Is HIV the FOCMA of AIDS?

With FOCMA did Harvard's Max Essex create his own mini-Ponzi Scheme before AIDS?

Feline oncornavirus-associated cell-membrane antigen (FOCMA): distinction between FOCMA and the major virion glycoprotein.

 J R Stephenson, M Essex, S Hino, W D Hardy, Jr, and S A Aaronson

 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC430654/

 

 

THE AIDS WINDFALL By Barry Werth New England Monthly June 1988  

 But Gallo was not the first to envision that AIDS was caused by the kind of virus he'd been pursuing. Dr. Myron Essex, a Harvard virologist and friend of Gallo's, had suggested the possibility much earlier, soon after the first cases were reported. Max Essex, as he is known, was perhaps the first to propose publicly that what was killing gay men was probably a new virus, that it was quite likely spread sexually, and that the profound devastation it wrought was the result of a collapsing immune system. Incredibly, he had even foreseen all this. Essex, unlike Gallo, hadn't only been called to AIDS. He'd called it.

This was the other Max Essex. As a postdoctoral fellow in the early seventies, he and his chief collaborator in cat research, William Hardy of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center in New York, began speculating about an extraordinary defense mechanism that prevented cats from getting leukemia. They called it FOCMA, for Feline Oncornavirus-associated Cell Membrane Antigen, and it was supposed to do what only foreign microbes were thought to do, that is, direct the body's immune response. The implications were startling. Here was something the body knew how to manufacture that could help ward off cancer. Dozens of scientists went off in pursuit of FOCMA.
But no one could prove FOCMA existed. Essex abandoned the subject, and he refused to pursue the criticisms of those following it up, or to retrace it. He simply let FOCMA hang, and other scientists were understandably incensed. "We'd have figured it out ten years earlier if Essex had only done his homework," complains one researcher.

 http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/bwwindfall.htm

Essex never retracted FOCMA.

Was Essex's FOCMA the scientific prototype for the Montagnier-Agut HIV Fraud Ponzi Scheme and HHV-6 Cover-up?