HEAL London

In a stunning move, a group of respected research scientists, medical doctors, lawyers and journalists, in association with Rethinking AIDS - the group calling for the scientific reappraisal of AIDS are issuing a letter to the highly-respected journal Science, calling for research papers to be withdrawn. But these are not ordinary papers, they are the original papers co-authored by Dr Robert Gallo in which he claimed to have found the 'probable' cause of AIDS in 1984. These papers went on to become the most referenced papers in science, and in turn, papers that referenced those papers now form part of the alleged 'mountain of evidence' that HIV causes AIDS.

In 2006, Libya was the scene of the re-trial of the foreign medics who were all accused of deliberately infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV. Mike Hersee of HEAL London was invited to assist the defence with the trial. Sadly, it didn't work out as intended. I wrote an article about the experience that was first published in Hot Wild and Free (http://www.hot-wild-and-free.co.uk/), and you can reach that version by selecting the link, then selecting archives, then select the CONFLICTED issue (no 2), then select 'Liberated in Libya?'

The article was understandably edited, and in particular some technical details were left out. Below is the original article as submitted.

It has been announced that the recipients of half of the 2008 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine are Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for apparently discovering HIV. They will get a quarter of the prize money each. The winner of the other half is Harald Zur Hausen for allegedly discovering that the human papilloma virus causes cervical cancer.

There have been one or two serious lapses of judgement on the part of the Nobel Prize committee over the years but this year takes the biscuit so far. To award a prize for the discovery of HIV is to overlook some serious deficiencies in that claim. For instance:

I bought this book because from her previous writing I already knew that the author had analysed some of the same source documents about the discovery of HIV that I had and come to the same conclusions. It was already a subject about which I considered myself fairly knowledgeable so I was eager to see what a whole book's worth of investigation would reveal. In the event I found it absolutely stunning to read.