How serious errors persist in modern science and medicine

Becoming a doctor or a researcher or a scientist nowadays begins with a dozen or more years of training and education following high school: four years of undergraduate college work, then either four years of medical school or about that number of years of graduate work in science. The eventual award of an MD or PhD after this mandated study is then succeeded by further years as a medical intern, or as a postdoctoral researcher in a science, before one becomes a fully independent professional.

In those eight or more years of quite formal study, not only does a great deal of material have to be covered: learning it also means believing it to be correct and to be taken for granted.

During the following years as medical intern or as postdoc mentored by a senior scientist, much depends on the particular environment. That environment may make for more awareness of uncertainties, or it may entrench the dogmatic approach typical of the formal years of study. In either case, however, the mentors of medical interns, or the senior scientists mentoring postdocs, will normally have accepted what the contemporary mainstream professional views and attitudes are, and naturally pass that belief on.

For example, if someone in medical or biological research happens to intern or postdoc in a laboratory or hospital with a specialty in HIV/AIDS, that experience will leave the newly minted professional believing it to be settled science that HIV caused AIDS and that it HIV an infectious retrovirus that continues to offer danger to those who contract it; and moreover, that the long-standing tests for HIV are sufficiently accurate to be trusted as a basis for prescribing and continuing treatment.

In point of fact, of course, the belief that AIDS was caused by HIV was a very consequential mistake resulting from early errors in categorizing victims of AIDS, compounded by mistaken ideas about retroviruses, as well as incompetent and deceptive practices in the laboratory of Robert Gallo [1].

But anyone who entered this field of medical science in the last three decades or so will have been taught that AIDS was unquestionably caused by HIV and that there is no reason to think otherwise.

This train of thought has its origin in the Guest Essay by Monica Gandhi, “We Didn’t Get Covid Right. But This Is Just Wrong” (New York Times, 17 July 2005).

“Monica Gandhi is an American physician and professor. She teaches medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and is director of the UCSF Gladstone Center for AIDS Research and the medical director of the San Francisco General Hospital HIV Clinic, Ward 86. Her research considers HIV prevalence in women, as well as HIV treatment and prevention. She has been noted as a critic of some aspects of the COVID-19 lockdowns in the US” [2].

Gandhi received the MD degree in 1996, and MPH (Master of Public Health) in 2001 [3], so that her education will have taken place during a time when budding researchers and doctors encountered no reason to doubt HIV/AIDS theory.

That she happens to be wrong about HIV, as so many other people are, is a consequence only of the manner in which HIV/AIDS theory became generally accepted. That she was a contrarian about the management of COVID, and is sharply critical of current actions by the federal government, shows that she by no means lacks a penchant for thinking critically about contemporary matters.

In other words, a very important lesson is that highly damaging errors in science and medicine can become entrenched to the degree that otherwise critical and skeptical researchers unwittingly carry the errors further.

Those who are nowadays engaged in research purportedly about HIV have long taken for granted not only that it caused AIDS but also the reliability of HIV tests and the reliability of all the methods involving measures of DNA that are supposed to be biomarkers of HIV — even though, to this very day, no pure virus particles of HIV have ever been isolated from an AIDS victim or an HIV-positive individual.

In fact, the belief that such indirect techniques are appropriate has infected research in virology as a whole.

It seems impossible to predict what sort of event might serve to stimulate a really fundamental re-examination of HIV/AIDS theory and practice. Present-day researchers represent a scientific generation that may not even have any familiarity with the dissenting voices and evidence, other than perhaps a vague awareness that among all the crazy people out there, some are what is called “AIDS denialists”.

These circumstances are quite similar to those concerning politics or religion. In the normal course of events, children absorb from the influence of parents, and also of peers and teachers, what can be taken for granted as true and trustworthy. It is a much observed social fact that most people remain lifelong with the same political religious and social preferences that were normal during their childhood and maturing years. So too do most doctors and scientists remain lifelong adherents to the theories and practices into which they were trained.

Society-wide changes of some significance are often associated in popular discourse and belief with particular “generations” --- “Baby Boomers”, say, or “millennials”. And generational changes are often associated with durations of approximately 25 or 30 years.

Something quite similar seems to be the case nowadays in scientific matters. A cohort of researchers and practitioners is educated and trained in the environment of the couple of decades spent on their way to be coming independent professionals. Just as few people make significant changes from the political, religious, and social preferences of their early life, so too do only few researchers make significant advances or changes from the theories and practices into which they were trained.

If those theories and practices are in fact mistaken or inappropriate in some way, those mistakes can then continue to be influential well beyond a given generation.

That has certainly been the case with HIV/AIDS [1]; and I believe it is also the case with the theory that carbon dioxide is the chief culprit in global warming and climate change [4].

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[1] “The case against HIV; https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net;
Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Gandhi

[3] https://medicine.ucsf.edu/people/monica-gandhi#Education

[4] Steven Koonin, Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters, BenBella Books, 2021; reviewed in Journal of Scientific Exploration, 39 (2025) 96-98; https://journalofscientificexploration.org/index.php/jse.