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EDITOR'S CHOICE: Richard Smith Beyond doing BMJ 2003; 327: 0-h [Full text]

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BMJ under attack by Nature - never surrender!

Friedrich Flachsbart   (28 November 2003)

Re: BMJ under attack by Nature - never surrender!

Alexander Huw Russell   (29 November 2003)

Pico means small, but small RNA is the great interferer!

Friedrich Flachsbart   (16 December 2003)

Free speech, changing concepts - BMJ in Nature, RNA in Nature

Friedrich Flachsbart   (27 January 2004)

BMJ under attack by Nature - never surrender! 28 November 2003
Friedrich Flachsbart, General medicine 37085 Göttingen Send response to journal: Re: BMJ under attack by Nature - never surrender!	Dear Sir, "The BMJ is under fire from AIDS researchers over a series of publications on its website." Nature/Vol 426/20 November 2003/page 215. I am sure that Your open market place of medical opinions is extremely useful. Even Nature does not know everything. Sometimes very small things become most exciting: We only have to look on siRNA! We have to have the whole picture. We have to see the complexity of nature. Every scientist is forced to focus. Sometimes he lost the vision. But we have to think and to think again before we do! Sincerely Yours Friedrich Flachsbart Competing interests: None declared
Re: BMJ under attack by Nature - never surrender! 29 November 2003
Alexander Huw Russell, Reviewr/writer WC1N 1PE Send response to journal: Re: Re: BMJ under attack by Nature - never surrender!	Challenge to Nature: Prove that 'HIV' exists via visual confirmation. The Huw Christie Memorial Prize: £100,000 Reward for 'HIV' isolation Offered by Mr. Alexander Russell 28th November 2003 "...infectious units, after all, are the only clinically relevant criteria for a viral pathogen." Peter Duesberg and Harvey Bialy (Nature, 375, 1995, p. 197) "The most formidable barrier to the advancement of science is the conventional wisdom of the dominant group." Geneticist C. H. Waddington I am offering £100,000 Reward for the first paper published in Nature magazine that can prove that 'HIV' isolation exists via visual confirmation. There is no evidence that 'HIV' is a sexually transmitted retrovirus and the current 2002 UK Public Health Laboratory Service figures clearly confirm this. You simply cannot have a putative retrovirus that is permanently restricted for 20 years to the two originally identified risk group: gay men and drug addicts in the West. There is no heterosexual 'HIV/AIDS' epidemic in the UK, Europe and the USA. In the Ukraine and Easter Europe this is not an 'AIDS' epidemic but a recreational drug epidemic. It is the recreational drugs that are the activating factors; that are activating the endogenous material wrongly labelled 'HIV'. It is the chemicals in cocaine and other recreational drugs that make people test 'HIV' positive and not the putative 'HIV'. Cocaine acts as an in vivo mitogen in exactly the same way that other plant derived substances have a mitogenic effect on cell-cultures in vitro. Indeed, experiments have shown that when cocaine is added to cell- cultures, the cells are activated and show a typical mitogenic response. Cocaine is the most obvious example but add to this the full repertoire of recreational drugs indulged in by many gay men and it is no wonder that their constantly activate cells permit the putative 'HIV' tests to dredge up something endogenous. (I suggest people read the important new paper by Peter Duesberg et al: The chemical bases of the various AIDS epidemics: recreational drugs, anti-viral chemotherapy and malnutrition (Journal of Bioscience, Vol. 28, No.4, June 2003, Indian Academy of Sciences). Hans Gelderblom of Berlin's Robert Koch Institute co-authored the first paper in Virology, March 1997, showing 'purified HIV' to be 'purified microvesicles'. What was assumed to be 'purified HIV' was in fact "an excess of vesicles" - particles of cellular proteins. The hypothetical 'HIV' is in fact a collection of endogenous microvesicles and cellular proteins (which also never seem to form particles - so how can they be infectious)? Cell-free viral 'HIV' particles have never ever been visualised in any freshly donated bodily fluid including semen, blood, etc. 'HIV' has never ever proven to be a sexually transmitted retrovirus. To date: no electron-micrograph image exists of isolated/purified densely packed 'HIV' particles recovered directly from fresh samples of any bodily fluid. The key fact to remember is that cell-free infectious 'HIV' viral particles have never, repeat never, been recovered directly from fresh donor semen, a blood sample or any other bodily fluid. The rules demonstrating the existence of 'HIV' (and retroviruses in general) were never adhered to by those who devised them nor were they ever validated. No particle of 'HIV' has ever been obtained pure, free of contaminants; nor has a complete piece of 'HIV RNA' (or the transcribed DNA) ever been proved to exist. So confident am I that no such electron-micrograph evidence for the existence of 'HIV' can be produced by adhering strictly to the Etienne de Harven methodology, I am prepared to offer the sum of £100,000 to the first person to submit just such a micrograph, prepared under stringent laboratory conditions. I do not want 'markers' for 'viral activity' which are at very best, inaccurate. I want visual evidence of myriad active, infectious viral particles, clearly morphologically defined recovered from a fresh sample of bodily fluid, unadulterated with any other kinds of cells: i.e: CEM,H9 cancer cells. As Peter Duesberg and Harvey Bialy stated in Nature: "...infectious units, after all, are the only clinically relevant criteria for a viral pathogen." (Nature, 375, 1995, p. 197) Once again, to paraphrase Peter Duesberg, an alleged 'virus' which is not doing anything cannot be 'causing' anything. The rules for attempting to isolate the putative 'HIV' via the Etienne de Harven methodology are: 1. Only plasma centrifuged from fresh whole blood may be used in the experiment. No material derived from cultured cells will be considered, to rule out 'viral particles' which may be merely cultural artefacts. 2. The donor blood/plasma must be taken from a person/persons with a recent 'high-viral load' test result, and evidence for the date and result of the test (the number of 'HIV'- RNA's alleged) must be submitted, obviously with the name of the person/persons deleted to preserve donor confidentiality. 3. The donor must not be in receipt of protease inhibitors, AZT or any 'antiviral drugs'. 4. Only cold heparinised Ringer's solution may be used to dilute the plasma 1/1 ( i.e. 50%). 5. The diluted plasma shall be first filtered by aspiration- filtration, through a 0.6 millipore membrane. The resulting filtrate #1 will then be filtered again, this time using a 0.22 millipore membrane and filtrate #2 will be submitted to ultracentrifugation. 6. Centrifugation at 30,000 g for two hours will be used to prepare a pellet, likely to be extremely small. This pellet will be fixed with glutaraldehyde and osmium, then carefully detached and embedded in epoxy resins following routine EM procedures. 7. The electronmicrograph shall be at least 19,500 x magnification, and must resemble that published in Fig.1 of this article for particle size and shape, but with one notable and important variation. 'HIV' has been deemed to be a lentivirus, possessing a dense core of truncated conical shape. An ultrathin slice of randomly packed lentiviruses must inevitably show a number of particles bisected to show this core lengthwise, as well as end-on, with a resultant apparent mixture of round and 'rod-shaped' dense cores. Any micrograph which does not clearly show this feature will be deemed not to represent the lentivirus 'HIV'. 8. This challenge is open to any qualified scientists, or microbiology students/lab technicians with the necessary lab skills and facilities to carry out the work. Photographs of the required electron-micrograph(s) plus full details of the methodology, along with brief details of the senders' qualifications, must be sent to me at: alex@lalage52.freeserve.co.uk NB: Emeritus Professor of Pathology, University of Toronto. He worked in electron microscopy primarily on the ultrastructure of retroviruses throughout his professional career of 25 years at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York, and 13 years at the University of Toronto. http://www.sidasante.com/edhindex.htm Mr. Alexander Russell MA 28th November 2003 Competing interests: None declared
Pico means small, but small RNA is the great interferer! 16 December 2003
Friedrich Flachsbart, General Medicine Praxis 37085 Göttingen Send response to journal: Re: Pico means small, but small RNA is the great interferer!	Dear Sir, siRNA, small interfering RNA, sounds like Picorna, pico-RNA-Virus, interfering with microbes and host. Common cold is the small RNA, interfering with streptococci and tuberculosis. HIV is the small RNA, interfering with tuberculosis. This could be a unifying concept of host-microbe-interference: Small RNA changes the susceptibility of the host. People of cold regions, adapted to common cold, show a different resistance to small RNA compared to people of hot regions, adapted to malaria. Sincerily Yours Friedrich Flachsbart Competing interests: None declared
Free speech, changing concepts - BMJ in Nature, RNA in Nature 27 January 2004
Friedrich Flachsbart, General Medicine Praxis 37085 Göttingen Send response to journal: Re: Free speech, changing concepts - BMJ in Nature, RNA in Nature	Dear Sir, the letter in Nature, Vol. 427, 22 January 2004, page 287 by Richard Smith ("Milton and Galileo would back BMJ on free speech. Arguments, crazy ideas and open communication are the LIFEBLOOD of science") is mirrored by two articles in the same issue on "Viral entry into host cells": The classical concept of immunity, B-cells and T-cells, is not even mentioned. A complex concept of fusion proteins targeting the membrane emerges. Life is a complex matter. Free discussion of new concepts is life. Sincerely Yours Friedrich Flachsbart Competing interests: None declared