Dr. Maller’s Blog

I usually have several books going, some new, some old; some funny, some illuminating, some infuriating; once in a while a book can be all three, e.g. “What’s the Matter With California?”

My current old book is “Black Death” about the plague of the mid-14th century that killed at least a third of all Europeans and millions of Asians. Life then was, as Thomas Hobbes described it hundreds of years later, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Superstition abounded; witches, Jews, clergy, the rich were all blamed even though the plague ravaged them all impartially. There were surprisingly many “doctors” with precious little to offer.

How much better to live in this golden age of progress. Just since 1900 Americans’ life expectancy has risen from 47 to 79! Thousands of children died every year of strep throat, measles, pneumonia, polio, tuberculosis and other diseases back then. Despite that in 1899
a well-known writer announced that there was nothing left to discover!

We can laugh at that man’s shortsightedness, but I fear that the best years of science may be behind us. Of course there will be great advances in medicine and all other fields, but where will our Einsteins, our Kochs, our Listers, our Edisons come from? Perhaps Galileo or Copernicus would be better examples of what I mean. If science is to lead us to the promised land, it must be a pure search for truth. Money is necessary but cannot be permitted to buy results.

Several instances of what I consider junk science come to mind. In some cases results are foreordained because we want it so; second-hand smoke is vilified (even most smokers agree!) but the numbers aren’t there to back up the claims. Remember the apple dye scare? Asbestos was banned over 30 years ago but trial lawyers are still fattening up on it, and the truth is that no one except asbestos miners (almost all of them smokers) were ever harmed by the stuff. Did you know that the Twin Towers in NYC were built with asbestos until the ban, so that all floors above the 73d were unprotected? That the Challenger disaster might not have occurred if the defective tiles had continued to be made with asbestos?

A great deal of junk science is put forth to justify big budgets. Testing all children for lead poisoning is an everyday example. Our education and judicial systems are rife with all sorts of expensive and intrusive programs based largely on theories put forth by experts who wouldn’t know a double-blind study from a seeing-eye dog.

Even worse to my mind is the suppression of truth when it is politically incorrect. Two examples will suffice. The link between induced abortion (especially before having a first baby) and breast cancer is so strong that the law now recognizes that informed consent must include that fact. The AIDS “epidemic” is the other. My epidemiology training at CDC came before the term “AIDS” was part of the language, but I was skeptical from the start. The same syndrome had been seen much earlier, either at birth or after certain repetitive stresses on the immune system. Hemophiliacs had been receiving transfusions of clotting factors and some (remember Ryan White?) developed an AIDS-like illness. Amyl nitrite in ampules had been popular in the bathhouse culture of San Francisco and elsewhere; used as “poppers” to enhance erotic sensation, they had caused AIDS-like fatalities.
About 1979 or so an outbreak of a rare sarcoma in homosexual men led to the discovery of a burgeoning immune deficiency syndrome that was labelled “AIDS” and the rush was on to find a cause, meaning an external villain to blame it on. Witches being unlikely, a virus became the lead suspect. By finding such a cause, the lifestyle choices that were really responsible could be overlooked. And it worked!

A previously obscure retrovirus was found in most patients and was tagged “HIV”. AIDS seemed to have originated in sub-Saharan Africa; HIV is found in monkeys; some Africans eat (and even have sex with) monkeys; there is rampant prostitution and poor hygiene, leading to the largely mythical heterosexual AIDS hysteria. One of the principles I learned at CDC is that an epidemic burns itself out when the susceptible population falls below a critical level. In the mid-80’s I served on the Advisory Board of the Southern California Hospital Council and saw well-educated experts dealing with this new scourge about as inappropriately as the poor folks in medieval Europe did in 1349. “The number of cases is doubling every 9 months!!” (At that rate the human race would have disappeared by 1994).

A generation later we have millions of “HIV-positive” people all over the world, many taking extremely expensive and toxic drugs that actually shorten their life span. We have many deaths from AIDS but few confirmed as such. In Africa any chronically ill person with malaria and other parasites is counted in the statistics, the blood tests being too expensive and not all that reliable. The UN just reduced its number of AIDS cases in India by 60% because of a “statistical error” which just may have been related to a budget request that was too outrageous even for them. The point is that the pool of people at risk for AIDS is far smaller than claimed early on.

The age of bacteriology, and later virology, began with Koch and his discovery of the TB bacillus about 1880. He found the germ (medical students call them red snappers), isolated it in culture, injected it into animals, recovered it again and repeated the cycle. These steps became known as “Koch’s postulates” and had to be reproduced by other investigators to be accepted as scientific truth. That is, until AIDS came along. Only the first step was accomplished with HIV, and embarrassingly, thousands of AIDS victims remain free of HIV. The original group of men with Kaposi’s sarcoma did not have HIV, they had a herpesvirus.
Dr. Peter Duesberg of UC Berkeley had been one of the world’s most respected virus researchers until he wrote “Inventing the AIDS Virus”. His life has been threatened, his research grants taken away, and yet he has not backed down. Now others are coming forth and challenging over 25 years of politically-motivated pseudoscience. I believed him then and even more so now, for the only response from the toe-the-line crowd has been to scream Homophobe! or Holocaust Denier! They have no explanation for the twenty years’ survival of millions of HIV carriers who refuse to get sick and die as they predicted.

I would date the reversal in science-as-truth to science-as- dogma to 1962 and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”. DDT was banned in an emotional response to her touching pictures of birds’ egg shells thinning. In those 45 years countless millions of Africans have died of malaria. Now, finally, DDT has been re-introduced in a controlled way and the impact has been dramatic. Where were the Darwinians in 1962? If birds were exposed to a new environmental hazard, wouldn’t they adapt? Data in humans actually showed that exposure to small amounts of DDT helped our livers act more efficiently against many other toxins. Now we have the man-made global warming hoax, which to their credit a great number of scientists have come forward to challenge.

Let me finish with Darwin and his theory, which is 150 years old and remains provocative but leaks like a sieve. Our children too often are presented with evolution as fact, as dogma, and those who question it are labelled all sorts of things. I am not a religious person, and do not take the Bible literally, but those who speak of Intelligent Design make more sense to me and should at least be heard by our children. ID is not science. It is not “creationism” in the sense that it promotes the Bible as a scientific treatise. It is simply a humble approach to mysteries we may never solve but can never stop trying to understand.

You’ve seen my tropical fish tank if you’ve been in my office the past 35 years or so. I’ve had a few lionfish. Looking at them is my idea of a religious experience, because there is no way Darwin can explain them as anything but our Creator’s sense of humor, on display for His most favored creation to enjoy.

G.K. Chesterton warned that “When man ceases to believe in G-d, he does not believe in NOTHING - he believes in ANYTHING.”
For too many of us that Anything is science dressed up as divinely inspired truth.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 10:43 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.