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CD8 "HIV"-infection inflames gay press Note: The information on this website is presented for
educational purposes and This document was provided by A PhD student at Edinburgh University claims in The Lancet that it is "easy to document" HIV in CD8 cells – 15 years after the search for "HIV" began. In the week after an unexplained arson attack involving 30 fires at its offices, UK’s mass-circulation Pink Paper printed two stories on the subject, one by a staff reporter and one by researcher Wendy Livingstone herself, on the shakey assumption the claims were not a smokescreen. Pressed for minimal details of their work however, Livingstone and supervisor Peter Simmonds revealed lax scientific standards in their work despite claiming that historically "HIV research has gone really well." Using DNA-PCR, a technique to amplify genetic material in cells (rather than retroviral RNA), Livingstone looked for HIV by documenting the hypervariable region of a theorised HIV gene called env. Asked how the researchers were sure this highly variable region of cellular DNA was specific to an isolated retrovirus HIV, Simmonds asserted "infection equals viral isolation". Scientists disputing this point out genetic material can be readily incorporated into cells whether it is viral or not. Livingstone says that having her first paper published in The Lancet has been "quite cool". |