When ‘HIV’ was first ‘discovered’ in the original papers by Gallo and Montagnier, they had difficulty isolating and didn’t publish pictures from what I understand—that didn’t happen until years later. Gallo’s great discovery for HTLVIII was based on running a lager number of antigen/antibody tests with an immortalized cell line to find an antibody test that could screen AIDS and pre-AIDS blood from regular blood. That is the basis of all the current HIV tests.
The first published pictures came more than a decade later, and they showed that “HIV isolate” really consists largely of cellular debris and microvesciles. In these EM photos, they do find some occasional particles of roughly the right size and label them as “HIV”, but they could also just be any of a number of other things, and for all intents and purposes, HIV ‘particles’ look like regular microvesciles.
The titles of the papers say it all:
“Cell membrane vesicles are a major contaminant of gradient-enriched human immunodeficiency virus type-1 preparations”
“Microvesicles are a source of contaminating cellular proteins found in purified HIV-1 preparations”
I have lost the link, but there are better more recent pictures taken with ATM, and they show that for all intents and purposes, it’s impossible to distinguish ‘HIV’ from regular microvesicles that bud from the cell wall naturally. If HIV can be said to exist at all as a unique exogenous virus, it is only because of unique RNA content in the microvesicle, and in this sense is very much unlike all other known viruses.
Of course, the part of HIV’s genome which is supposed to code for the outer envelope is pretty much the same as the endogenous sequences that already exist in the human genome—the HERVs.
Which electron microscope pictures?
When ‘HIV’ was first ‘discovered’ in the original papers by Gallo and Montagnier, they had difficulty isolating and didn’t publish pictures from what I understand—that didn’t happen until years later. Gallo’s great discovery for HTLVIII was based on running a lager number of antigen/antibody tests with an immortalized cell line to find an antibody test that could screen AIDS and pre-AIDS blood from regular blood. That is the basis of all the current HIV tests.
The first published pictures came more than a decade later, and they showed that “HIV isolate” really consists largely of cellular debris and microvesciles. In these EM photos, they do find some occasional particles of roughly the right size and label them as “HIV”, but they could also just be any of a number of other things, and for all intents and purposes, HIV ‘particles’ look like regular microvesciles.
The titles of the papers say it all:
“Cell membrane vesicles are a major contaminant of gradient-enriched human immunodeficiency virus type-1 preparations”
“Microvesicles are a source of contaminating cellular proteins found in purified HIV-1 preparations”
more on HIV ‘pictures’
I have lost the link, but there are better more recent pictures taken with ATM, and they show that for all intents and purposes, it’s impossible to distinguish ‘HIV’ from regular microvesicles that bud from the cell wall naturally. If HIV can be said to exist at all as a unique exogenous virus, it is only because of unique RNA content in the microvesicle, and in this sense is very much unlike all other known viruses.
Of course, the part of HIV’s genome which is supposed to code for the outer envelope is pretty much the same as the endogenous sequences that already exist in the human genome—the HERVs.
Huh. While I still think that the HIV explanation is the most likely one for AIDS, I am slightly less convinced.