How Serge Lang Confronted the World of Sociopathic Science that formed the foundation of AIDS and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research.

Serge Lang (1927-2005) was one of the most distinguished elder academic statesman in the group intellectuals and scientists that challenged the science of HIV. A mathematician known for his accomplishments in number theory and as the author of numerous graduate level mathematics text books, he taught at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. He was Professor Emeritus at Yale University at the time of his death. He was very active in the Vietnam anti-war movement and spent a great deal of time challenging the misuse of science and mathematics and identifying the spread of misinformation on a number of issues. Lang was rewarded for his interest in the Duesbergian criticism of HIV and for speaking out on the questionable scientific procedures of the HIV establishment, by having his distinguished career in mathematics framed by the same dirty little Orwellian trick used on other HIV critics: he was labeled an “AIDS denialist,” by that paragon of sober objectivity, Wikipedia.

     As Lang surveyed the manner in which AIDS research was being conducted and the outrageous way that Duesberg was being treated, he was appalled and feared for the integrity of science itself. In 1984, his long critique of the HIV/AIDS theory was published in the Fall issue of Yale Scientific. He opened his piece by pointing out the sleight of hand involved in the naming of the virus only associated with AIDS which was called “Human Immunodeficiency Virus” before adequate evidence had been gathered to show that it actually deserved that title. Which, of course it didn’t. Lang’s critical vision of what was transpiring in AIDS was quite damming: “ . . . to an extent that undermines classical standards of science, some purported scientific results concerning ‘HIV’ and ‘AIDS’ have been handled by press releases, by misinformation, manipulating the media and people at large.” Much of Lang’s analysis of AIDS science supports this book’s contention that AIDS could best be described as science at its most abnormal. But he stayed away from the matter of the motivation behind the breakdown of science, asserting “I am not here concerned with intent but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground.” Even though Lang steered clear of digging into the bigotry that motivated and unified the whole pseudoscientific enterprise, he did make it abundantly clear that there was something not kosher about the field of HIV/AIDS research. He argued that there wasn’t even a proper definition of “AIDS” and “thus a morass about HIV and AIDS has been created.” Lang called the established view of AIDS “dogma” and he was horrified by the way people who dared to challenge the “dogma” were being treated, noting that critics were unfairly being maligned by being called “flatearthers” or told that by just asking questions or being skeptical they were themselves threats to the public health. He was very sensitive to the emotional blackmail that was a staple in the AIDS establishment’s psychological armamentarium.

     In the Yale Scientific piece Lang argued that “the public at large are not properly informed” and in order for them to know what was really happening, people had to turn to sources outside of the official scientific media. He thought that the way AIDS misinformation was being spread was itself an important issue that needed a focused study. He charged that the official scientific press had failed miserably by obstructing legitimate dissent and that not only would the public lose “trust in the scientific establishment,” but people would not be “warned of practices which may be dangerous to their health.” As we now know, he was only seeing the tip of the pseudoscientific iceberg.

     Lang reiterated the Mullis contention that there were no papers that provided proof that HIV is the cause of AIDS, and no serious HIV animal model for the disease. He was very concerned about the unreliable tests for HIV: “The blood test for HIV does not determine directly the presence of the virus.” The test cross-reacted with numerous other diseases. He argued that the AIDS numbers coming out of Africa were based on faulty testing. In terms of the HHV-6 catastrophe that everyone was willfully blind to at the time, it is interesting to note Lang’s argument that “there exist thousands of Americans who have AIDS-defining diseases but are HIV negative.” Had he said millions, we might be calling him a prophet of the HHV-6 spectrum catastrophe. The argument for HIV was made even worse by the fact that there were “hundreds of thousands who test HIV positive but have not developed AIDS-defining diseases.” He accused the CDC of playing games with numbers to support their official image of the epidemic. He was also critical of the CDC’s circular definition of AIDS that made it look like there was a 100% correlation between HIV and AIDS in the public’s mind. He argued that HIV positivity might “be merely a marker rather than a cause for whatever disease is involved.” He was intrigued by the Duesbergian recreational drug hypothesis, but remained open-minded. He wrote, “I have no definitive answer. I merely question the line upheld up to now by the biomedical establishment, and repeated uncritically in the press, that ‘HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.’” He felt that because most scientists treated HIV=AIDS as a given, “some scientists try to fit experimental data into this postulate, actually without success.” They succeed even when they fail: when the so-called AIDS virus doesn’t meet expectations, Lang notes that it is then called “enigmatic” without anyone going back to basics and questioning the science and logic that form its foundation upon which it stands.

     Lang was troubled by the unwillingness of the establishment to fund research into alternative hypotheses about AIDS causation—particularly Duesberg’s recreational drug hypothesis. He felt that the evidence that the recreational inhalant, “poppers” (amyl nitrite), played a role in AIDS via the development of Kaposi’s sarcoma, was compelling enough that it didn’t deserve the cold financial shoulder it was consistently getting from those in charge of the governmental funding of AIDS research

     In the Yale Scientific piece Lang also criticized “establishment scientists who have tried, so far mostly successfully, to keep reports questioning the establishment dogma about HIV out of the mainstream press.” The Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science organized a symposium for June 21, 1994 called “The Role of HIV in AIDS: Why There is Still a Controversy.”  Lang reported that the AAAS “has come under fire from U.S. AIDS researchers and public health officials” and the symposium was almost cancelled. An article about the symposium in the journal, Nature, quoted a professor from Harvard as saying that the people involved were “fringe” people. David Baltimore was quoted as saying, “This is a group of people who have denied the scientific facts. There is no question at all that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Anyone who gets up publicly and says the opposite is encouraging people to risk their lives.” Again the emotional blackmail of what today would be called the “concern trolls of HIV/AIDS.”

     Lang reported that while the symposium was finally held, Nature made a point of not covering it. Lang sharply noted that “Nature’s readers are not given evidence on which to base an informed or independent judgment. Thus does Nature manipulate its readers.” And thus did that esteemed journal help enable the abnormal science of Holocaust II.

     Lang captures the manner in which the media was manipulated during the AIDS era in his description of a study meant to demolish Duesberg’s drug hypothesis: “A piece ‘Does drug use cause AIDS?’ by M.S. Ascher, H.W. Shepherd., W. Winkelstein Jr. and E. Vittinghoff was published in the Nature issue of 11 March 1993. This piece was published as a ‘Commentary.’ About a week before publication, nature issued a press release concerning this piece headlined: ‘DRUG USE DOES NOT CAUSE AIDS.’ The press release concluded: ‘These findings seriously undermine the argument put forward by Dr. Peter Duesberg, of the University of California at Berkley, that drug consumption causes AIDS. . . .’” Lang noted that Duesberg was blind-sided because the press was notified and was asking him for a response even before he had even had a chance to see the forthcoming piece. Lang wrote bitterly, “Thus Nature and the authors of the article use the media to manipulate public opinion before their article had been submitted to scientific scrutiny by other scientists (other than possible referees), and especially by Duesberg who is principally concerned.”

     Lang attacked the press release, writing that it made several misrepresentations including the manner in which the sample of men studied was gathered: “ . . . the press release suppressed the additional information that the sampling came from a definite segment of San Francisco households.” Lang’s analysis of what the Ascher group called “a rigorously controlled epidemiological model for the evaluation of aetiological hypotheses” pointed to numerous flaws that made the study look like a bad joke—which was par for the course in the world of AIDS science. He notes that predictably, The New York Times which, with the help of Lawrence Altman, a reporter who was a former CDC employee, was the world’s most prestigious echo chamber for the government’s AIDS research, ran with the ball. In an article by Gina Kolata called “Debunking doubts that H.I.V. causes AIDS,” propagated “the misinformation of the [Nature] press release and of the ‘Commentary.’”

     Lang’s sense of scientific standards was offended by the whole picture of AIDS science that he saw: “I take no position here on the relative merits of the AIDS virus hypothesis or the AIDS drug hypothesis (in whatever form they may be formulated). I do take a position against the announcement of purported scientific results via superficial and defective press releases, and before scientists at large have had a chance to evaluate the scientific merits of such results are purportedly based.” What Lang didn’t fully understand was that this kind of propagandistic manipulation of truth was actually business as usual in the abnormal, totalitarian science of "Holocaust II."

     One of the more amusingly outrageous aspects of Ascher’s ‘Commentary’ in Nature, appears at the end of the piece: “The energies of Duesberg and his followers could be better applied to unraveling the enigmatic mechanism of the HIV pathogenesis of AIDS.” To this patronizing bum's rush, Lang responded, “I find it presumptuous and objectionable for scientists to tell others where energies ‘could better be applied.’ Scientific standards as I have known them since I was a freshman at Caltech require that some energies be applied to scrutinize data on which experiments are based, in documenting the accuracy of the data, its significance, its completeness, and to determine whether conclusions allegedly based on these data are legitimate or not.” Lang didn’t realize that Ascher was part of a political bandwagon driven by social forces which Lang, as brilliant as he was, was not interested in or perhaps even capable of fully fathoming.

     In his piece in Yale Scientific, Lang also raised the issue of the role of other viruses in AIDS, stating that “No hypothesis can be dismissed a priori. It is still a possibility that some viruses other than HIV sometimes cause some of the diseases listed under the “AIDS” umbrella by the CDC.” One of those he mentions in the piece is HHV-6. He clearly was intrigued by the paradox of a supposedly ubiquitous and usually (or also supposedly) harmless virus also being associated with pneumonitis in compromised hosts. He inadvertently went right to the heart of the political and scientific problems that HHV-6 would be entangled with in the years ahead when he wrote, “Here we meet typical examples of rising questions: whether there is merely an ‘association’ between a virus and some disease, or whether a virus is a cause, and if so how. It is then a problem to make experiments to determine whether a given virus is merely a passenger virus, whether it lies dormant, and if it is awakened (how?). Whether it merely shows its presence by testing positive in various ways (antibodies?), or whether it is or becomes harmful (how?), under certain circumstances (which?).” He had unknowingly stumbled into the tragic intellectual fog of the HHV-6 catastrophe, the biomedical tragedy that the Orwellian propaganda about HIV was obscuring.

     One of the more curious episodes in the struggles of the Duesbergian camp concerns Serge Lang’s encounter with Richard Horton, the then youngish editor of The Lancet who was pretty much in the bag for the HIV establishment. It is described in Challenges, Lang’s book of essays. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the slovenliness of the intellectual community during Holocaust II. Horton had written a 9,000 word review article, “Truth and Heresy about AIDS” which was critical of Duesberg and published in the New York Review of Books (May 23, 1996). In response, Lang submitted a letter as long as Horton’s book review itself to NYBR but it was rejected. Lang’s unpublished letter charged that Horton’s review gave “a false impression of scientific scholarship” and did not convey to the readers the complexity of the debate about HIV and AIDS. Horton had reviewed two books by Duesberg and one book which was a collection of 27 articles called AIDS: Virus—or Drug Induced?, which included two articles by Lang. Horton completely ignored the more important of Lang’s two articles—the one we just discussed that was reprinted from Yale Scientific. Not only did Horton ignore Lang’s detailed critique of HIV, but he also ignored everyone published in the collection except Duesberg, contributing to the image of Duesberg that the HIV establishment had cleverly manufactured and marketed, namely the fringy lone gunman: Lang wrote, “Horton mentioned Duesberg repeatedly as a critic of the established view, but by not referring to the multiple articles in the . . . collection he made it appear as if Duesberg is more isolated than he actually is in raising objections.” In addition to criticizing Horton for personalizing the issue rather than engaging in scientific discussion, Lang criticized Horton for not informing his readers about misinformation the government had put out about AIDS and for ignoring legitimate questions about the reliability or credibility of the HIV test. He suggested that Horton had fudged “the issue about relationships between AIDS (whatever it is), HIV and other viruses such as a persistent herpes virus.” (The truth about the looming HHV-6 catastrophe was so close to Lang that it could have bitten him.)

     Lang pointed out that Duesberg was getting the silent treatment from Horton’s own publication, The Lancet, where he “has not been allowed to publish longer pieces, [other than letters] either as a scientific article, or as a ‘Viewpoint.’” Lang also attacked Horton for resorting to what we have called emotional public health blackmail when he pointed to the fact that Horton wrote in his review that “Duesberg’s arguments take him into dangerous territory. For if HIV is not the cause of AIDS, then every public health injunction about the need for safe sex becomes meaningless. . . .” Dangerous territory? (Certainly dangerous territory for those behind the Potemkin HIV paradigm.) Lang held that Horton’s warning “bypasses the specific objections and questions, and draws an invalid extreme conclusion.” As was typical throughout Holocaust II, every time anyone asked a critical question about HIV it was as though they had taken a bullhorn and were shouting out encouragements to the public to run wild and naked in the street without condoms. It often came across as a veiled, patronizing, heterosexist assault against the dignity and intelligence of the gay community. Remarks like those made AIDS look like a public health campaign that was more concerned about behavioral control than truth—which in many ways it was.

     New York Review of Books published an exchange of letters between Duesberg and Horton on August 8, 1996. Among a number of things Lang was critical of in Horton’s letter, he was especially incensed by Horton’s challenge that “If Duesberg seriously believes there is nothing to fear from HIV, he can easily prove it. If Duesberg seriously believes that HIV is harmless, let him inject himself with a suspension of the virus.” Lang asserted, “Horton’s logic is deficient on several counts. First, self-experimentation by Duesberg would not ‘prove’ (let alone ‘easily prove’) anything about a virus which is supposed to take ten years to achieve is pathogenic effects. Second, the negation of one extreme is not the extreme of opposite type. Here may be something to fear from poppers (amyl nitrites) or AZT, as well as HIV.” Lang honed in on the very peculiar debating style that characterized Holocaust II when he wrote, “Horton’s reply with the above challenge to Duesberg pushed the discussion to extremes in an unscientific and ad hominem manner. He turns the discussion to considerations of beliefs, rather than facts (‘If Duesberg seriously believes . . .’). But it is not a question what ‘Duesberg believes.’ What’s involved scientifically are, among other things: the possibility of making certain experiments (some of them on animals); whether certain data (epidemiological or laboratory) are valid (e.g. properly gathered and reported); whether interpretations of the data are valid; the extent to which certain hypotheses are compatible with the data; and whether scientific objections to specific scientific articles are legitimately or substantially answered, if answered at all.”

     Lang pointed out in his letter that “On 2 August 1996, I submitted a letter to the editors of the New York Review, about 500 words long.” The letter was rejected. There was a second exchange between Horton and Duesberg in NYRB. According to Lang, “Horton devoted the greater part of his second reply to the ad hominem challenge, and some history of self-experimentation. Thus Horton compounded the problems raised by his ad hominem attack. Self-experimentation is something which a scientist may offer unprompted, as has sometimes been done in the past. Whether to do so or not is for each scientist to decide individually. I object to other scientists putting pressure for self-experimentation especially in a journalistic context.” Lang was so disturbed by Horton’s unprofessional suggestion of self-experimentation that he submitted his rejected letter as a half-page advertisement to New York Review with a check for $3,500 to cover the cost. The editor returned the check and agreed to publish the letter.

     Lang was incensed that NYRB had not published several other letters from scientists defending Duesberg. The New York Review’s behavior shocked Lang who had been both a contributor and an admirer of the publication’s integrity and intellectual legacy. He summarized its importance: “With its world-wide circulation of 120,000, it is very influential in the academic and intellectual community. Members of these communities rely on the New York Review for information they cannot get easily elsewhere. Flaws in the New York Review editorial judgment are therefore very serious.” (Lang would live to see the New York Review betray its ideal even more egregiously years later when they attacked South Africa’s brave HIV critic, Thabo Mbeki.)

     Lang wrote about the pseudoscience of HIV/AIDS like someone whose scientific heart was breaking. In the Horton/NYRB piece he wistfully quotes Richard Feynman who called for scientists to have “a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, it you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. In summary, the idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” 

  Feynman’s good faith vision of science operating at its best was like the opposite world of the HHV-6/AIDS/CFS/autism era and "Holocaust II." Richard Horton was one of the powerful little princes of that opposite world and the very principled Serge Lang’s unflappable, stubborn and inspiring confrontation with Richard Horton on the intellectual world stage during the depressing days of  "Holocaust II" reminds one of what Hannah Arendt wrote about Karl Jaspers in Men in Dark Times: “It was self-evident that he would remain firm in the midst of catastrophe. . . . There is something fascinating about a man’s being inviolable, untemptable, unswayable.” (Men in Dark Times p.76) But even the inviolable, untemptable, and unswayable Serge Lang could not stop the catastrophe of "Holocaust II."