David Gilbert - Scientific Unraveling lyrics

When first introduced to a conspiracy theory in 1987, 1 believed it because of the sordid history of U.S. chemical and biological warfare. The version I saw then was based on the work of two East German scientists, Jakob and Lilli Segal, and was published by the Soviet news agency Ta** on 3/30/87. They claimed that HIV couldn't have possibly evolved naturally and that it was obviously an artificial splice between visna virus (a retroviru s * that infects the nervous system of sheep) and HTLV-1 (the first retrovirus known to infect humans). They argued that the splice was created at the notorious CBW lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland and then tested on prisoners in the area. Upon receiving and believing this article, I immediately sent it to a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology (now at the University of Ma**achusetts Medical School), who specializes in immunology, Janet Stavnezer. My friendship with Janet goes back to the 1960s and her support for civil rights and the anti-war movement. While that does not make her an*lysis infallible, there is certainly no way she could be a conscious part of a conspiracy against oppressed people. Stavnezer's response to the article I had found so politically credible was unequivocal: the splice theory that the Segals posit is scientifically impossible. (All references in this paper to Stavnezer's an*lysis, as well as to her colleague at U. Ma**. who specializes in virology – professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, Dr. Carel Mulder – come from personal correspondence and discussions.) A couple of years later the Soviet Union withdrew the Segals' charges. But it is open to interpretation whether they did so because the "science" involved is so demonstrably dishonest or because with " Perestroika, " they were now cultivating diplomatic favor with the U.S. In any case, there are other fatal flaws in the Segals' theory. First, in an obvious error of U.S. geography, they speculated that Maryland prisoners, once released, congregated in New York City to become the seedbed of the epidemic; but most Maryland prisoners would return to Baltimore, or Washington D.C., and neither of those cities was an early center of AIDS. Second, they posit sophisticated forms of genetic engineering and cloning that hadn't yet been invented in 1977. 11 Since the Segals there have been a number of related theories that HIV was man-made. One posits a splice of visna virus and equine infectious anemia virus; another, a splice of visna virus and bovine leukemia virus. One sets the date at Fort Detrick back to 1967; another implicates the World Health Organization (WHO), starting in 1972. Most of these other theorists (such as Robert Strecker, John Seale and William Dougla**) come from the far right politically and charge that – whether it was engineered at Ft. Detrick and/or by WHO – the AIDS virus is a Soviet biological warfare a**ault on the Western world. I sent these various splice theories to Stavnezer and Mulder for review; none of them holds water scientifically. The method for an*lyzing the relationship of different viruses is to compare the base pairs of nucleic acids that constitute the DNA. None of the viruses posited in the various splice theories has nearly enough similarity (or h*mology) with HIV to be one of its parents. At the same time as my 1987 inquiry, another, and far more exhaustive, study independently came to a similar conclusion: the various genetic engineering theories were fundamentally flawed. Investigative journalist Bob Lederer researched the topic for Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB), a publication that has been outstanding at exposing CIA and related operations. Lederer, an anti-imperialist and an AIDS activist, also started out with a political predisposition for believing the government could well have created AIDS. His in-depth research led him to conclude that the series of HIV-splice theories were false. One of his prime sources was Dr. David Dubnau, a long-time activist against CBW, who was emphatic: the HIV splice theorists "are simply wrong." This movement scientist independently offered the same explanation as Stavnezer and Mulder: HIV does not have any nearly sufficient sector of h*mology with the proposed parent viruses. 12 Needing a vehicle for the deliberate dissemination of the allegedly spliced virus, the conspiracy theorists also characterize various vaccination programs (against smallpox in Africa, hepatitis-B among gay men in the U.S., and polio in various places) as examples of CBW campaigns. While vaccination programs with inadequate controls for contamination may have contributed to the spread of infection, they could not have been a prime cause: The geography of the vaccination campaigns does not correspond with the locations of early centers of AIDS 13 – and retrospective tests have not found any such contamination. l4 Meanwhile, such unsubstantiated rumors can dangerously discourage people here and in the Third World from getting the same protections for their children that have done so much to stop diseases among more privileged whites. The danger is illustrated by the unnecessary and serious 1989-91 outbreak of measles among children within the US. More privileged children had routinely been protected by a safe and effective vaccine (not the later, experimental E-Z variety) in use since 1963. The tragic result of the public health system's failure to carry out thorough vaccination campaigns in poor, primarily Black and Latino, communities was 27,000 cases of measles and 100 d**hs in 1990 alone. 15 There is another major problem with the splice theories – timing. Why in the world would scientists searching for a weapon of genocide in the early 1970s plunge into the then-completely-uncharted territory of human retroviruses when there were already many known and available lethal agents? Marburg virus, for example, discovered in 1967, would make an excellent candidate. 16 On the other hand, scientists had no reason to even consider the cla** of viruses to which HIV belongs as possible CBW agents to destroy the human immune system. The first human retrovirus (HTLV-I) was not discovered until 1977, and even then it could not immediately be linked to any disease. Yet the epidemiological evidence shows that AIDS already had appeared in several countries by 1978. 17 For full-blown AIDS cases to already be so geographically dispersed, HIV (a virus with a long incubation period) had to have existed at least several years before that. And it is probably considerably older. Retrospective tests on blood taken in 1971-72 from 238 IDUs across the U.S. found that 14 of the 1129 samples – or 1.2 percent – were HIV antibody positive. l8 There are also a number of known cases of patients who died of AIDS-defining diseases decades ago. These include: a teenager who died in St. Louis in 1968 with four different opportunistic infections; a Norwegian sailor, his wife and a child in the late 1960s; and a sailor in England in 1959. Preserved tissue and blood samples from all of these cases later tested HIV antibody positive, although when the more difficult direct test was tried in two of these cases they could not recover HIV itself. 19 Medical case histories going back to the 1930's – the earliest period in which accurate records were kept – show isolated cases with all the earmarks of AIDS. Various an*lyses of the DNA sequences – a technique used for broad a**essment of a species' age – have provided estimates for the age of HIV that range from 30-900 years. 20 Whenever HIV first arose, and however long it may have subsisted at a low level in isolated populations, there is no mystery as to why its spread would take off in the mid-1970s. There were a host of new social conditions to serve as powerful amplifiers for any infectious agent: international jet travel flourished; a s**ual revolution provided many more opportunities for multiple s**ual partners; injection drug use greatly accelerated; there was a revolution in the use of a range of blood products, including multiple-donor blood-clotting factors for hemophiliacs; and there was the scandalous practice, born of poverty, of multiple re-use of syringes for legitimate medical practices in Third World countries. The travel, s**, drug and blood products revolutions all combined by the mid 1970s to create powerful amplifiers for the rapid global spread of infectious diseases. 21 Far from being an anomaly, AIDS is a harbinger of other pandemics to come if humanity doesn't radically change our approach to worldwide public health. In brief, the lack of knowledge of any human retroviruses before the late 1970s and the compelling evidence for the earlier genesis of HIV virtually eliminate the possibility that scientists deliberately designed such a germ to destroy the human immune system. More specifically, and decisively, Stavnezer and Dubnau independently confirm that all the alleged splices are in fact impossible because HIV does not have nearly enough genetic similarity with any of the proposed parent viruses.