to go from being like clean cut kids that get three square meals a day and you know but they just slowly started picking up more and more riotous kind of living and and it it you get used to things i guess and then i don't know somebody put the the suggestion out the cdc wanted you know they didn't want to have a plague
• 101:00 - 101:30 and it was a good you know any it looks like a nice possibility and they went for it remember the actor errol flynn yeah swatch buckler he was in uh you know robin hood yeah captain blood and yeah he died on his 50th birthday around his 50th birthday he was only 50 years old he was so burnt out so washed out that when the doctor who he died up in
• 101:30 - 102:00 canada when the doctor did an autopsy couldn't believe that he was alive for the last five years his liver was totally scrossed his heart was completely shot he had atheron arterial sclerosis he had it all and he looked about 90. now he drank every day he smoked every day and he lived a fast life he also did some drugs there's a good example of what would happen to a heterosexual
• 102:00 - 102:30 in a very relatively short period of time took him about 20 years to do that and so then you triple what he was doing and you can speed up the process we have a lot of models for uh in the heterosexual community for people who have destroyed themselves without needing a virus to do it we have a lot of things lifestyle show does so so now we say lifestyle's not a part of it and it always amazed me that everybody
• 102:30 - 103:00 bought that it was the easiest solution i mean the easiest explanation for those people who were starting to get all these diseases to accept because the other one would have said you maybe are going to have to modify your behavior now we don't know exactly what it is you're doing that's wrong but you might not think about you know dropping a few things and seeing if if if you know what is it that's making you sick i don't i don't i just can't imagine people that were doing that kind
• 103:00 - 103:30 of stuff that weren't aware that it was the things they were doing that were doing it and when i i mean it's so obvious to me when i go without sleep for two days that that's what's causing me to bump into things or forget things or or have a little sore on my finger that should have healed really quickly it didn't you know it's obvious to me when that happens but you know why not just look at all the other gays who were not living that kind of life who never got hiv or aids
• 103:30 - 104:00 well only two percent of the gay population tested positive for hiv raised less you know there's so many i think it's when you this this particular whatever it is you can't call it a hoax you can't call it a conspiracy you can't call it it's it's something that's so bizarre that to try to explain it to somebody they don't it's almost like they can't
• 104:00 - 104:30 possibly believe how bad it is how dumb it was how crazy that's why that's one of the reasons i think that gooseberry had a hard time convincing anybody at all because he was saying look every single thing here is wrong there's no evidence that you know there's plenty of reasons to doubt it there's just it's every bit of the data is is is is is wacky in some way all the conclusions are wrong all of them are wrong that's what i think that's when if there's been one little thing wrong
• 104:30 - 105:00 then it's easy to say well here's one little thing that's wrong here and people will deal with that a lot easier than the entire aids establishment is absolutely guilty of some hideous sins and everybody's been fooled everybody on the planet has been fooled by a handful of greedy people without any scruples and no brains that's hard to believe see it's like no it can't be my mother wouldn't go for it i said mother i've studied this really well
• 105:00 - 105:30 and i'm telling you there ain't no epidemic mom there isn't an epidemic there isn't anything out there that is causing people to die that's called hiv this is not no carry i read it everywhere i look i go you know and mother the entire medical establishment is wrong and i'm right now you can't possibly react gary they wouldn't do that they couldn't possibly be wrong every radio station you listen to every television station everywhere you turn there's somebody telling you that there
• 105:30 - 106:00 is an epidemic of some organism that is fatal and that it you get it from sex so how can you come in here and tell me that it's it do you think that it should be renamed dumb or dumber dumber dumber after the movie you know i think that some of those people really ought to be um you know there's a hundred thousand of them right yeah there's probably about half of those people are just too dumb to know what they've done the
• 106:00 - 106:30 other half of them have just been too dishonest they have not the heart or the reason or the testicles to say you know what we screwed up really bad and i i think we've got too many scientists anyhow we might just take those guys out alamogordo and drop another bomb out there just get rid of them i think that we're going to do that to the you know the guy that killed 200 people in oklahoma he was an idiot you know misguided but powerful he could
• 106:30 - 107:00 make bombs these guys are the same way they're idiots misguided and they're powerful and they wreak i mean they have been killing people right and left and and what the people they hadn't killed they think of all the suffering and misery they've caused just the fear of ages probably killed about a thousand people just just the fear you know you don't it doesn't make you feel good to think you might be getting a fatal disease all the time and worrying about it every morning is this cold the beginning is this flu the beginning of age you
• 107:00 - 107:30 know a lot of people with hiv are always worried every time they get any little disease they're worried sick about it and some of them probably end up dying just because they're worrying about it you know he worries it i mean it's not one of those things it's what bone pointing bone pointing yes it's sort of like bone pointing aboriginal quality of pointing a bone and condemning someone and that allows them to go out and die there's things that i can see there but i don't know how to talk about it
• 107:30 - 108:00 if you look at them long enough you say there's a lot of interesting stuff there and that's probably the way atoms look somehow like that and they go down infinitesimally in structure they don't you don't get down to any shiny little balls anywhere and and then just all the things that we really started with when we started trying to decide what matter was made out of turned out to not make sense in light of what we find out using those assumptions going in you know you come up with something like a neutrino well that's a cool little particle in it
• 108:00 - 108:30 no mass but angular momentum carrying the angular momentum of an electron well that's a really sort of interesting idea in it so we don't know anything and and and it's it's it's like not unlike i mean we're only here because we learned how to eat not because we had slide rules you know we're here because we know how to eat and mate and maybe bring up our young to where they can do that and and that's not
• 108:30 - 109:00 you know it's it's shocking to me that we know anything i mean that we can build a jet plane that can usually fly is an amazing it's got to do with we cooperate we have we have written language and i mean none of us could do that actually i couldn't even make a book you know i might by myself i couldn't make a damn coke can if i had to i don't know all the things you need to know none of us is very smart really we don't know anything much i know
• 109:00 - 109:30 a few things and you know a few things and all of us together you know it's it's a miracle we're here and i don't think it's the week anthropic principle kind of thing operating either i didn't go for that i think it's uh it's stuff that we just you know it's way beyond our comprehension that's why there's it that's why the religion is a thing that people do continually seek out they some people somewhere inside you know that it's a lot weirder than that
• 109:30 - 110:00 you know it's stranger i think some british guys it's like life the universe is not only stranger than we imagined but stranger than we can imagine and i think that sort of you know that is one of something struck me a long time ago as being yeah we're pretty arrogant to think that just by learning how to copulate and eat and raise our kids that we're going to learn about the the inner workings of the entire universe and when and when we get run out of information we just come up with something like the cause the you know
• 110:00 - 110:30 the primary first the way you start in cosmology you say well if you can't see it it's like everything you can see right if it's too the whole universe must be homogeneous because if it weren't we wouldn't be able to talk about it here in this classroom right that's pretty that was lame the first time i heard that and i said wow right because you couldn't talk about the whole universe it says most 99 of it's invisible to you so you must just you have to assume that the same laws apply everywhere if if they don't then you can't even
• 110:30 - 111:00 make up a theory about it right it doesn't matter that it's not testable at all it's a i have my own cosmology published in nature by the way that was funny as hell when i was a second year graduate student i published a paper called the cosmological significance of time reversal in maddox's magazine and he took it and i wasn't a cosmologist or even an astrophysicist i'd read scientific american a little bit taken some acid and had some dreams about how things were i wrote myself a paper and got it
• 111:00 - 111:30 published suddenly i was writing you know i was saying big bang theory is not right and then steady state theory is not either this is a good idea right here what about it published it when i sent pcr no thanks they rejected it nature rejected the pcr paper that i wrote and 30 science both of those austere magazines but they took nature to the cosmological significance of time reversal which was the uh sort of lunacy of a
• 111:30 - 112:00 of a sophomore i mean a second year graduate student in biochemistry that that when that happened it really that was my first real shock about science i said there's nobody minding the store you know there aren't any wise old men up there how could this happen how could they let me publish this theory in nature it's not like in some backwater journal nature you know a lot of the professors in the department said what in the hell is this
• 112:00 - 112:30 one of our graduate students just put his own paper in nature and it's not even about biochemistry it caused a lot it was it was it's weird what that did to my career at berkeley people said well he's weird but aids is a lot of people think of it as a conspiracy by some group or something like that but it's it just it's just something that happened it's it's a thing that really fit right into the historical framework and it went exactly the way a sociologist
• 112:30 - 113:00 looking at history would have said yes it something like that ought to happen and it happened and there's the thing that i learned like back in 1968 when i first published a paper by myself in nature in a field that i had no expertise in it all uh there are no old wise men up there at the top of science where which i would have i really did until 68 i would have thought you know if you try to publish a dumb paper in a journal like nature it won't get published if you try to publish a good paper in there like i later tried
• 113:00 - 113:30 to publish pcr the invention of pcr in the same journal and they didn't take it so it's up there there isn't up there there there's no place up on the the academy of science is just a bunch of idiots just like everybody else you know the editors of journals austere journals even they're just busy with their little lives and stuff there are no old wise men up on the top making sure that we don't do something really dumb you know and we are kind of like the
• 113:30 - 114:00 children of the apes that we came from we're a we're a very uh we're naive and none of us even knows how to make his own shirts you know and i mean we don't really individually amount to a whole lot we we have a pretty neat thing going here and i like it but you can't ima you can't think that there's there's really some council of elders or something watching and there certainly is not some austere body of people that are that are
• 114:00 - 114:30 not self-interested that are really looking at medical science and making sure that everything works or that nothing really dumb happens we're on our own here carrie what would happen if half the scientists in the united states came here could live right across the street from the pacific ocean see beautiful sunrises sunsets have a lot of nice sex have a refrigerator with beautiful women with nice bodies hang out with some good people and
• 114:30 - 115:00 enjoy this kind of lifestyle you think you get a little different would they be different would they be different um no i think people are gonna you know we're really bound to remain human human is what we are and human is you know as we're we have foibles right we our warranty runs out probably when we're about 35 for one thing you know we're with old wise men
• 115:00 - 115:30 were not involved in evolution because they didn't exist they i mean there weren't any people over 35 probably for until at least a hundred thousand years ago when people started carrying things around that they could bash animals with and stuff like that so where have old wise men are kind of a new development old wise women are a new development they're just we're very so and i think the humans will always just be you know we we have to think of ourselves as a bunch of kids
• 115:30 - 116:00 i mean i think there was a real you know somewhere back in there when we came out of the trees and hit the ground there was a neony kind of an event where we we became we stopped growing up we were babies of the apes that got old enough we got capable of reproduction you know what i mean that something had to happen there to keep us to make that transition and if we look around and think of ourselves as kids you know just a bunch of kids then i think we see much better who we
• 116:00 - 116:30 are than if we think of ourselves as being you know mature i always think of myself as a kid i i roller skate and i play you know and i love little kids to play with and i i don't ever think of myself as mature at all and i think that that's a better way of looking at humans than that as they start looking older that they somehow get wiser because it's not my experience [Laughter]
• 116:30 - 117:00 gary mullis fun talking with you well it was a pleasure talking with you let's go get something [Music] you