Scientist Interrupted

House of Numbers debuted at the Nashville Film Festival this week, and word is that US and European AIDS millionaires have become unhinged. Indeed, they good reason, for after repeated threats and demands to censor the movie, the Nashville and Boston Film Festivals are showing his movie, while Sundance has buckled under the weight of political correctness.

During the past eight years, an unassuming film student named Brent Leung has visited heavily funded (by taxpayers) research centers throughout the US and Europe to interview the world’s leading AIDS scientists. The heaviest hitters, Robert Gallo, John P. Moore, Luc Montagnier, Donald Abrams, David Baltimore and others were interviewed within the past 18 months. Indeed, all of the statements reflect the most up-to-date notions of what HIV and AIDS are today. As each scientist explained what HIV and AIDS meant to him (or her), the audience absorbed each interview like dots of a Pointillist painting.

But unlike the pleasant surprise that one experiences when stepping back, Leung’s interviews produced something more akin to Rorschach inkblot. As each scientist struggled to explain what they saw in that stained paper, the audience found it hard not to scoff at the creative interpretations of each competing theory. As one scientist contradicted the next, the stories built to a climax when one scientist actually contradicted himself three times within five minutes in the same interview. By the end of the movie, Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier admitted that HIV was harmless to healthy people.

This is not to imply that Leung’s documentary is funny. As one woman explained the rapid decline and death of her pregnant sister after one month of deadly AIDS drugs, the AIDS scientists appeared less comical. As if her malicious death was not enough, Leung posted emails between doctors at the National Institute of Health, who joked about Hafford’s death and her doctor.

Leung also showed the horrifying affects of AIDS drugs on a two-year-old baby, whose parents were told that she would not survive the next year without AIDS treatments. Family video shows the beautiful healthy baby before treatments began and her fast decline during treatments. When the grieving parents made the agonizing decision to stop treatments, the baby quickly recovered. Despite continuous warnings of her impending death, she grew up to be a beautiful, vibrant, and healthy 19-year-old.

When the movie ended, our audience met the young woman and her parents who told us that, of the ten HIV+ children in Minnesota during that period, she was the only one to survive. She was also the only HIV+ child whose parents did not administer AIDS drugs to her.

This leaves me wondering why these scientists are becoming unhinged. Why would someone who made millions on the pretext that HIV=AIDS be concerned that, after nearly 30 years, they might be wrong? After all, this is science and not theology, isn’t it? If Leung is wrong, why would this handful of scientists feel threatened enough to pressure film festival organizers to kill the release? What do they have to hide?

After the movie, a Vanderbilt Medical School student conveyed her shock at the conflicts exposed in the documentary. When she vowed to examine those conflicts at school, I warned her to keep quiet and not risk the retaliation. Like many major universities, Vanderbilt receives millions of pharmaceutical funding and tax dollars each year. With the economy the way it is today, universities can’t afford to bite the hand that feeds it.

Brent Leung’s film will be shown in Boston tomorrow - unless the AIDS Truthers get their way.

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