Dr. Boyd Graves

[riptowtan]

Lately I've been researching the AIDS conspiracy theories and just when I thought everything was debunked I read about this guy. I haven't found any refutations of his claims online so I was just wondering if anyone else here has heard about Dr. Boyd Graves, or has any good links that refute him. He claims that:
1. He possesses a "top secret" flow chart which is part of a "Special Virus Program" during the 70's and that this proves without a doubt the US military created AIDS in a lab.

2. The government is using AIDS for population control over blacks.

3. AIDS has a cure and it is "Tetra Silver Tetroxide", which is patented. (U.S. Patent #5676977)

My view of this at the moment is that he may have fabricated the flow chart, or misinterpreted it. He seems like he has all the ingredients for a confirmation bias (he was an african american with AIDS). And numerous peer reviewed papers from scientists around the world conclude the AIDs virus evolved from the SIDS virus.

For an more in depth overview of the claims and the history of Dr. Boyd Graves:
http://www.rense.com/general38/made.htm

[Alareth]

Well if Jeff Rense endorses it, it has to be true.

Outside of his claimed flowchart it sounds like more of the same claims I've heard many times before.

[ElMondoHummus]

And numerous peer reviewed papers from scientists around the world conclude the AIDs virus evolved from the SIDS virus.


Right. If I recall correctly, they even have a general timeframe for when the virus leaped. The first documented case was in the 50's - they went back and tested an archived blood sample taken from a patient in the 50's, and it was positive for HIV-1 - so IIRC, they believe the virus made the jump in the 30's or 40's.

I'm not sure how to rebut the specific claims of a military origin, but if his story doesn't allow for the test of that individual or the timeframe for the virus being introduced prior to the 50's, then his proposal is falsified right there.

[Horatius]

3. AIDS has a cure and it is "Tetra Silver Tetroxide", which is patented. (U.S. Patent #5676977)



You can see that patent here:

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=CXQoAAAAEBAJ&dq=5676977


The important thing is, despite his title and description being directed to curing AIDS, his claims read thusly:

What is claimed is:

1. A method of treating AIDS-afflicted humans comprising injecting a multitude of tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystals into the bloodstream of the human subject.

2. A method for increasing white blood cell counts in AIDS-afflicted humans comprising injecting a multitude of tetrasilver tetroxide molecular crystals into the bloodstream of the human subject.

3. Methods of treating AIDS-affilicted humans according to claims 1-2 where the concentration of said molecular crystals is approximately 40 PPM of the total blood weight of the human subject.


Note that there are no claims to "curing" AIDS, or even destroying HIV. The prosecution isn't available online, but this conspicuous absence leads me to suspect that he couldn't satisfy the USPTO that he was actually doing any of that.

The claim to "treating" AIDS patients is sufficiently vague, it could really apply to anything - you could "treat" a patient by injecting them with saline or glucose, for instance. Doing so might give some benefit, but it won't cure them of AIDS. He probably showed some kind of effect, which was enough to support this pretty weak claim, but not enough of an effect to support a claim to a cure.

Anytime you see someone assert, "So-and-so patented X!", you need to go look at the claims, to see if they really patented X, or just some X-related crap.

[ElMondoHummus]

Hmmm... thankfully, Ag4O4 is considered to only be "slightly" acutely toxic (http://www.pesticideinfo.org/Detail_Chemical.jsp?Rec_Id=PC37565#Toxicity) (not my terminology; click the link). Still, though... I'd rather see a real pharmecutical toxicity study done before I'm willing to say that it's truly a harmless substance. Harm would of course depend on exposure, effects, etc., and many drugs do indeed have deletrious effects - nobody ever tries to claim that AZT doesn't really screw up the body; reverse transcriptase inhibitors can't help but have serious side effects - but the question is the risk/benefit ratio. And I don't see any studies on this when I search.

BTW, small, sticky point about nomenclature: From what I can find and recall (it's been a looooooong time since my chem courses in college), "tetrasilver tetroxide" might on the surface seem to be correct naming, but it's really not. Since silver would have to be in the +2 oxidation state for this molecule, the proper name would be to cite the metal plus it's oxidation state, then the prefix for the number of the nonmetal (tetra), then the nonmetal itself, plus the requisite "ide". In short:

Silver (II) tetroxide.

That's if I recall things properly. Anyone with better knowledge, please feel free to correct it. But presuming I'm right, I bring it up for a reason: I'm a bit suspicious that a nonstandard name for the compound is being used. That could be innocent "marketing", but it also could be deliberate obsfucation. And the possibility of it being the latter is what worries me. Why disguise things?

Maybe I'm being too suspicious about this, but it bugs me a little. Add to that the other signs of quackery... well... my point is that the naming just adds to the woo-ishness of all of this. That's all.

[LONGTABBER PE]

Just to throw another monkey into the wrench for discussion fodder.

Back in the day during my "dragon soldier" days ( nuclear, biological and Chemical) the subject of AIDS came up frequently as to if it was a created agent.

I'm an Engineer, not a Medical Doctor or Chemist so I dont know but this is a claim I have heard numerous times thrown around. Here it is but I would like to know if there is any legitimate medical commentary on it just to satisfy my personal curiosity.

It has been said that the possible origin of the virus was malaria vaccines during the canal building ( from simian blood) and it was "created" in that sense but due to technology of the day- nobody realized it.

It mutated and whatever and became what it is today.

It wasnt identified until decades later.

Anyone heard this or investigated or addressed this?

It makes sense that such a unique virus just "popped up" ( and hasnt been around forever) but I dont have the skill set to even begin technically examining it. ( way out of my realm of expertise)

[dropzone]

Malaria is spread by protozoan parasites. HIV is a virus. There are several layers of evolution between the two and there is no connection between them.

[ElMondoHummus]

Just to throw another monkey into the wrench for discussion fodder.

Back in the day during my "dragon soldier" days ( nuclear, biological and Chemical) the subject of AIDS came up frequently as to if it was a created agent.

I'm an Engineer, not a Medical Doctor or Chemist so I dont know but this is a claim I have heard numerous times thrown around. Here it is but I would like to know if there is any legitimate medical commentary on it just to satisfy my personal curiosity.

It has been said that the possible origin of the virus was malaria vaccines during the canal building ( from simian blood) and it was "created" in that sense but due to technology of the day- nobody realized it.

It mutated and whatever and became what it is today.

It wasnt identified until decades later.

Anyone heard this or investigated or addressed this?

It makes sense that such a unique virus just "popped up" ( and hasnt been around forever) but I dont have the skill set to even begin technically examining it. ( way out of my realm of expertise)

I've heard of this, but in relation to Africa, not the Canal (I presume you're referring to the Panama Canal construction). The story goes that there were people involved in malaria treatment experiments that supposedly were given primate blood. The story further says that these experiments occurred early as the 30's and extended into the '50s. I've been too lazy to chase down the references, but the journal Nature was invoked as having been the source of that. This was mentioned in that famous Rolling Stone article trying to link the polio vaccine research with AIDS. To me, that linkage is tenuous at best. But my point in bringing this up was that the supposed link was not malaria or the antimalaria treatments themselves, but that supposedly that blood was tainted with SIV, and the experiments simply opened the door for mutations to develop that eventually evolved the virus into HIV. Just like the Rolling Stone proposed link was the cellular medium that the polio vaccine was grown in; the hypothesis was that the vaccine was contaminated with SIV and eventually mutated (For the record, I think knowledge gained since then has led to the falsification of this hypothesis, but I'm really struggling to recall details on this story. Someone else with more up-to-date knowledge can pick up from here).

So, is the "tainted blood in malaria experiments" proposal plausible? Only in the most broad sense possible that introducing blood infected with a virus into humans can lead to the mutation of that virus. But there's a ton of stuff that's gets glossed over in an explanation that facile; for example, a mutated virus still has to outcompete others to take root. Natural selection applies period, not just to higher order organisms, and that's a steep road to climb. To me, while it may sound plausible on the surface, there's just too much missing for this to be anything other than a testable hypothesis. From what I know, it's far from being an accepted explanation. And the consensus I see from legitimate researchers is that the jump wasn't from human induced activities such as those malaria experiments, but natural exposure in the wild.

This could be dug into further, but I'd suggest hitting up Google Scholar - or better yet, a university library - for work on the possible origin of AIDS. Just doing a straight Google search will pull up thousands of sites of dubious quality and quackish research, and it'd be a pain to separate the genuine from the garbage.

[LONGTABBER PE]

I've heard of this, but in relation to Africa, not the Canal (I presume you're referring to the Panama Canal construction). The story goes that there were people involved in malaria treatment experiments that supposedly were given primate blood. The story further says that these experiments occurred early as the 30's and extended into the '50s. I've been too lazy to chase down the references, but the journal Nature was invoked as having been the source of that. This was mentioned in that famous Rolling Stone article trying to link the polio vaccine research with AIDS. To me, that linkage is tenuous at best. But my point in bringing this up was that the supposed link was not malaria or the antimalaria treatments themselves, but that supposedly that blood was tainted with SIV, and the experiments simply opened the door for mutations to develop that eventually evolved the virus into HIV. Just like the Rolling Stone proposed link was the cellular medium that the polio vaccine was grown in; the hypothesis was that the vaccine was contaminated with SIV and eventually mutated (For the record, I think knowledge gained since then has led to the falsification of this hypothesis, but I'm really struggling to recall details on this story. Someone else with more up-to-date knowledge can pick up from here).

So, is the "tainted blood in malaria experiments" proposal plausible? Only in the most broad sense possible that introducing blood infected with a virus into humans can lead to the mutation of that virus. But there's a ton of stuff that's gets glossed over in an explanation that facile; for example, a mutated virus still has to outcompete others to take root. Natural selection applies period, not just to higher order organisms, and that's a steep road to climb. To me, while it may sound plausible on the surface, there's just too much missing for this to be anything other than a testable hypothesis. From what I know, it's far from being an accepted explanation. And the consensus I see from legitimate researchers is that the jump wasn't from human induced activities such as those malaria experiments, but natural exposure in the wild.

This could be dug into further, but I'd suggest hitting up Google Scholar - or better yet, a university library - for work on the possible origin of AIDS. Just doing a straight Google search will pull up thousands of sites of dubious quality and quackish research, and it'd be a pain to separate the genuine from the garbage.

Thats it- I just dont have the knowledge from my career field to even address it, much less confirm/deny or refute it.

Thats why I was asking

[Horatius]

That's if I recall things properly. Anyone with better knowledge, please feel free to correct it. But presuming I'm right, I bring it up for a reason: I'm a bit suspicious that a nonstandard name for the compound is being used. That could be innocent "marketing", but it also could be deliberate obsfucation. And the possibility of it being the latter is what worries me. Why disguise things?

Maybe I'm being too suspicious about this, but it bugs me a little. Add to that the other signs of quackery... well... my point is that the naming just adds to the woo-ishness of all of this. That's all.



Well, you're generally not supposed to use "marketing" terms in patents, so I suspect that the unusual nomenclature is an attempt at obfuscation. By using a different, but somewhat defensible, term, they make it harder for the patent examiner to find related information. If the examiner is good enough to see through the different terminology, and figure out what more-usual terms should be searched, this won't work, but if they aren't as experienced in nomenclature as you are, they would miss it.

I haven't checked what classification this patent was in, but as it's ostensibly directed towards a method of medical treatment, it might not be in a class that a chemist would have examined. So it's possible that the examiner would not have known about the different terminology.

[ktesibios]

Here's the asbstract of a paper on the genetic sequencing of HIV obtained from a sample taken in 1959 in Congo:

An African HIV-1 sequence from 1959 and implications for the origin of the epidemic.

Zhu T, Korber BT, Nahmias AJ, Hooper E, Sharp PM, Ho DD.

Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, The Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10016, USA.

There is considerable genetic diversity among viruses of different subtypes (designated A to J) in the major group of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), the form of HIV that is dominant in the global epidemic. If available, HIV-1 sequences pre-dating the recognition of AIDS could be crucial in defining the time of origin and the subsequent evolution of these viruses in humans. The oldest known case of HIV-1 infection was reported to be that of a sailor from Manchester who died of an AIDS-like illness in 1959; however, the authenticity of this case has not been confirmed. Genetic analysis of sequences from clinical materials obtained from 1971 to 1976 from members of a Norwegian family infected earlier than 1971 showed that they carried viruses of the HIV-1 outlier group, a variant form that is mainly restricted to West Africa. Here we report the amplification and characterization of viral sequences from a 1959 African plasma sample that was previously found to be HIV-1 seropositive. Multiple phylogenetic analyses not only authenticate this case as the oldest known HIV-1 infection, but also place its viral sequence near the ancestral node of subtypes B and D in the major group, indicating that these HIV-1 subtypes, and perhaps all major-group viruses, may have evolved from a single introduction into the African population not long before 1959.

Source (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9468138?dopt=Abstract)

Later work found sequenceable HIV in another sample from Kinshasa obtained in 1960. This sample turned out to belong to a different HIV subtype than that from the 1959 sample, indicating that by that time not only was HIV established as a human virus but it had already started diversifying into some of the lineages we see today.

Here (http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2008/10/paleovirology.php) is Abbie Smith of ERV at Scienceblogs, discussing this work and its implications for our understanding of HIV's evolutionary history.

1959. 1960. Confirmed not just by an antibody test but by sequencing the actual viral genome.

That pretty much destroys Graves' "made in the '70s by the eevil gummint" claim, although he's probably too ideologically blinkered to understand that.

BTW, Graves is not a medical doctor nor a Ph.D. in any field of science. The title "doctor" to which he lays claim is based on his holding a J.D.

That's right, he's a ****** lawyer.

[Mr.D]

Wikipedia has an article which is fairly digestible to the layperson on some of the known history of HIV.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_AIDS

There's suggestion in there that reused needles for antimalarial drugs may have contributed to the early spread of HIV. That could be one of the origins of the malaria -> HIV claim.




ETA: Apparently there's some evidence that SIV may have crossed into humans as early as the late 19th century. If a sample were to be found even from pre-WWI, that would pretty much eliminate any human-engineered hypothesis as that would predate the knowledge and technology needed.

[LONGTABBER PE]

Wikipedia has an article which is fairly digestible to the layperson on some of the known history of HIV.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_AIDS

There's suggestion in there that reused needles for antimalarial drugs may have contributed to the early spread of HIV. That could be one of the origins of the malaria -> HIV claim.




ETA: Apparently there's some evidence that SIV may have crossed into humans as early as the late 19th century. If a sample were to be found even from pre-WWI, that would pretty much eliminate any human-engineered hypothesis as that would predate the knowledge and technology needed.

I would think that a sample as noted above from the 50's would pretty much eliminate it

[riptowtan]

New studies show that HIV has been around for at least 100 years. I really don't think the military had the technology to genetically alter viruses back then because DNA was discovered in 1952 by Francis Crick and James Watson.
Apparently Dr. Boyd Graves was given an opportunity to put up or shut up in a court trial and he chose the latter. Hmmm. I guess he had a little more work to do on that flow chart before he presented it.

He allegedly found this chart "hidden among U.S. medical research archives in 1999". (http://www.boydgraves.com/flowchart/download.html)
And he charges 5$ just to see an enlarged version on the image on his website.


http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2008/10/study_traces_ai.php

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7213/abs/nature07390.html

Thanks for the replies!

[Horatius]

He claims that:
1. He possesses a "top secret" flow chart which is part of a "Special Virus Program" during the 70's and that this proves without a doubt the US military created AIDS in a lab.


What I don't understand is, why would you create a "flow chart" for an obviously illegal program, and then label it as a "Special Virus Program"? Why not use some sort of code words? The Manhattan Engineering District wasn't labeled the "Special Bomb Project", after all. And secondly, having created this chart, why would you then....


He allegedly found this chart "hidden among U.S. medical research archives in 1999".


....keep it for 20-30 years? Sentimental value? "Hey, you remember back when we were just lowly gene splicers?" "And now, we're running the whole genocide division!" "How far we've come!".


:bunpan

[Nitpicker]

In The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, Henry Bauer shows with official US statistics that HIV as identified by the standard tests, does not behave like an infectious agent. You don't need to understand the biology to see that HIV positive test results have nothing to do with AIDS. Thus Bauer is an HIV/AIDS denialist, but not at all an AIDS denialist. If it matters to you, don't listen to me, read his book or his blog or both. His opponents don't address his arguments, they just attack him.

[riptowtan]

In The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, Henry Bauer shows with official US statistics that HIV as identified by the standard tests, does not behave like an infectious agent. You don't need to understand the biology to see that HIV positive test results have nothing to do with AIDS. Thus Bauer is an HIV/AIDS denialist, but not at all an AIDS denialist. If it matters to you, don't listen to me, read his book or his blog or both. His opponents don't address his arguments, they just attack him.

Here's a couple sites that go over a lot of the "HIV doesn't cause AIDS" claims. I'm not too familiar with Henry Bauer's book, but you can address more of his claims, and list sources that back them up.(When you reach 15 posts) I'd also like to see a source for the claim you've already addressed.

http://www.aidstruth.org/denialism/myths#m1
http://aidsmyth.blogspot.com/