HEAL London

The first candidate for the annual ‘science stating the bleeding obvious' prize of 2009 is a study just published that shows that quality and length of sleep can affect your immune system. Specifically, getting less sleep and / or poorer quality sleep makes your immune system less able to fight off infections. This should surely not be a big surprise to most people who have at some point in their lives been run down to some extent and have had less than adequate quantity and quality of sleep. But clearly, scientists felt it was important enough to get some quantitative measure of effect.

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reappraisal of AIDS are issuing a letter to the highly-respected journal Science, calling for research papers to be withdrawn.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.