> he was a denier of the HIV virus role as a cause of Aids
I did a deep dive into this back in the 90s, during the course of which I had a chance to talk to Kary. I looked up his phone number on the internet (this was long before doxxing was a thing), cold-called him, and he picked up the phone. We talked for about half an hour. That's the kind of guy he was. I more or less asked him how can a smart guy like you buy into this conspiracy theory? His answer was: he wasn't buying in to the conspiracy theory. He was not endorsing the idea that HIV did not cause AIDS. All he believed was that there was not yet enough data to conclusively show that HIV was the cause, and so people should keep an open mind. And frankly, given what was known at the time, I thought he had a valid point.
He remained a denialist for the rest of his life, though. And besides there was plenty of evidence in the early 90s that HIV caused AIDS. It was conclusive.
> there was plenty of evidence in the early 90s that HIV caused AIDS. It was conclusive.
That is far from clear, at least to me. The main thing that bothered me at the time, and which I've never seen satisfactorily explained, is that 1) AIDS was widely believed to be 100% fatal, 2) believed to be caused by HIV, but 3) the HIV virus had incubation periods of [EDIT: up to] ten years or more. I don't see any way to validly conclude that HIV causes AIDS at a time when the virus had only been known for ten years or so. One could advance this as a plausible hypothesis (one which ultimately proved to be correct), but in the mid-90s I think there was still room for valid doubt.
But I'm very open to being convinced that I was wrong about this (not that it matters much at this point, but it is of historical interest to me).
That incubation period doesn't sound right. Google tells me: "The interval from HIV infection to the diagnosis of AIDS ranges from about 9 months to 20 years or longer, with a median of 12 years." (https://www2.health.vic.gov.au/public-health/infectious-dise...)
So yes, median of 12 years. Not minimum.
Wikipedia's entry on HIV/AIDS denialism links to this document from a committee organized by the National Academy of Sciences in 1988 where the committee says they find the evidence of a causal link between HIV and AIDS conclusive (page 33): https://www.nap.edu/read/771/chapter/4 The rest of that section explains the evidence they have: extremely high correlates for HIV infection and subsequent AIDS prevalence in at-risk communities, no cases in populations that were not at risk, near 100% detection rate of HIV in the blood of AIDS patients, and the tracing of HIV infected blood donors to transfusion patients acquiring AIDS.
I didn't say minimum. The point is, in the mid-90s you had a lot of people with HIV infections. Some of them were dying, but a lot of others carried infections for many years with no apparent ill effects. I don't see how you can get definitive causality from that data.
You said incubation periods of "ten years or more," which was clearly false. The rest of my comment addresses the rest of yours. Not everybody who is infected with a virus gets the most severe symptoms, I would assume we know this intuitively after 10 months in a different pandemic situation ;)
I thought it was implausible that you meant less than ten years by saying that, because your argument rested significantly on it. Other than that our disagreement seems to be on whether there was good reason to be significantly out of line with the scientific consensus on HIV/AIDS in the early 90s, which there doesn't seem to be from my research.
No, it didn't. If you think that then you haven't understood my argument. Let me try again:
HIV was first identified in 1983, so by the mid-90s the virus had been known for just a little over 10 years. Part of the prevailing hypothesis at the time was that the virus occasionally had incubation periods in excess of 10 years, but that it would inevitably kill you sooner or later. I do not see, on the basis of the data available at the time, how you could definitively rule out the possibility that, for example, some people could successfully defend against HIV indefinitely based on some to-that-point unidentified immunological mechanism. Or that AIDS was caused by some unidentified factor that weakened the immune system, and that HIV was an opportunistic infection that was harmless if you happened to have it without the actual unidentified causal factor for AIDS. Or maybe HIV was a co-factor. I can think of a lot of possibilities that AFAICT could not have been definitively ruled out based on what was known in 1995.
Yes, the establishment got it right. But it is far from clear to me that it wasn't for the wrong reasons. The history of science is full of examples of the establishment getting it wrong. It's possible they just got lucky with HIV.
If the epistemic standard is a well-understood mechanism for HIV causing AIDS then yes I would say that hadn't been identified at the time, but the review I linked admits as such.
Moreover if what you disapprove of is the standard of evidence demonstrated by the medical community at the time then I think I can understand that even if I disagree with it. What I can't understand is why you think this is relevant to why Kary Mullis was a denialist, since it's clear he remained as such long after the evidence was overwhelming, the mechanism was demonstrated, etc.
By 1983 it was known that the HIV virus affected T-cells, and the hypothesis that destruction of T-cells causes the observed immunodeficiency isn't such a long stretch.
Yes, I specifically said it was a plausible hypothesis. But the fact that there were people with HIV infections who had no apparent ill effects for years still left room for reasonable doubt for quite a while (like well into the late 90s) particularly since one of the alternative hypotheses was that the treatments then being given for HIV were actually killing people.
Mullis subscribed to the theory that AIDS is caused by infection with too many viruses at any given time. You go to the gay sauna, have sex with dozens of people, and the sheer multitude of infectious agents is what causes breakdown of the immune system. That doesn't square up with how we know the immune system works, not then, not now.
one of the alternative hypotheses was that the treatments then being given for HIV were actually killing people
That hypothesis was advanced and defended by Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In retrospect we can tell that Duesberg was obviously wrong, but to simply dismiss it as "plain bonkers" is being far too facile.
You'd like to know how Duesberg came up with his hypothesis because the results from early clinical trials speak for themselves. T-cell count went up in the treatment group, amelioration of symptoms, progression to more severe disease delayed.
Of course the virus evolved to defeat the medication, and the disease came back, that's why we nowadays use combination therapy.
You'd really like to know why, despite the obvious successes of combination therapy, Duisberg continued to advance his theory, by 2000 it was totally disproved.
I did a deep dive into this back in the 90s, during the course of which I had a chance to talk to Kary. I looked up his phone number on the internet (this was long before doxxing was a thing), cold-called him, and he picked up the phone. We talked for about half an hour. That's the kind of guy he was. I more or less asked him how can a smart guy like you buy into this conspiracy theory? His answer was: he wasn't buying in to the conspiracy theory. He was not endorsing the idea that HIV did not cause AIDS. All he believed was that there was not yet enough data to conclusively show that HIV was the cause, and so people should keep an open mind. And frankly, given what was known at the time, I thought he had a valid point.