CALIFORNIA ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
CAL ALUMNI DAY

March 6, 1993

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: DR. PETER DUESBERG

INTRODUCTION (SCOTT): Our keynote speaker is a distinguished scientist
and also a professor of cellular and molecular biology. He was educated
at the Universities of Wurtzberg, Frankfurt, and Munich in Germany and at
the University of Basel in Switzerland. He's been at Cal (UC Berkeley)
since 1964, where he has worked primarily on retroviruses and their
relationship to cancer. That work has been rewarded by the discovery of
the first cancer gene in 1978.

He received the California Scientist of the Year award in 1971. He
received the American Medical Center Oncology award for research on cancer
in 1981. In 1986, he was elected to the National Academy of Science,
which is probably one of the most prestigious awards any scientist can be
given short of winning a Nobel prize. That same year he was also the
recipient of a seven-year Outstanding Investigation Award from the
National Institute of Health, which is really awarded to only those
scientists who have very strong track records, who are on the cutting
edge of science.

Well, I think that all of us at the University of California at Berkeley
are no strangers to controversy, whether it's the Free Speech Movement, or
the cause of AIDS. I think that the discussion and debate of unpopular
views is critical to truth and also to the health of great universities
like ours.

Today we have the opportunity to listen to the beat of a decidedly
different drummer and make up our own minds. With that, again let me say
it's my distinct privilege and pleasant to introduce our keynote speaker,
Dr. Peter Duesberg.

DR. DUESBERG: Thank you very much Scott and certainly also Annette
Ramirez. I certainly congratulate you for your courage and for being a
little bit different, and also for your sense of humor in getting me here
today despite my highly controversial point of view. I understand that
there were some suggestions from some of my colleagues at Berkeley who are
also a little bit different from you and me that Annette should pick me up
with her jeep but not to deliver me to the Biltmore Hotel but back to
Berkeley. Somehow I persuaded her to come to the Biltmore Hotel and
there's where we still are.

Now, perhaps you all remember that in the early 1980s a mysterious new
disease, which is now called AIDS, began to claim increasing numbers of
lives in America, a few also in Europe. But AIDS from the very beginning
picked from very selective groups. It didn't pick your ordinary guy from
next door. 90% of its victims in Europe and American, to this day are
males. And even they are not just all males, but males between 20 and 50
years of age. And even that is not specific enough for AIDS. A third of
these males are intravenous drug users and use those drugs for years at a
time, and another two-thirds approximately are male homosexuals. A few
other have been identified as AIDS risk groups. These are hemophiliacs,
transfusion recipients, and almost all women with AIDS are also
intravenous drug users. That's 90% of the AIDS in America; it's almost
exactly the same in Europe.

Well, when this new epidemic appeared, scientists were stunned and divided
from the very beginning at to whether this was due to a new microbe, a new
infectious agent that we had not seen before or discovered before, or
could it be due to what was euphemistically called the life style. The
style was a euphemism for sexual and drug liberation, which started in the
60s, essentially after the Viet Nam War. And those were the groups, those
practicing those new life styles, where most AIDS patients had come from.

Now the confusion ended suddenly in April, 1984, by an unprecedented
event, at least unprecedented in the history of science. At that point,
it was announced at an international press conference in Washington by the
Secretary of Health and Human Services , Margaret Heckler, and Robert
Gallo, researcher at the National Institute of Health, a colleague of mine
and retrovirologist also chasing viruses for 25 years, that the cause of
AIDS had been found, that it was a retrovirus, which is now called HIV,
shor t for human immunodeficiency virus. There was no more need to worry
about it; within two years we would have a vaccine, AIDS would be under
control, but the hypothesis predicted, unfortunately though, that AIDS
would within those two years explode into t he general population. In
fact, Margaret Heckler was not politically correct enough at the time, she
said in the heterosexual population, and therefore she became ambassador
to Ireland shortly after.

So it was to explode, then, into the general population. The Gallo
hypothesis that HIV infects you, is sexually transmitted, that would
explain why it is found mostly in 20 to 45-year-olds, not in the older
people, and it would infect the critical part o f the immune system called
the T-cells. There are two major cellular elements to the immune system:
one is called the B-cells and the other is the T-cells. And they are sort
of like the Army and the Navy. If you lose one, the defenses become
crippled or useless. So if the T-cells are gone, the immune system is
gone, and if the immune system is gone, it's like leaving your door open
on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. All sorts of things start moving in.

So that was the explanation but there were immediately some odd
stipulations to this hypothesis. In fact, it's not going to happen right
away. You have a couple of years to think about it, five years initially,
now we are at ten years. So you get infec ted today and ten years you're
free. You can continue whatever you've done until then, but ten years
from now, you may get one of 25 diseases which are all called AIDS now --
when they occur in the presence of HIV. That is the definition in terms
of Gal lo's and Heckler's announcement of April, 1984. These could be
dementia, it could be diarrhea, it could be tuberculosis.

Look at the first slide. That sort of illustrates it. This is
essentially the definition of AIDS nowadays, and I'm not making that up.
That's the Center for Disease Control's definition. When you have
tuberculosis, which is one of the 25 AIDS diseases , when you have also
antibodies against HIV, your disease will be called AIDS. If you have the
same tuberculosis and no HIV, then it is called tuberculosis and nobody
gives a damn. It's not going to be published in Nature, in Science, the
New England Jo urnal, or the Los Angeles Times, nobody's going to mention
it, because tuberculosis is an old disease and nobody can make a career
that way.

Dementia plus HIV is called AIDS. Dementia in the absence of HIV, you're
just stupid. That is the definition of AIDS. I'm not making that up.

So Gallo and Heckler promised a vaccine, which was a politically good
announcement to make because Ronald Reagan was going to be reelected in
1984 and the gay lobby had complained that he had never said anything
about AIDS. He said, "What do you want, here's Robert Gallo, he's found
the cause and in two years we'll have a vaccine." So Ronald Reagan was
reelected.

Now, the major achievements of the virus hypothesis were all in the public
relations form. It achieved instant popularity, global popularity, with
the scientific community. Among them, particularly my buddies, including
me initially for a short term, we all looked for an important virus.
Because a lot of scientists in biology are still microbe hunters. There
were raised in the era of microbe hunting, the only triumph in medicine --
we have eliminated infectious diseases. Starting with Robert Koch and
Louis Pasteur, all medical students have been microbe hunters, in their
fantasies, at least. They were going to get a bad microbe, make a
vaccine, find an antibiotic, cure it, get rich and famous, get a Nobel
prize and everything else they wanted. That's the dream of all of us.
And that has actually worked, but that has worked so well that infectious
diseases are eliminated in the Western world.

Less than 1% of us in our lifetime die from an infectious disease or get
sick from an infectious disease. Over 99% of our health problems have
nothing to do with infectious diseases anymore. It's clearly a triumph,
but it's history. But it's still in the minds of all of us researchers
and the last frontier we had in the Western world was the polio epidemic
in the 50s, when thousands of virologists were raised to fix the next
viral epidemic, but it never came.

So we turned our attention, that's we virologists, to cancer. We hoped
that viruses would cause cancer. We learned a lot about cancer, we
learned a lot about viruses, but we failed in our mission, basically. The
virus/cancer program was a failure. Human cancer is not contagious, is
not caused by a virus, and hardly any animal cancers, either. They are a
few. My claim to fame is one of those, finding cancer genes, as Scott
pointed out in the introduction, but that's a rare thing, it's
academically in teresting, it is not useful for science in general, and it
is irrelevant in terms of cancer statistics.

So here was an army of literally 10,000s of retrovirologists, all of the
AIDS orthodoxy is included now, Robert Gallo, Peter Duesberg, Robin Weiss,
Howard Temin, David Baltimore, you have heard some of those names, Anthony
Fauci, in the newspapers. All of these are retrovirologists from the
virus/cancer program that had failed. They were looking for clinical
relevance. That is exactly what they were looking for. Finally, there
was some clinical relevance, an important disease, to make a name for
thems elves, and of course to justify their research, which is nothing
that a scientist would see better than the end of his or her career or the
middle or it, or even at the beginning, to make clinical relevance and
become famous.

So the retrovirologists all immediately agreed, sure, it's got to be a
viral disease. And the approval was even more widespread, because the new
thing happened to biology in the last 20 years, and that's the
commercialization of science, which is hardly ever addressed because most
scientists see themselves as truth-seekers working at universities in
ivory towers and are publishing papers in journals that look for nothing
but the truth. But the reality is that if you look at Berkeley, at UCLA,
and all th e major campuses, they are surrounded by bio-technology
companies, Genetek, Chiron...they are not accidentally surrounding these
campuses, because they're consulted, owned and operated by the same people
who pretend to be truth seekers, that have no other interest but finding
the truth on campuses, and they're moon-lighting or double-timing at
companies where they make millions of dollars. That is sometimes very
good. That is good for the economy, but it's not necessarily good for the
truth. Because once you have a company put a million dollars on one
view, you certainly don't push the alternative view that could threaten
that investment. And that's happening in Berkeley just as well as at many
other universities.

So the bio-technologists would like nothing better than a viral disease
because now they could make test kits for the antibody. Twenty million
AIDS tests are performed per year at $50 apiece. Twenty million times 50
is a nice number for a bio-technology company to start. You can also make
a vaccine at a bio-technology company and you can multiply everything
again with a factor of a million. You can make AZT. But if you deal with
drug addiction or with homosexuality or heterosexuality or God knows what,
then you have to call in Mother Theresa and nobody has any money for any
studies.

So for the bio-technology company, viruses are first-rate, but a human
problem is not very viable and commercially highly uninteresting. And
even the gays preferred a virus over alternative causes because a virus is
an egalitarian disease. Nobody is goi ng to look into your lifestyle and
say, "Okay, you're doing this, you're doing this, you should get this."
God gave the virus, nobody can argue with God, and we can easily come up
with slogans -- "We are all in this together," which they all say. Eliza
beth Taylor is in this together, although Elizabeth Taylor comes to the
dinner and some other people die of AZT and some other causes of AIDS.
Nevertheless, we're all in this together.

And even the journalists loved it. It was a windfall for the journalists.
The science writers had to sit in the laboratory in somebody's lab, and
listen to what is a nuclear reactor, how does it work, how can I sell it
in my next Sunday magazine article. Now, all they have to do is call
Anthony Fauci or some other expert on AIDS research, touch it up with a
little anal intercourse and intravenous drugs in the bathhouse, and have
their next story for the Sunday Times. Everybody would love it and
everybody would read it.

So it was a windfall in terms of public relations and commercial
interests, but if you look at the public health benefits of the virus/AIDS
hypothesis, that we have known since 1984, since that famous press
conference, its achievements have been a complet e disaster, a total
failure, not even one life has been saved. We are spending on this virus
more than on all viruses and microbes in history combined. The U.S.
taxpayer pays four billion dollars annually on AIDS research, one billion
on basic research, three billion in care. No one life has been saved. No
vaccine has been developed. No drug has been developed except AZT. This
I think is AIDS by prescription. It's the most toxic drug ever approved
for long-term consumption in the free world. It wa s developed 20 years
ago for chemotherapy, that is to kill human cells, when you have no other
way of removing a cancer, that's what it does. There are no side effects,
there's nothing other than killing cells. That's what it does. It just
killed Arthur Asche last month, in January, Kimberly Bergalis a year ago,
and 200,000 people are on AZT owing to this one hypothesis now in this
country alone, every six hours they take chain terminators of DNA
synthesis.

So you cannot even come up with effective prevention. AIDS continues to
spread despite hundreds of organizations educating, condoms, clean
needles, and nobody has achieved control of the spread of AIDS. So in
terms of public health benefits, the virus hypothesis has been a complete
failure. But that is not even the final verdict on a scientific
hypothesis. There are other hypotheses that are correct but still have
not produced any results. The hallmark of a scientifically correct
hypothesis, however, is when it can make valid predictions. That is the
hallmark of the good hypothesis. A good meteorology hypothesis can
predict whether it's going to be sunny or rainy tomorrow, it cannot change
the weather.

We can say on the basis of genetics that the odds of getting hemophilia,
if the hemophilia gene is in the family, are 25% or 50%. We can do some
symptomatic treatment but we cannot cure hemophilia at this point. That's
the hallmark of a good hypothesis.

Now what can the virus/AIDS hypothesis predict? Can it predict who is
getting AIDS? It predicted exactly what you would expect from a viral
disease -- it would explode into the general population. But it didn't
explode into the general population. As in the first year, AIDS is still
restricted 90% to men, among them 30% intravenous drug users and 60% gays,
and a few hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients. It did not explode.
The virus hypothesis failed to predict the epidemiology of AIDS.

If you are infected today, you ask your doctor, "When do I get AIDS?" He
could tell you, maybe next month, maybe next year, maybe five years from
now, it could be ten years from now, it could also be 20 years from now,
or it could be never. Any decade now, you could get AIDS. That's not a
very helpful prediction to make. That's true almost with life. If you're
talking decades, life is running out pretty fast, because it's not
forever.

If you ask your doctor, what do you get? What do I get, I'm infected
today? Well, it could be dementia, but it could be just as well diarrhea,
it could be Kaposi's sarcoma, it could be lymphoma or pneumonia, diseases
which have absolutely nothing in com mon, at least many of them. Totally
useless predictions.

Despite the billions of dollars in AIDS research, nobody has an idea how
HIV is causing AIDS. In fact, here's one of the major flaws in the
hypothesis altogether: The T-cells are disappearing but they are not
infected by HIV. One in 1000 at the most is infected. There is no
precedent anywhere in the literature of biology or even microbiology that
a cell that is not infected is dying from a virus. Viruses are what you
call intracellular parasites. They have to get into the cell and then
they mess up the machinery of the cell. They cannot send a signal, "Okay,
I'm staying here, I'm too busy with something else, but you're going to
die over there." Viruses cannot work that way. They have to get into the
cell, then they can do something, whatever it is. But they certainly
cannot kill from a distance. That's what the virus hypothesis is asked to
explain. It cannot. It comes up with co-factors and other things.

There are other problems. AIDS is new, but it turns out that HIV is
probably as old as America, if it's not older. But how do we measure the
age of the virus, particularly one that we don't know yet so well, only
for eight years. But it is the law in epidemiology, based on
epidemiologists from the last century, who have actually observed that
when a new microbe or new disease comes into a population, it spreads
exponentially -- it explodes, exactly like Heckler and Gallo predicted for
AIDS. That was a very logical thing to predict. Because it will spread
into susceptible animals, or in this case people, according to
susceptibility.

Very much like we heard this morning about the diseases that came to
California when the white man came with the Bible, the gun, with syphilis
and tuberculosis. Within months, 95% of the Indians were dead. They
could read the Bible, they could use the gun, but they died from syphilis
and tuberculosis. The same thing happened to the Eskimos, the same thing
happened to the Hawaiians when they were discovered by the white man.
That's how new diseases spread in a population. Or when a new flu strain
comes in, susceptible people, usually nowadays the old and the very
young, get sick or some of them die. Then the population becomes
resistant. The survivors become resistant and the virus either
equilibrates or disappears.

Now look at the pattern of HIV in the population. Since we can test, I
agree that it's not a long time, but it's long enough to draw a
conclusion. Take, for example, cytomegalovirus and herpes virus, which is
in the middle of the curve. That is found in 50% of Americans and
Europeans, ever since we've had the tests available. This chart only
starts in 1985 because the HIV test started then. On that ground, you can
say that it's a long - established virus, it's an old virus in the
population. A hypot hetical new epidemic, like the flu epidemic which I'm
showing here, would come up in a season, peak, and disappear.

Now look at Candida and Pneumocystis, so-called AIDS diseases. These are
fungi which are normal inhabitants, guests in our lungs and on our skin.
They are in 100% of the population. Now look at HIV. The numbers are
small, but they are based on an enor mous amount of testing, over 20
millions AIDS tests are conducted in the United States per year; 10% of
the population, essentially. Twelve million blood donations are sampled
for HIV, 2.5 million men in the Army, recruits are tested. The United
States Job Corps is tested. Maternity clinics are tested. AIDS patients
are tested. Altogether 20 million tests.

On account of these tests, one million Americans were found to be
HIV-positive in 1985 and one million Americans were found to be
HIV-positive in 1992 and again in 1993. HIV is a totally long-
established virus and on the grounds of this type of epidemio logy, you
can extrapolate this curve back 200 years. It's as solid as that. You
can say the virus came with the immigrants 200 years ago to this country.
It's an old, long - established virus, but AIDS is a new disease. It's
not a good candidate for a new disease.

Now we say AIDS is sexually transmitted. Is that true? The AIDS
orthodoxy has tested transmission of HIV and we have a beautiful
experimental group to test it on, the American hemophiliacs. There are
20,000 American hemophiliacs. 15,000, or 75% of them, have HIV, owing to
blood transfusions from before the AIDS test. So for ten years now, they
are HIV positive. According to the virus hypothesis, they should
virtually all be dead. The reality is that the hemophiliacs are now
getting twice as old as they did only 15 years ago. They have never done
better than they do now in the history of hemophilia, where 75% of them or
15,000 have had HIV for ten years. It's a good record for HIV.
Logically, you could argue, if you were a total HIV fascist, you could say
HIV has doubled the life of hemophiliacs. (Laughter.) I'm not insisting
that's true, but it is consistent with the facts.

They have provided a group to see how readily HIV is transmitted sexually,
by sampling the spouses of hemophiliacs. Scientists have found that less
than 10% of their spouses, who had lived with them on an average of ten
years now, have picked up HIV from sexual contacts. On that basis, again,
it was calculated that on the average, 1000 unprotected sexual contacts
are necessary just to pick up HIV. Then a latent period of ten years is
to follow. So we can see it is a lot of work to pick up HIV. So it' s a
lot of work; you need a lot of contacts.

In other words, no virus, if it were a sexually transmitted virus, could
ever survive on that basis. Evolutionarily that would be a hopeless
condition. There is no virus that could live as a sexually transmitted
agent if it depended on 1000 sexual contacts. Typical venereal diseases
are transmitted at a much higher efficiency. Gonorrhea, syphilis, and
herpes are transmitted at an efficiency of almost 50%. If you have sexual
contact with someone who has gonorrhea, the chances for you to pick it up
is at least 50%. On 1000 contacts, nobody could make a living.

The only way HIV could survive is if it had another, more secure mode of
transmission. And that is known -- it is perinatal, like all other
retroviruses, in mice, chickens, monkeys that we have studies ad nauseum I
would say over the last 30 years. They are all transmitted from mother to
babies. And anything that is naturally transmitted perinatally is
harmless because anything that would be harmful and dependent on perinatal
transmission would be a fatal combination. The baby would die, the mother
would die, and the microbe would die. Microbes that are perinatally
transmitted in nature are harmless. E. coli is among them. Hepatitis-B
virus is naturally transmitted from mother to baby. 90% of the natives in
Africa or Australia have the virus. It's transmitted because it goes
through the guts; you don't have a shower or a diaper service. The mother
wipes the baby and there's the virus. And the baby doesn't get sick.
That's how polio was naturally transmitted, in the old days. Only when
the natu ral chain of transmission was interrupted, then it become
pathogenic when you first encountered it at the age of 15 or 20.

So HIV is clearly a perinatally transmitted virus and therefore not
pathogenic. If a virus or microbe that is normally not transmitted that
way is perinatally transmitted accidentally, like syphilis, the
consequences are disastrous. The baby can be blind or can die from it,
that occasionally happens, but it's not the natural mode of transmission.

Another argument that is against the virus hypothesis, and that's one of
the worst, the most clear-cut, came up last summer at the Amsterdam
International AIDS conference. It was called by several writers the
Amsterdam Surprise. There were dozens of AIDS cases, in risk groups, that
were HIV-free. They had pneumonia, they had Kaposi's sarcoma, there were
hemophiliacs with pneumonia, there were gays with Kaposi's, there were
junkies with tuberculosis, but did not have HIV. So, they called them
HIV- free AIDS cases and everybody was alarmed because there was a new
virus. There was no new virus. Now we have actually a perfect cover-up
on the part of the CDC. They gave it a new name that nobody can
pronounce, you can't even use it for Scrabble, it's call ed idiopathic CD4
lymphocytopenia.

It's a wonderful name. It won't appear in the Los Angeles Times, Nature,
or Science because nobody can remember what it was. When there's no HIV,
essentially we call a disease by the old name, as long as it's not AIDS.
So that in fact would have been th e strongest argument, again, one of the
most clear-cut arguments, if a disease is found in the absence of a
hypothetical cause, then it must be another cause that would have caused
the disease. But we don't hear about that much.

Now, in this case, if we were scientists, if we didn't have a four billion
dollar research budget or a grant and our companies would depend on it,
and thousands or millions of patients would have been told "You are
antibody positive; you won't get life in surance, you can't be in the
Army, you can't have a relationship, you'd better take AZT." We have
actually prescribed for them AZT...then it's too late to be scientifically
honest. You have to continue whatever your cause is.

But since we have among us alumni, we have an open mind, which is an
unusual problem, then we can reconsider. We can say, "What should we do?"
We should apply what's called the scientific method. The scientific
method is that you make an observation, i n this case it was the
observation that AIDS is a new disease, what could it be? Could it be an
infectious agent? Right, that's a legitimate hypothesis. Then you test
the hypothesis and see does it work, if it explains the observation, if it
makes valid predictions, then your hypothesis is good. If it doesn't,
which AIDS surely doesn't, (the viral hypothesis is a complete failure, in
results and in predictions) then you'd better make a new hypothesis.
That's what you expect from a graduate student an d even from a professor.

(Laughter) So, if we want to make a good hypothesis, then we want to
analyze first what we actually want to explain. What is AIDS? We have to
have a quick look back at AIDS. Is AIDS actually something that can be
fitted with a common cause? Let's have a look at AIDS. AIDS in America
is very difficult to reconcile with a single cause, because only about 62%
of all American AIDS diseases are immunodeficiencies. Let's say you were
to hypothesize there is an agent, virus or a drug, that would eliminate
the immune system, which could readily explain 62% of American AIDS cases,
which are pneumonia, Candidiasis, all sorts of microbes that move in, as I
said, when the door is left open on Telegraph Avenue.

But there are a full 38% of AIDS diseases in America and it's almost the
same in Europe, totally different in Africa...I'll come to that in a
second...that have nothing to do with immunodeficiency. There are either
Kaposi's sarcoma, which is a cancer, lymphomas, which is also a sort of
cancer, there are dementias or wasting disease which is not microbial.
There is a weight loss similar to anorexia or cachexia. You lose weight,
like typically junkies do, without an infectious agent that is associated
with it. Those add up to 38% of AIDS cases. They are not
immunodeficiencies and cannot be explained by the loss of T-cells. You
may have no T-cells whatsoever and your IQ could be exactly the same as
somebody who has an active immune system. The same is true for cancer.
Cancer is not the consequence of immune deficiency.

So, it's not easy to find a common denominator and thus a common cause for
such heterogeneous types of diseases. Second, when you look at the
so-called AIDS epidemics of different continents, you will find monumental
differences, as you will see on the next slide. Just compare the United
States, Europe, and Africa. You see, the American and European AIDS
epidemics are the same and the African is totally different, like day and
night. 90% of all European and American AIDS cases are males, but in
Africa they are sexually distributed evenly, like all other infectious
diseases, in fact, like most spontaneous diseases.

The American and European AIDS patients all come from these risk groups,
which are already listed, mainly intravenous drug users, male homosexuals,
hemophiliacs, transfusion recipients. The African AIDS patients come from
everywhere; they're from the gen eral population. If you look at the
diseases...we already went through some of them. On the left column are
the European diseases and American diseases. On the right column are the
African diseases. There is overlap between them, but the overlap is le ss
than 10%.

So clinically African AIDS is essentially tuberculosis, diarrhea, and
fever, and European and American AIDS is pneumonia, Candidiasis, Kaposi's,
wasting disease, and so on. There is overlap, but they are certainly very
different in their major distributi on.

The annual AIDS risk is a curiosity. If you can take the number of
antibody-positive Americans, estimated at one million, 30,000 to 40,000,
now more like 50,000, get AIDS, like 3 or 4% per year. But if you look in
Africa, the World Health Organization s ays there are six million
HIV-positives and only about 30,000, at least in the past couple of years,
have annually been reported to have AIDS. So, the annual AIDS risk for an
HIV-positive person in Europe and America is about 3-4% and in Africa it's
0.3% . See, you already learned something very practical from this talk.
If you are antibody positive, immediately move to Africa, (laughter) and
your odds of getting AIDS are 10 times lower. That's very
straightforward.

So from these kind of comparisons, you can clearly see we are dealing with
two entirely different epidemics, and epidemiologically, 50 and 90% male
are extremely different. There is no infectious disease that is ever so
unevenly distributed. Virtually all of them are 50%. So it is very
difficult to find a common cause. Even within America, we have different
risk groups and we have different sub-epidemics that have totally
different risks and have totally different diseases. Most
characteristically, the male homosexuals who are HIV-positive, they have
an annual AIDS risk of about 5%, 4-6%. That translates into a so-called
latent period of ten years for 50% of them to get AIDS. That's just
another way of expressing it. It makes it more easy to compare...that's
why I put it together in that table, on an annual basis.

Now you can see, the homosexuals are almost the only ones who ever develop
Kaposi's sarcoma. I'll give you a reason why that is. But the American
transfusion recipients have a much higher risk of developing AIDS when
they are HIV positive. It's about 50% per year. But they get never
anything like Kaposi's or dementia or wasting disease. They always get
infectious diseases, primarily pneumonia.

The American babies also have a higher risk than the homosexuals and the
intravenous drug diseases. Their diseases are mostly neurological
diseases, retardation and dementia, and bacterial infections, which until
January, 1993, were not seen in other gro ups.

So different groups have different diseases and as you can see from the
annual AIDS risk, spanning from Africans to Americans to recipients of
transfusions, they vary over 100-fold. That is totally incompatible with
a common cause or a common infectious agent. There is not one virus, not
one microbe, that is so selective and so different in different groups, in
different countries, or causes different diseases on top of it. It's
virtually impossible that this is due to a common cause.

Now, if you were to decide what AIDS is caused by, you should ask
first...we should have asked at the beginning, is AIDS actually an
infectious disease? Even the CDC considered lifestyle interpretations
until the famous Gallo-Heckler press conference. Bec ause that came from
the NIH, it was binding to all public health institutes in the country, to
the CDC, to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and to all recipients of
research grants, which means everybody who is doing research in the free
state univer sities in this country. Like it or not, they all depend on
Robert Gallo, Sam Broder, and Anthony Fauci for their grants, because
otherwise their machines would stop grinding because these universities
could never pay for the equipment that we need in the laboratory. It all
comes from the central government. We have totalitarian science directed
entirely from Washington in hypothetically free universities. You can
survive with tenure but you certainly cannot run a centrifuge or pay your
graduate students or write a paper if you don't have a government grant.

So the government controls the scientists totally centrally, even at
universities that represent themselves as reservations of academic
freedom, which has long been sacrificed due to the high costs of high
technology which we are practicing now.

Now, if we wanted to distinguish between infectious and not, here are the
hallmarks of infectious diseases versus non-infectious diseases: All
infectious diseases, zero exceptions, all of them, viruses, bacteria,
fungi, you name it, are equally distributed between the sexes. Of
course, if you look at a narrow enough group, if you look at a monastery,
that is male or female, which is what they do in cohort research, you'll
find it all of the sudden infecting only the boys or the girls. But if
you averag e it out over 250,000,000 Americans, 200,000,000 Europeans, or
a billion Africans, you will always find it equally distributed between
the sexes. No exceptions.

All infectious diseases strike within weeks, days, or at the most, months
of infection. There are no slow viruses or slow microbes. There are slow
virologists, but no slow viruses. (Laughter) The reason is very simple.
Microbes are very simple in design. They have generation times of
minutes or hours or days. And for them, the human body or animal body is
a hundred liters of juice in which they replicate as fast and as much as
they can. There is no control for that. They take what they can get.
The only restriction for them is the human or the animal immune system. A
good immune system stops them right at the border. As soon as they
penetrate host territory, it says "Here's the enemy -- stop it." So it's
an asymptomatic infection.

If the immune system is poor, they penetrate deeper into it and if there
is no immune system, then bye-bye host. The microbe takes over. That
takes weeks at the very most. Microbes are essentially self-replicating
toxins. Lets say a cigarette is consi dered a toxin. We have to smoke 20
years to build up enough toxicity to get lung cancer and emphysema. With
a microbe, you need just one cigarette, because that cigarette makes
billions of cigarettes right in your own body. That's what a microbe is
lik e. It's a self-replicating toxin. That's why microbes are fast or
never. It's not to say that it can't come back or hang in there for a
long time, but the rule is that they strike now or never. There is no
precedent for a case where you say, "I was at wild party, it was
wonderful, but doctor, would I get a venereal disease?" The doctor says,
"When was the party," and the patient says "Four weeks ago," so he says
"Don't worry, it's okay."

But not nowadays. You have a great party. You ask the doctor "Do I get
AIDS?" And he says, "Come back ten years from now?" [You say] "What do I
get?" "Well, diarrhea, dementia, can't say." It doesn't even matter with
whom you slept. If the person you slept with had diarrhea, you could
have Kaposi's sarcoma 15 years from now. That's totally inconsistent with
the virus hypothesis. Nothing like that ever existed before in virology
or microbiology. The disease followed soon or it didn't follow. The y
can come back. Virus reactivation and things like that. But the primary
response is now or never.

Now look at non-infectious diseases, what the characteristics are: They
spread non-randomly, depending on exposure to the toxin. Smokers are
almost the only ones who get lung cancer and emphysema. Others can get it
too, but it is very rare. It is very strictly restricted to these risk
groups. Liver cirrhosis is common among those who drink a bottle of
Schnapps per day and other sources. And those who drink tea, you hardly
ever see cirrhosis. The diseases do not follow after the party when you
take drugs. Everybody, even the President, occasionally exhaled some drug
(laughter) but it takes a long time and yet it would be nice to be close
to him...secondary exposure I guess. (Laughter).

You could have a party on cocaine with two or three or five or ten and you
get out of the gutter, take a cold shower, brush your teeth, and eat some
vitamins and you're fine. But if you do it every day for ten years,
that's what's euphemistically called the latency period of the virus.
Then you check in with pneumonia. Then you find a little virus there.??
That is how drugs work. You have to smoke two packs of cigarettes for 20
years before you get pneumonia of before you get emphysema and you have t
o drink two bottles of Schnapps a day for 20 years before you get liver
cirrhosis. The drugs, they have "latent periods" because the human body
is designed to live with a lot of junk, we grew up on this planet when it
was much less hospitable than it is now. We were living with a lot of
dirt. We are designed to take a lot of intoxication before we succumb to
it. But we were not designed to inject cocaine three times a day for ten
years. That is a very recent development in the history of the human ra
ce. And that is what can break down the immune system after a long time.

So, my hypothesis is very simple, therefore: AIDS in America and Europe,
not in Africa, is exclusively the consequence of the long-term consumption
of recreational drugs such as injected drugs, cocaine and heroin, and
unfortunately AZT, which is by far the most toxic drug that has ever been
approved for long-term consumption in the free world, and is now
prescribed if a patient has antibodies to HIV as AIDS prophylaxis, and
those who have already AIDS, as AIDS therapy. That is one of the most
toxic drugs out.

So, how can I back up this hypothesis? Chronologically, the drug use
epidemic in America and subsequently in Europe started after the Viet Nam
War. Here are some data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics: In 1980,
the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported seizures of 500 kilograms of
cocaine in the whole United States. In 1990, ten years later, they
confiscated 100,000 kilograms of cocaine. Perhaps you recall there was a
garage confiscated with two or three tons of the good stuff in it, 100
tons con fiscated two or three years ago. A couple of tons were
confiscated three years ago. The number has gone up since.

So the consumption of cocaine has gone up 200-fold in their books. They
estimate they confiscate 10% of the good stuff. Ten years ago, and the
same percentage now, because as soon as Congress approves an increased
budget for the drug agencies, the drug lords get immediate higher payments
on the street and can double their equipment as well. So the amount that
is confiscated has stayed exactly the same.

Amphetamines, the consumption has gone up 50-fold in the past ten years,
according to the Narcotics Bureau, from 2 million confiscated to 100
million confiscated. And again, they estimate they confiscate 10% of the
stuff. So if you multiple that by ten, you have 100,000,000, that's
divided by four or five doses for every American. Since I didn't use mine
in that year, there's a little more for a couple of others. 250 thousand
Americans used nitrite inhalants in 1980. That trend is declining; it's
goin g down. Most of them actually were the gays. Eight million Americans
are currently using cocaine regularly, which is not terribly well-defined;
that means several times a week.

(Gap in lecture while changing tapes.)

80,000 of the 250,000 American AIDS patients are intravenous drug users.
Almost all heterosexual AIDS patients are intravenous drug users in
America. The same is true in Europe. Now the biggest risk groups,
though, are male homosexuals. The CDC and als o the Narcotics offices do
not take oral drugs like poppers, nitrite inhalants, and so on very
seriously. Cocaine, yes, but not the others. They are not recorded as
health risks 10% of Western men and perhaps women are considered to be
homosexual. That is 8 million adult male homosexuals in this country, the
same percentage in Europe. But only 25,000 of these, 0.2%, gets AIDS.
We're talking about a small minority, that minority that is said to
practice risk behavior, which have many sexual contacts, r ecord numbers
of them, hundreds, sometimes even thousands. Those records are not
achieved with the conventional sex drugs, that is, testosterone and
estrogen. Like in the Olympics, the records in the bedrooms are now
broken with chemicals. Here is a list of chemicals that are used.

This is a CDC statistic: shortly before the virus hypothesis was published
by Jaffe, a group of 170 AIDS patients, 96% of them have reported regular
use of nitrite inhalants. Nitrites are the mutagens and carcinogens that
were known to molecular biology and in my opinion are the direct cause of
Kaposi's sarcoma and also pneumonia. Ethyl chloride inhalants, cocaine,
amphetamines, phencyclidine, you add up the percentages and you can see
that everyone has used at least several of these drugs at once. In 1987,
a group in San Francisco, almost exactly the same numbers, again from the
CDC from public health studies reporting these numbers.

So the drug use correlates very well with those gays who are at risk for
AIDS and with all heterosexuals who are intravenous drug users. The
remainder are the hemophiliacs and transfusion recipients. They have
diseases that would have occurred in the ab sence of drugs. That has to
do with their condition, and we can explain those in a minute.

Now in order to prove that drugs rather than HIV are the cause of AIDS, we
would have to show that among those who are HIV infected, only those who
also use drugs get AIDS, or we have better yet controls in which drug
users without HIV get the same diseases. Here are a few examples of both
of these predictions:

Here are some groups...here is a group of 65 intravenous drug users from
New York that were persuaded or asked to go into a medical program. I
think it was half of them, I'll have to check that, continued to use
drugs. They could not be persuaded. They came to the clinic but they
continued to inject drugs. They lost 35% of their T-cells per year over a
two-year period. The group that didn't continue the drugs, that was
either on methadone or withdrew altogether, maintained their T-cell level
from the point where they entered the study.

A similar experiment was published in Zurich in Switzerland, which had a
rather liberal drug policy. They handed out drugs and needles. Those who
continued on drugs for a year or two after the program started had three
times the incidence of AIDS-definin g diseases like pneumonias and T-cell
deficiencies compared to those who had discontinued the drugs.

Here in Los Angeles was a group of 11 persons on AZT. They all gave up
AZT a year ago, it was published in The Lancet, in favor of an
experimental vaccine. Ten out of eleven recovered cellular immunity
within two weeks. It was in The Lancet. So AZT was clearly highly
involved in suppressing the immune system. Well, the bone marrow is one
of the most susceptible parts to AZT chain termination because it's one of
the fastest growing cells in the body. It's killing the bone marrow.
That's essentially what I'm saying. It's AIDS by prescription.

There are other examples of AZT recipients when they discontinue it, they
recovered from muscle atrophy, or they recovered their bone marrow when
the AZT was discontinued.

Here are some examples of people where we are comparing the same diseases
in the same risk groups in the absence and presence of HIV. These would
be the HIV-free AIDS cases. They would be called officially by the Center
for Disease Control now, more recently, ICLs, idiopathic CD4+
lymphocytopenia diseases. I've practiced a lot; now I can say it with
little hesitation in between. (Laughter)

So now look at New York City intravenous drug users, reporting in Science,
one of the major AIDS journals these days. There were something like 50
cases with and without HIV. They had exactly the same diseases, the same
pneumonias, the same tuberculosis , the same endocarditis. There was a
group of homosexuals in New York who had all used poppers. All of them
had Kaposi's sarcoma; not one of them had HIV.

Again, a group of intravenous drug users in New York who had been followed
for 20 years. Their T-cells had declined way down to below 200 or 400.
Only 2 out of the 21 were HIV positive in that example.

In Sweden and in Germany, the mortality of junkies with and without HIV
was compared and was found to be exactly the same. In Amsterdam, 300
junkies were compared for HIV. They had all immune deficiency.
Immunodeficiency is based on T-cell counts and is based on symptomatic
infections. 100-something were HIV positive; 200 were HIV negative. They
had exactly the same diseases. Again, in New York, intravenous drug users
with fever, weight loss, night sweats, diarrhea, and mouth infections, all
classic al AIDS diseases -- the same with and without HIV.

Here in San Francisco, crack babies, babies born to mothers who use drugs
during pregnancy, that was published last year, 8 with HIV, 20 without
HIV, had the same mental retardation, neuromotor problems, and
developmental retardation. Another study had 19 babies born to
drug-addicted mothers. 18 were HIV-free; one was positive, and all had the
same immunodeficiencies.

So, the conclusion is that drugs can easily explain the American AIDS
epidemic and they resolve all of the problems that the virus/AIDS
hypothesis has failed to do. Here's just a few of them: How come is AIDS
new when the virus is old? Well, AIDS is ne w because of the drug
epidemic in America. It started after the Viet Nam War and escalated over
100-fold in the past ten years alone, according to the Bureau of Justice
statistics and those from the National Institute of Drug Abuse. Why are
males the only targets in Europe and America? There again, we have the
answer if we look at the numbers from the Bureau of Justice statistics and
also European statistics.

Males consume 80% of the hard recreational drugs, that is cocaine and
heroin. Women are far behind in that regard. They are catching up. It
doesn't mean they're smarter, you see. It's like smoking. Smoking
started with men. Men had lung cancer 20 years ago exclusively. Now
women are catching up, proving that they're not smarter than men.
(Laughter). Now the same is happening with AIDS. Women are catching up
with AIDS and women are injecting drugs more than they did 15 years ago.

Gays are the only sexual group that use consistently drugs for sex. There
again, I'll point out it's a very small minority. And they use nitrite
inhalants to facilitate anal intercourse. Nitrite inhalants were used
initially, prescription drugs a hundr ed years ago, to relax smooth
muscle, to prevent heart attack and angina, in small doses like 0.2
milliliters. People who are on those drugs usually don't live very long
and you can't look at long-term side effects. But users of sexual
aphrodisiacs, as they are used, or sexual stimulants in gay bars, in
sometimes milliliters, 50 milliliter doses. That's what a dose is called
in that instance. And some of the gays came into the hospital with 75% of
their hemoglobin oxidized to methemoglobin from inhalation of nitrite
inhalants.

As I said, they are the traditional carcinogens in cancer research and
mutagens in genetic research. And they are considered harmless by the
medical orthodoxy! They tell you, make sure your condoms are clean and
your needles are shiny...that's all you have to worry about. We are not
cops...drugs are fine. That's unfortunately what Project Inform tells it
clients in San Francisco: Drugs are fine; viruses are dangerous. And
here we go continuing inhaling classical mutagens and carcinogens at
milliliter doses, when we know for years that they are carcinogens and
mutagens.

So it explains the maleness of AIDS in the Western world. In Africa, it's
equally distributed because it's not a drug disease in Africa. In Africa,
AIDS builds out of malnutrition, parasitic infections, and poor
sanitation.

Now, why did AIDS science go wrong? Here we are, essentially science is
progressive, we know everything and we think we have everything under
control. It's not easy to explain to many people, but we are under the
spell of the only triumph that medicine. ..virology...has really ever
achieved in terms of public health benefits. And that is the elimination
of infectious diseases. Starting with Pasteur and Koch and ending with
Salk and Sabin, with the elimination of polio.

And in the spell of this and the admiration of the germ theory, everybody
in the medical profession, immuno-biology, is inclined to look for an
infectious agent long before they want to consider alternatives, which are
much less popular and much less solvable. And look, the price for this
is enormous. In the 20s, the U.S. Public Service, the precursor of the
NIH and the CDC, decided that the pellagra epidemic in this country that
killed tens of thousands of farmers was an infectious disease, transmitted
very much like AIDS, by sex and poor hygiene. Until a doctor...a
pharmacologist from New York, finally discovered it was a nutritional
deficiency that turned out to be a vitamin B deficiency.

Most recently we are saying that cervical cancer in women is due to human
papillomavirus. Ten years ago, it was herpes virus, you remember. There
was just a study at Berkeley. It studied 400 female students on the
Berkeley campus. 250 were papillomavirus positive. In reality, 50% of
all women in this country have these papillomaviruses and men have them
too, and the incidence of cervical cancer is totally independent of it.
The percentage of women with cervical cancer with and without
papillomavirus reflects exactly the percentage of papillomavirus in this
country. No evidence whatever.

AIDS is said to be a viral disease and is in reality is drug disease. The
most recent example is chronic fatigue, which is said to be a yuppie or
female disease. It's also said to be a retrovirus now. That's coming up
in the literature now.

So, my conclusion then is, if I turn out to be right, this would be a very
testable, very easy hypothesis to test. We could feed the drugs that I
blame AIDS on, readily to experimental animals and it would be in fact a
picnic to find human volunteers as well. We could check those effects on
them and see whether these drugs are pathogenic. There's plenty of
literature to document that these drugs are all pathogenic. They have
been in the past and are now, and there is even now some data that these
drug s are all pathogenic. AZT, nobody has to ask a question about it.
It was developed to kill cells and it does it exquisitely well. Nitrites
are mutagenic and carcinogenic, and cocaine has traditionally caused
pneumonia, weight loss and tuberculosis, way back in the early part of the
century when the first cocaine users were studied in Vienna and Paris
around the days of Sigmund Freud when everybody thought cocaine was
totally chic, it even was in Coca-Cola then in low doses.

It is also totally testable epidemiologically. And that's really a shame,
considering the money that is spent in AIDS research, that this is not
done. We could take a hundred hemophiliacs with HIV, 100 without, matched
for all parameters, and see who ge ts AIDS diseases. There is not one
such study in the AIDS literature that has ever shown that HIV causes AIDS
diseases. There are 80 studies alone that I know that show the opposite,
that show it makes no difference, but they are not advertised.

Equally well, this could be done with intravenous drug users. You could
compare a hundred with and without HIV, or gays with and without HIV. No
controlled study is ever done because it would threaten or perhaps kill
the virus/AIDS hypothesis.

So, in my opinion, then, AIDS is a totally preventable disease and could
in fact be a largely curable disease if we would consider it as a toxic
disease caused by recreational drugs. I conclude by sort of dedicating
this to all those who are unfortunatel y misled by the current hypothesis,
all intravenous drug users and all drug users, the victims of AZT, who
were never told that these drugs cause AIDS diseases, and to all those
antibody positives, and there are millions, unfortunately, who were never
tol d that the HIV hypothesis is unproven, and as we know recently, based
on four fraudulent papers. The papers by Gallo, on which the hypothesis
is based, are found to be fraudulent on several counts by the Office of
Research and Technology of the National Institute of Health.

Thank you very much.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

(Q: AIDS isn't really a disease but rather a syndrome.)

That is correct. The S is AIDS is actually short for syndrome, and
syndrome is a collection of diseases. I'm only repeating now the Centers
for Disease Control definition for AIDS. They never really said it's a
disease, but it has evolved...it has become a disease to the press. It
is more convenient because if you call it a disease, then it fits a single
cause. A disease is usually by definition something that has one single
cause. The syndrome could have many causes. And they try to get away
from that. But the initial wording was actually quite adequate:
"acquired syndrome," acquired by drugs, in my opinion. Hard to acquire,
not even easy. It takes a lot of junk before you go to the point of no
return.

(Q: Can you comment on the etiology of the African syndrome?)

The African syndrome is not as well described as the European and
American, but you can correlate it fairly well with protein malnutrition,
parasitic infections, and poor sanitation. They don't have healthy water
there. They don't have Burger King. They don't get steak, and they
don't have vitamins. These are the diseases of poor health and poverty
that were common in Europe and American before we knew the laws of
nutrition, before we knew about vitamins and proteins, and people were
eating, you know, schmutz and bread and potatoes and Schnapps and thought
they had everything to eat, why should they get sick. They had cholera,
they had flu, and they had tuberculosis at the turn of the century. These
diseases have disappeared, not because we have doctors handing out AZT
and antibiotics. They [antibiotics] help a little bit too, but certainly
not a lot. The majority of the reasons why the infectious diseases have
disappeared is because of nutrition and sanitation. Our immune systems
are in top shape because we get proteins, vitamins, we have filtered
water, we have showers, and we have aspirin. Not so much because we have
doctors giving us antibiotics. That helps, too, but that only eliminates
the last 2-3%. And that's not available in Africa, or in many places.
They have serious malnutrition, poverty, parasitic infections.

(Q: Have you proposed an experiment to prove your theory?)

Yes, actually I have. I've finally proposed an experiment. I have even
submitted it. I want to...there's a doctor, a professor actually, at
Davis. I asked him for advice. He's an inhalation toxicologist,
Professor Robert... We were going to check pop pers in mice. Give mice
poppers, let them inhale the poppers and see whether they get pneumonia or
Kaposi's sarcoma. And we are also checking AZT, the toxicity of AZT,
which, in our opinion, is falsely determined as a millimolar of toxicity.
We thinks it's a micromolar...1000 times more toxic than it originally was
said.

When the stakes get as big as with AIDS, when it becomes political, when
Reagan gets re-elected and the gays are marching, we want an answer, then
of course it becomes political. So then, the government said, "We have
the cause of AIDS." So now it's very difficult for the government to say
Peter Duesberg gets 100,000 to do research and say this is all baloney,
and the remaining part of the scientists get four billion dollars to chase
HIV. That's the problem.

After eight years of Gallo's hypothesis and not saving one life, maybe
some people will actually apply again the old-fashioned scientific method
to look for an alternative.

(Q: Back to the African AIDS epidemic...

There have been additional problems in Africa. There have had a lot of
wars there that made things worse, and the cities have developed there in
the last 20 years where these things are exacerbated. People move out of
their traditional environment where they had essentially a stable
nutritional basis now to the cities where they eat junk or whatever. So
you see some of the problems with that.

Well, the demographics are very interesting. In the press and the New
York Times they relate that Africa is going to disappear from AIDS. If
you look at the statistics, Africa's real problem is the population
explosion. They have the fastest growth rate in the world...3% annual
increase in Central Africa. That's called the AIDS Belt in science. The
fastest population problem in the world, in America it's less than 1%; in
Europe it's less than 0.5%, and in Asia it's less than 1%. In Africa,
it's over 3%. That's what you're going to see there.

(Q: Inaudible)

That's why they never get AIDS through a blood transfusion. They get HIV
through a blood transfusion. There are controlled studies on that view
again that have compared recipients of blood transfusions in America with
and without HIV. The mortality is exactly the same. It sounds shocking,
but 50% of Americans receiving a blood transfusion today will be dead a
year from now...50%...that's the odds if you get a transfusion. Not from
the transfusion, because the average transfusion recipient has serious
health problems. They are either bypass operations or cancer surgery, hip
transplants, serious diseases, mostly of old age.

Paul Gann died that way. And he became a national, or certainly a
California, AIDS case. Here's a man with two five-fold bypass operations
and a broken hip at 77, died from pneumonia. In the press, it was an AIDS
case, a heterosexual AIDS case.

(Q: How would you explain the following case: a young heterosexual
girl, with no intravenous drug use, whose only source of contact would be
heterosexual sex, who remained healthy until a diagnosis was made with a
T-cell count of under 100 in the prese nce of an opportunistic infection.
Since heterosexual sex was the only risk factor that she was exposed to,
how do you explain the presence of a depressed immune system and an
opportunistic infection?)

It would be for me presumptuous to explain such a case without better
knowledge of the medical background, but I would like to remind you that
all AIDS diseases are old diseases. There is a low background in the
general population. There will be 1 in 100,000 men and women who get
tuberculosis, who get immune depression, who get a yeast infection,
candidiasis, without any reason that I could explain to you.

(Q: Unintelligible. Same guy.)

There is a low incidence...there's a low background...in the general
population, and has always been there, of tuberculosis, of all AIDS
diseases, but the only people who get it above that background, that made
AIDS visible as a disease, was when 20-45 year-old men and a few women
would get it, and all of those who are above that normal background, are
long-term intravenous drug users and AZT recipients.

(Q: Do you think Clinton's administration will take a different view on
AIDS?)

And more money in fact in this case is counter- productive. See, money is
good if you know where the moon is, you can send a man there with a lot of
money. But if you don't know where the moon is, it can be
counter-productive. You create an orthodoxy. Now we have 100,000
scientists studying HIV. They are not going to give up the money, the
reputation, the meetings they get to, the funds they get, readily for
something else. Because that's all they know.

All my buddies in the AIDS field are millionaires. I'm the last one to
live on a UC salary. It's true. They are all millionaires. They all have
companies, mistresses, Porsches, Mercedes (laughter), frequent flyers,
everything. I'm still messing around in the old style in Berkeley. It's
very true. And they're not likely to give that up readily. So if you put
in more money, you create an ever bigger orthodoxy and everybody who
questions this then is even a smaller minority. That's the problem, is
the money.