http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/elett...7387/495#43617

This series of exchanges started off as a comment on an article on the
'politics of AIDS in South Africa'
(http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/conte...l/326/7387/495) but has
turned into a debate between the Perth Group and their adversaries,
notably Christian Noble and Tony Floyd. The Perth Group's contributions
to this debate are carefully reasoned while those of the other side
consist largely of hectoring and windy, pompous outrage. The PG are to
be congratulated on keeping their cool despite considerable provocation.

"Uiopp" <uislad@faaa.co.nz> wrote in message
news:uislad-102A1F.00002405052004@lust.ihug.co.nz...
After spending several hours reading the above mentioned series of letters I
do not come to the same conclusions that you do. The Perth Group and Rasnick
made no attempt to discuss the topics via a rational evidence based
approach. Quite the opposite in fact, each time someone presented them with
evidence they either ignored it and continued on as if no new information
had been presented, or they claimed it was not evidence because they say it
is not evidence and provided no scientific basis for there assertion of said
evidences invalidity.

Gary Stein

Utter nonsense Gary. You hear what you want to. It is the establishment
that never faces the real questions and madness of its silly hypothesis.

I think , no actually, I KNOW that you also only hear what you want
to.

Having read the letters it seems that the Perth Group and their
groupies are just sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting
"La la la" everytime someone points them to the proof for HIV's
existence.

"PaulKing" <aimulti@aimultimedia.com> wrote in message news:<d76664a65e32d06dd42f6d7230857460@localhost.t alkabouthealthnetwork.com>...

david199@volcanomail.com (Dave) wrote in message news:<4fdc9699.0405050848.525f73c4@posting.google. com>...
Let's hear it, with references please.

In article <G4Slc.25127$sK3.23423@nwrddc03.gnilink.net>,
"Gary Stein" <ge.stein@verizon.net> wrote:

What we see with that debate is an endless repetition of the same
arguments, going over the same points again and again, and that from
both sides. The Perth Group's critics just don't want to deal with their
basic points.

Uiopp <uislad@faaa.co.nz> wrote in message news:<uislad-D8EF1C.20522318052004@lust.ihug.co.nz>...
The Perth Group has only ONE basic point. They claim that Francois
Barre-Sinnousi and Jean-Claude Chermann gave a talk at the Institute
Pasteur in 1973 that the Perth Group claims forever put an end to
new developments in virus "isolation". The Perth Group claims that
this talk resulted in a global standard method for retrovirus isolation
and that no other method can ever be valid. The Perth Group has
never produced a transcript of this talk. No virology textbook or
lab manual mentions the talk or the method. No virus has ever been
isolated by the alleged method.

In short, the Perth Group clearly is attempting to mislead people into
believing that HIV has perhaps not been properly studied. The tactic
they are using is called a "straw man" argument. They claim method X
must be used to isolate a virus, then go on to show that HIV-1 has not
been isolated exactly by that method (although gradient centifugations,
EM, etc.. are indeed commonly used with HIV-1 and all other retroviruses),
whithout ever showing any evidence that method X is in fact valid
method. Method X, allegedly described by the very people who were
the first (in Europe anyway, and tied with Gallo's group in the USA)
to produce molecular clones of HIV-1 M group subtype B virus, has
never been proven to exist at all. It is a straw man.

On 20 May 2004 12:00:21 -0700, drpsduke@yahoo.com (Dr. Phillip S.
Duke) wrote:

And the funniest bit of quixotic oddity with this whack claim of the
"Perth Group" is that Barre-Sinnousi was one of the original
discoverers of LAV, later known as HIV-1. You'd think, if she gave
this talk in '73, she'd know a wee bit about viral isolation, eh?

It's not only a straw man, it's cognitive dissonance.

George M. Carter

In article <b82db7cf.0405201100.126ceac@posting.google.com> ,
drpsduke@yahoo.com (Dr. Phillip S. Duke) wrote:

You're mistaken in over-emphasizing the significance of 1973 in the
Perth Group's scheme of things. The method they refer to was used for
decades before that. As they have elaborately pointed out many times.

Uiopp <uislad@faaa.co.nz> wrote in message news:<uislad-A143CE.14081421052004@lust.ihug.co.nz>...
Yes, and Foley and dozens of other people have also pointed out
that gradient centrifugation is still routinely used for seperating
HIVs, SIVs, FIVs, BIVs, EIAV and other lentiviruses from the majority of
host cell material. Whether one claims that this results in "pure"
virus or only "material enriched for viral components", the fact is
that this method cannot result in 100% "pure" virus. Infectious
molecular clones are a much better way to study viruses.

Likewise, electron microscopy is useful, and indeed is routinely
used in the study of lentiviruses, but it is not the best method
of discriminating between viral and cellular components. As the
Perth group and everyone else well knows, many cells produce virus-like
particles, and they look just like retroviruses by EM, so Southern
blots, northern blots, DNA sequencing and other molecular methods, as
well as western blots and other serological methods are absolutely
required to study retroviruses. All of this has been done, and
re-confirmed by thousands of labs all over the world, not just in
Gallo's and Montagnier's labs.

AS you would find out if you read a small sample of the Perth group
material and if you are at all familiar with the science invloved,
">Southern
secondary to proving that the proteins they detect are unique to that
virus, which involves first isolating and characterizing the virus.
Likewise studying clonal allegedly infected cells is meaningless for
proof since you first have to prove that the cells are indeed infected
with the virus in question, which requires isolation and
characterization, and also some way of proving it to be infectious and
pathological.

Please explain how this has been done, with reference to and quotes
from at least 1 paper that you have read. THe Perth group have read
and reviewed countless papers on the subject which no doubt required a
huge effort. If you are going to slag them off then you are obliged to
do at least a tiny % of similar work to back it up.

- James

drpsduke@yahoo.com (Dr. Phillip S. Duke) wrote in message news:<b82db7cf.0405261452.31c61a0a@posting.google. com>...

Correction, DNA sequencing is of course the exception but the same
argument applies, you have to isolate the virus, prove it is
infectious etc before sequencing it.
Theoretically there could be an indrect way of sequencing but I don't
know of one - you could find sequences that are in the patient sample
but not found in a "perfect" control, but I don't see even that as
being proof that the sequence is of a virus.

abinkum@yahoo.com wrote in message news:<30ff07d0.0406011918.6679139e@posting.google. com>...
This is not true. You can in fact sequence a virus long before
you isolate it or prove that it is infectious. As just one
example, GenBank contains the sequences of hundreds of endogenous
retroviruses that are not infectious.

But it is a moot point anyway, because HIV-1 and other lentiviruses
have in fact been "isolated" using the very same methods used
to "isolate" all other infectious retroviruses. The Perth group
is bluffing, when they claim that the methods used to "isolate"
other viruses have not been carried out with HIV-1.

You are partly correct. DNA sequences alone don't mean too much,
but they do tell a lot.

It is simple, from the DNA sequence alone to tell what organism
the sequence came from. Retroviral genomes are very distinctive,
with LTRs plus Gag, Pol and Env genes. Bacterial DNA is easy to
distinguish from mammalian DNA, etc. The trick comes in determining
if the virus you have sequenced is the cause of, or contributes to,
to disease you are studying.

When you have the viral genome, plus serology, epidemiology and
lots of other data, the whole story comes together. For example, it
could very well have turned out that the cause of AIDS was a human
endogenous retrovirus that became activated, either in each patient
because of "environmental factors" such as drug use or infection
with other bacteria or viruses, or in a one-time activation that
then spread from one patient to another. The first example is a
valid theory that is being questioned in at least some cases of
schizophrenia. The second example has happened in domestic chickens
where the subgroup J of avian leukosis virus was apparently created
by recombination of an exogenous virus with an endogenous virus
in the late 1980s and is now spreading between flocks of chickens.

Looking at viruses or bacteria in microscopes is pretty mush useless.
It's sort of like looking at the covers of books, instead of picking
them up and reading them, and observing the effects that they have
on other people who read them. The cover of the Christian Bible does
not look all that different than the cover of The Anarchist's Cookbook,
but the contents are quite different. Likewise, HIV-1 looks exactly
like Equine Infectious Anemia Virus, but EIAV can not infect humans
and HIV-1 can not infect horses.

On Wed, 1 Jun 2004 abinkum@yahoo.com wrote:

<snip>
No. Not necessarily. It's perfectly acceptable to find proteins and
then subsequently set about proving that they're in a virus by isolating
the virus, in some instances, by using methods that use these proteins/DNA
etc. The most obvious method is to find an autonomous stretch of DNA/RNA
that encodes the very same proteins. That's kind of obvious then, a
no-brainer.

The trick is to use decent controls and appropriate methods, and common
sense. Many people refuse to accept this approach a priori, which is
wrong. The scientists who do the work don't find it a problem, so why
should a bunch of unqualified outsiders like the PG (for example)? It's
not unique to HIV - the same standards (or less!) are applied throughout
the field of virology.

The latter bit is impossible under current ethics and morality! You
certainly do not need isolation and characterisation prior to culture. In
fact, culture is one method by which you may _eventually_ acquire enough
virus to isolate and characterise! You have the process backwards. See
an earlier post of mine where I outline just how many people you'd have to
kill to get enough virus to fill a salt crystal, or containing enough RNA
to even see it on a standard lab gel. Culture or molecular methods HAVE
to come before isolation and characterisation, it's practically ordained!

Most of the PG "analysis" seems to me to be a range of confusion,
ommission, or maybe downright lies. I've written extensively on their
work (see the Google archives) and I'm always less than impressed. The
deeper I look, the more upset I get at their methods.

I see that they're _still_ spouting the _same_ entirely refuted rubbish on
a public forum at the BMJ site. *sigh*.

Bennett

On Wed, 1 Jun 2004 abinkum@yahoo.com wrote:


You look at what the sequence encodes. If it encodes:

Gag, Pol, Env, regulatory elements etc and can self-propogate from a
plasmid contruct. Then yeah, I'd say it was a virus.

DNA isn't random, it means something. You can fairly easily say whether
it's human, viral, bacterial etc.

Bennett