That's right, there are two prizes on offer: £50,000 and $50,000. These are genuine awards to be wone for the first person to meet the criteria for either.

How to win £50,000

This is a continuation of the previous Continuum award, generously made available by Alex Verney-Elliot, offered to the first person who can demonstrate proof of the isolation of HIV as a distinct, exogenous infectious retrovirus. You may think that would be easy - just talk to your local HIV/AIDS specialist or the Terence Higgins Trust and ask for the references, but there is the problem: There aren't any.

That's the thing. Nowhere in any medical or scientific literature is any evidence that HIV has ever been isolated from any patient, from blood, semen, saliva, urine or breastmilk. You'll soon realise that science has increasingly been playing fast and loose with the meaning of words that we always thought had precise meanings.

You may have been under the mistaken impression that 'isolate' a virus actually mean to separate it and purify a collections of viruses from other biological matter in someone's body. That is not what's been happening though, because despite vast numbers of people allegedly having a 'viral load' of, let's say, 50,000 per ml of blood, scientists have been unable to actually find any whole HIV in their blood, which may seem a bit strange to you. How there be all these viruses in a patient's blood if no-one can find any?

Instead, what they do is take cells from someone they believe has HIV, then put them in a torturous environment with foreign cells and powerful (and stressful) mitogenic chemicals. The cells believed to contain HIV then start producing retroviral particles which are hailed by the scientists as proof of HIV infection.

There are two problems with that approach though. Firstly, experiments that show that happening tend to be rather short on negative controls that don't produce those particles. One of the most basic scientific principles children are taught at school is to have controls that do not contain the factor you believe is relevant to a particular outcome, in order to test whether or not that factor is indeed what makes the difference. What you tend to find with AIDS science is that either they miss out the controls (ie, people believed not to be infected with HIV) or else the controls get the same results.

If the negative controls produce the same results under the same conditions as the cells from people believed to be HIV+, then that indicates it isn't the alleged presence of HIV that makes the difference. And this should be no surprise because for a long time it has been known that cells have a significant proportion of DNA (at least 1%) that can become viral under the right conditions, and that highly stressed cells produce retroviruses.

When they are believed to come from within the cell's original DNA they are called HERV's, or Human Endogenous RetroVirus. When they are believed to come from outside the cell they are called Retroviruses. The only problem is, there appears to be little evidence that exogenous retroviruses actually exist, and it is entirely possible that all expression of retroviruses is simply a behaviour of the cell under extreme stress whose purpose is not yet understood.

It was this awareness of the potential confusion between endogenous and exogenous retroviruses that led to an international symposium at the Pasteur Institute in 1972 to thrash out a method to determine if a particle really was an exogenous retrovirus or not. You probaby won't be surprised to hear that the agreed, robust method was almost immediately abandoned, probably because scientists wanted to find exogenous retroviruses and the robust method was essentially dismissing the idea.

Essentially though, even orthodox experiments have indicated that expression of retroviruses only happens under stress, so retroviruses, whether they are endogenous or exogenous, have already been comprehensively demonstrated to be a symptom of stress, not the cause. This rather undermines the whole notion that HIV is a rampaging infectious virus killing cells left, right and centre.

As for claims of isolation of HIV when there has been no control group at all. Well, that's not science. So if you're going to claim the Continuum award, in memory of Michael Verney-Elliot, You'd better start looking pretty hard for the evidence.

Comment

This award is to encourage an essential part of the scientific process that should have been done long ago, before the claims of HIV being the cause of AIDS or the use of HIV tests on the general public to diagnose people with a biological death sentence. This suggests that the reason they are still not being done all these years later is because they can't be done, which suggests highly that HIV doesn't exist as an exogenous retrovirus and the other, more mundane, causes of the wide variety of illnesses that come under the 'AIDS' brand are being ignored, and that with any HIV to validate the tests against, they are essentially, manifestly, fraudulent.