Where do you think AIDS research got so off-track?
Money. It's real simple. The Federal government declared war on AIDS, which meant that anybody who was unemployed, or partially employed in terms of a medical career, could suddenly get nice, soft grants from the government to start taking part in the war on AIDS. I mean, its not like a field of science that came from a long tradition. There weren't any old men who could say, "No, that would be stupid to do that." It was all composed of people who were basically unemployed prior to that. I mean, there were a few of them [who] had been virologists, who were about to be unemployed because they worked for the National Cancer Institute, trying to show that cancer was caused by a virus. And they had honed up their skills for finding viruses to try to find one that caused cancer. No one had been successful, and writing grants in that field was getting harder and harder every year because you had to say: "Well, we have some preliminary evidence that there is a cancer that is caused by a particular virus, and we'd like to work on that." Right? It was easy in the first few years, but after ten it was starting to get kind of tough. But there were, by then, 10,000 people, principal investigators, making their living trying to blame cancer on some virus... because that was the big idea. In fact, who thought of that idea? Peter Duesberg. He's the guy [who] came up with that. And he said, about a year later: "You know what, that was a dumb idea, and here's why." But by then, he had already launched a bunch of people on a new career, and they didn't want to come back and investigate a new hypothesis...
What I'm trying to say is that to even ask the question of whether AIDS is caused by HIV or not is to not understand the wider picture. And until people really understand that science is not motivated by curiosity anymore, but by money -- big, federal money, big private money -- once people start recognizing that, and realizing that everything they hear from the scientific establishment they ought to interpret as a commercial... People don't really understand that. People hear something, that the CDC says this, the CDC says that. They don't treat that the same way as "General Motors says this, General Motors says that." They should.
 
So you're saying that a lot of this research is driven by monetary gain --
I'm not saying some of it. I'm saying all of it.

All of it.
You find some guy doing research today, in any field, not just in AIDS, you find someone who's doing it for free? I mean, send him over. I'd love for him to work for me...

This corporate side of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis plays heavily into the pharmaceutical companies --
Yes, them, and also the NIH. Don't forget them. They probably are splitting it about fifty-fifty.

So you believe there is a virus.
Oh, they've certainly detected a virus. But whether it really is or not... You know, if you wanted to know what caused polio, you looked at someone who had polio, and you found that this organism is reproducing out of control. Any tissue on their body had it in it. The virus could be isolated, and you could have a tube, in your lab, of pure polio virus.

And we don't have that for HIV?
We don't have that for HIV. We don't have anything like that. No one has ever purified a virus that they said, "Here it is."

I think people are so interested because the disease is mysterious and they don't know why all these things are going on.
AIDS had the PR because the CDC was worried that their budget was going to be significantly cut because there hadn't been any infectious diseases since polio... And they said, "Hey, we're in trouble. We need to find a plague. So look around for constellations of various diseases. Find a bunch of people [who] are starting to get symptoms that are like each other and we haven't seen anywhere else. Look for that stuff." And then they came up with that ebola bullshit? Like we're going to start to get these African diseases that don't even make it past the first village? It's all got to do with "People have to get paid."

And you say that's because HIV itself is not --
HIV doesn't cause any diseases. You know, we have 10,000 -- that's the estimated number -- retroviral sequences in our genome... Nobody knows what the hell they're for. What a lot of people think they are is the remnant of the fact that retroviruses have been infecting us forever. I don't actually agree with that, but... if everybody knew that HIV was just one of 10,000 it would not be so shocking to them to find that most of them don't ever express themselves. They just sit there quietly. Every now and then, one of them does...

What about T-cell count? Isn't that quantitative?
T-cells go up and down all the time. And here's the scary part: T-cell count has been substituted for improvements in your health as an endpoint in studies for new drugs. So now if you assume that HIV kills CD-4 T-cells and that's what causes the disease, now you start designing a drug to keep T-cells from being killed, and either it kills HIV or for some unknown reason it keeps the CD-4 count from dropping; then with the FDA rules you can have a clinical study where the endpoint is not that you actually get better, in terms of that any of your symptoms that caused you to originally say that you had AIDS, but just that your CD-4 count went up.

So tell me more about Polymerase Chain Reaction. You identified that, right?
I invented it.

What were you thinking originally when you invented it?
I didn't invent PCR to detect HIV. I invented PCR so that you could look at genes. That's what it's mainly used for. It's basically the way you look at the genomes of all organisms. Anything that has to do with DNA these days involves a PCR machine in a lab somewhere... Most of the people that use PCR -- 99 percent of the people who use PCR -- are not interested in AIDS. They don't do AIDS research, they work on the human genome... PCR is being used to look at, you know, the DNA of Czar Nicholas II, to figure out if it was really him. That's what you use PCR for. Any time that DNA is the subject, PCR will be the tool that you use to put the DNA in a form that makes it easy to analyze.