The Toronto Sun 'MIND FIELD' FOR AIDS NOBEL WINNER SAYS HIV MAY NOT EXIST By MICHAEL CLEMENT -- and BRAD HONYWILL You might be forgiven for thinking that Nobel prize-winning chemist Dr. Kary Mullis is a little eccentric. The 53-year-old Californian who has a PhD in biochemistry was once confronted in Mendocino County, in his home state, by a "glowing raccoon" that spoke to him. "And thereafter, for the next six hours, I don't know what happened, but by six o'clock the next morning, I was walking down this road in perfect physical condition," Mullis told a Sunday Sun reporter yesterday, after arriving in Toronto with wife No. 4, Nancy Cosgrove Mullis, 50 -- the "primo wife." True to form, Mullis' visit fired up a storm of discussion long before his plane touched the tarmac at Pearson. And it will continue long after he speaks tonight in a free public lecture at the University of Toronto's OISE auditorium on Bloor St. W., beginning at 7 p.m. Of course, that's what HEAL (Health Education AIDS Liaison) had in mind when it set up the Mullis forum. HEAL, one of several AIDS dissent groups, claims 500 supporters in Toronto and Vancouver and 10,000 worldwide. At their forum, Mullis will discuss his belief that HIV does not cause AIDS and promote his new book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field. Mullis said he wasn't under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs when the raccoon spoke to him in 1987, but he does reserve for himself the "privilege" of taking either acid or mushrooms "once in a while." Pot smoker During his life Mullis, who loves surfing, says he has smoked "quite a bit" of grass but "now not as often as I used to." Although still very much a cry in the wilderness, the AIDS dissent movement has been around almost as long as the disease itself. Mullis is just one of several high-profile spokesmen which include writer Christine Maggiore and, the guru of the movement, distinguished virologist and AIDS researcher Dr. Peter Duesberg. Duesberg and his followers say the link between HIV and AIDS has never been proven. He says AIDS is the accumulated affect of previous infections, particularly venereal diseases, aggravated by drug abuse and other lifestyle factors that weaken the body's immune system.
Mullis has similar opinions. "I'm saying there is no scientific evidence that you could quote to support the notion that HIV is the probable cause of AIDS," Mullis told The Sunday Sun. "I'm saying I can't find any evidence that it does. I can't find any, and neither can anybody else." He said that taking "29 different symptoms" and combining them under one umbrella called AIDS is done for "financial reasons ... people who are being supported by the NIH (National Institute of Health in the U.S.) or by private companies that are trying to make money off curing AIDS," he said. When AIDS was first defined, he said, there were four different symptoms or diseases that made it up: Kaposi's Sarcoma, a skin cancer; a type of pneumonia; and "two fungi that I can't even remember." "Now it's expanded to 29 symptoms, one of which is uterine cancer another of which is tuberculosis," he said. "When are we going to put heart attacks in there? What about getting run over by a truck? "That is an incredibly risky definition," to say that "once you have contracted HIV anything else that you get ... you wouldn't have gotten it had you not had HIV in the first place." And Africa is not being ravaged by AIDS either, according to Mullis. Asked if there was AIDS in Africa he said: "I would say there's no real AIDS anywhere. AIDS is a word." Asked if HIV itself even exists, he said, "it may or it may not. There is a test for it. But if you take the test and find out that you're positive for it and go back and take the test again, you might find out you're negative. "AIDS is an American disease, it has nothing to do with Africa ... They've got the same thing they've had for 500 years in Africa: Malnutrition and lack of sanitation. If you want to call it AIDS -- great. It's like the Christians called everything the devil." But Mullis is no fool. His biggest invention was Polymerase Chain Reaction or PCR, a "chemical reaction" where various chemicals react with blood to indicate whether given DNA sequences, including viruses, are present. For that he won the Nobel prize in 1993. He got about $375,000 and a similar amount when he won the Japan Prize, earlier that same year, for the same invention. "I blew it all -- well, not really," he said. John Scythes, a prominent Toronto AIDS dissident and owner of the Glad Day bookstore, believes that AIDS may in fact be the ultimate form of untreated syphilis. In its advanced stage, syphilis has similar symptoms to AIDS and is very difficult to diagnose. All of this enrages mainstream AIDS scientists and activists. They fear that discrediting the HIV theory negates more than a decade of huge public campaigns promoting safe sex. It also discourages people living with AIDS from using new medications that are based on the HIV model, like protease inhibitors. "We think they're doing a lot of harm to people who don't know better," says Paul MacPhee, co-chairman of AIDS Action Now, a Toronto activist group fighting for improved treatment and facilities. MacPhee points to an 80% drop in AIDS-related deaths during the 1995-97 period, coinciding with the introduction of protease inhibitors. AIDS dissenters throw back their own studies which they say show that the new drugs, rather than helping to cure AIDS, simply aggravate it. For MacPhee, it's an issue that's up close and personal. He feels he owes his life to the new drugs and has experienced the death of too many friends who didn't, or weren't able to, choose that option.*
 TORONTO |
