Etienne de Harven

Etienne de Harven’s name may not be the first that one thinks of when it comes to demolishing the HIV/AIDS connection, but it should be. A Belgian-born electron microscopist who was a professor of pathology at the University of Toronto, he published the first electron micrographs of mouse retroviruses using the gradient banding technique discussed in this post.

de Harven may well have been the most credentialed scientist to publicly dissent from the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, and in particular from the trope that HIV had been isolated, because of his long career and vast experience in electron microscopy. In this article, he describes in detail the procedure he and his colleagues had used to isolate the Friend leukemia virus from mice in 1965. He then continues to describe how, during the height of the scientific attempts to blame viruses for cancers in the 1970s and 1980s, no proper electron micrograph of isolated viruses could be produced. The best that could be seen were “virus like particles”.

Rather than admitting that perhaps they were a little too enthusiastic regarding a possible retrovirus-cancer link, rather than being concerned at all about the lack of proper proof of isolation, the scientific community inexplicably decided that such proof was not needed, and that instead “detection of reverse transcriptase” (the enzyme that converts RNA to DNA, which is the opposite of the way it is typically replicated and is said to be unique to retroviruses despite being detectable in tissues such as umbilical cord tissue) is sufficient to claim a retrovirus to be present.

Dr. de Harven wrote several papers and a book, Ten Lies About AIDS, originally written in French. He and Dr. Gordon Stewart also submitted this letter to the journal Science, urging the scientific community to reconsider the use of reverse transcriptase as a surrogate marker for retro viral presence. It was rejected and virology continues along its disastrous, nearly standards-free course.

Dr. de Harven died in 2019 at the age of 91. I encourage you to check out his book and papers. Those relevant to AIDS are archived here.