Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2006 19:15:38 -0600 (CST) From: "Randall J. Scalise" To: peter duesberg cc: David Crowe , "Randall J. Scalise" , John Cotton , Fred Olness , James The Amazing Randi , "Stephen Barrett M.D." , "Anthony S. Fauci M.D." , Robert Park , "Brian T. Foley" Subject: Re: AIDS Dissent... Dear Professor Duesberg, On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, peter duesberg wrote: > After all, all scientific innovation came from minorities, eg. > Galileo, Planck, Einstein,... Galileo's nemesis was the Roman Catholic Church, not other scientists. Galileo, Planck, and Einstein are famous and respected because they published and in this way convinced their peers that they were correct. Pons and Fleischmann are infamous because they announced their Cold Fusion claim in the press, bypassing the peer-review process. You are the one making the extraordinary claim, "that HIV is very unlikely to be the cause of AIDS," in the words of David Crowe. You have the burden of proof. Please publish your evidence and logical argument in a tier-1 peer-reviewed medical journal such as JAMA, NEJM, or the Lancet. Mr. Crowe also says, "...agreement between peer reviewers in clinical neuroscience journals was little greater than that predicted by chance." If you think you have a 50% chance of being published, simply submit your work to ten peer-reviewed journals. Then the chances that you will not be published by any of them is only 1 out of 1024. My expertise is particle physics, not virology. I rely on the editors and referees and the peer-review process to separate valid work from nonsense. Let me illustrate the problem with a hypothetical exercise. Suppose that you had no background whatsoever in particle physics and I sent you an email touting my great discovery that there are 4 colors of quark instead of the 3 that appear in physics literature. I then sent you hundreds of pages of quantum chromodynamics equations, experimental data from accelerators at national laboratories, and an argument justifying my conclusion that there are 4 colors. Should you believe me? You would want to know my credentials. You do a little research and find that I have a PhD in particle physics, have tenure at a prestigious university, and have a record of scholarly publications. Wouldn't it bother you just a bit that I was announcing this discovery, surely worth a Nobel Prize, by email or in a book written for the non-physicist or on the internet? Wouldn't you wonder why it didn't appear in a tier-1 peer-reviewed physics journal? Without going back to school and earning a PhD in particle physics, you must rely on the physics journal editors and referees. Now suppose that when you ask other expert particle physicists, 5000 of them tell you that there are definitely only 3 colors of quark, not 4. But you receive a steady stream of emails from acolytes who defend me and tell you that I'm right. Whom do you believe? I seem like a reasonable fellow and I did great work in the past. Still... where are those peer-reviewed journal articles? --Randall J. Scalise ,____________________________________________________________________. | Office: +1(214)768-2504 | Department of Physics | | Dept: +1(214)768-2495 | 102 Fondren Science Building | | FAX: +1(214)768-4095 | 3215 Daniel Avenue | | Email: scalise@smu.edu | Southern Methodist University | | http://www.phys.psu.edu/~scalise | Dallas, TX 75275-0175 | `--------------------------------------------------------------------'