Is the bubble about to burst?

Call it intuition, but something tells me that it is about time for science to be turned on its head for being wrong.  Again.

Recently, published reports from various scientific fields offer new insight about possible ways the human immune system wards off disease, specifically those conditions blamed on viruses, such as AIDS and hepatitis.

For starters, the latest word from atrociously well-funded AIDS researchers is that they’ve discovered the secret to defeating the HI virus by studying elite controllers (ECs), those people who test positive for HIV antibodies but never get sick, at least not according to any of the major AIDS theories.

As virologists, these scientists at MIT ultimately base their research and subsequent findings on assumptions established using the original faulty research of the now-discredited “co-discoverer” of HIV, Robert Gallo.  According to them, ECs have a genetic trait that causes them to create “super t-cells” that can defeat HIV and other viruses, such as Hep C.

Glia cell in cell culture from neonatal mouse brain, green: glia cell, red: peroxisome. (Courtesy of Max-Planck-Institute for experimental medicine, Goettingen, Germany)

Meanwhile, across town at Children’s Hospital Boston, less well known molecular and cellular biologists are busy performing research that continues to throw cold water on  Virology’s notion that t-cells are the key to fighting viral infections in the first place.  According to them, organelles inside the cell known as peroxisomes can detect virus invasion signals and launch a limited antiviral offensive. Other organelles, the mitochondria, follow up with a more definitive antiviral counterattack.

Even the headlines for these very different explanations for stopping viral infections tell a story.  Virologists are “finding secrets” to “mysterious viruses” while the cellular biologists report “mild-mannered helpers” of the immune system.  While mild mannered may not sound nearly so dazzling as secretive and mysterious, this research being conducted at a community hospital sounds exciting.

What is a poor layperson like myself to think of these very different explanations for how our immune systems work?  I may be out of my league to try to analyze these kinds of research reports too finely, but it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist (or a virologist or a molecular biologist) to realize that “Science” has not conclusively defined the process by which these supposedly lethal viruses kill.

Add this new information to the huge questions of what viruses actually are, where they come from and what they do, as articulated by Janine Roberts in her book Fear of the Invisible, for example, and the basis for skepticism grows exponentially.  Roberts reports on the body of research conducted by cellular biologists purporting that at least some viruses—retroviruses, in particular—may actually be cellular messengers that are manufactured by our body’s cell.  These are called endogenous viruses and every human being is chock full of them for good reasons.

Reading these various accounts of what is going on in the world of Science recently has led me to think that we just might soon be reading about a significant and newsworthy breakthrough very soon.  I hope that isn’t just my personal optimism working overtime.

I also read the tea leaves of published accounts by the AIDS industry and it appears that they, too, see the writing on the wall of the demise of the ‘HIV=AIDS, unless you take the expensive and toxic drugs for the rest of your life’ meme.

The line between the terms “HIV” and “AIDS” have been blurred since the beginning of the epidemic, resulting in lengthy and convoluted treatises that attempt to explain how AIDS is not a disease, but rather a syndrome of diseases, yet the treatment of choice is one-size-fits-all.  More recently, AIDS is becoming even more blurred as public health policy makers (and grant seekers) now lump it in with malaria, tuberculosis and other viral diseases like hepatitis.  This appears to me to be a rather transparent attempt to keep funding within the AIDS establishment, rather than refocusing the commitment to fight long standing epidemics of actual diseases that can be cured and prevented without drugs.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the work of cellular biologists will soon result in a new way of viewing illness from diseases like these in the very near future.  This new view will hopefully be heeded and will result in a shift of our scarce public funding resources from “fighting sneaky viruses” to working to eliminate the common contributing factors of malnutrition, poverty, lack of sanitation and clean water and drug abuse.

Then again, maybe what I’m feeling is simply optimism, rather than intuition.

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