Wishful ignorance: “Cure research” on HIV/AIDS

Pundits, politicians, and people almost everywhere are woefully mistaken about how science works and what it can do. Specialist science writers and journalists rarely expose (do they even detect?) the all-too-frequent unrealistic, misleading assertions by public figures — including spokespeople for scientific and medical institutions — about what money can buy in the way of research results. Honest work over time and with some luck, in the activity we call “science”, enabled humankind to progress in understanding how the world works; but science cannot deliver answers on demand to every question we would like to have answered, no matter how much money we throw into the action.

Useful applications of science rest on scientific knowledge and understanding. If an event or a phenomenon is not well understood, no amount of resources including money can be guaranteed to bring a desired application.

Not infrequently, one hears calls for a Manhattan-Project-type initiative to accomplish this, that or the other, for example, to find a cure for cancer. The Manhattan Project was for building an atomic bomb. Only academic specialists appear to know that the Project came about only because the knowledge and understanding were already at hand to know that such a bomb was feasible in principle: it was known that nuclear fission of uranium occurs and that it releases energy far outstripping anything produced by chemical reactions. The Project started because scientists told policy makers that it was feasible. Inventing the atomic bomb was essentially an engineering project rather than a scientific one. Could the fissionable material (a relatively rare isotope of uranium) be isolated from raw uranium in sufficient quantity? Or could an alternative fissionable material, plutonium, be prepared in sufficient quantity in a nuclear reactor? How could the bomb be designed to explode only when and where desired, rather than as soon as the “critical mass” of fissionable material was assembled?
Innumerable technical problems had to be solved to attain the final goal, and some of those did involve the gaining of new scientific understanding; but the point remains that the Project was known to be in principle possible before it was begun; the pertinent laws of Nature were sufficiently understood. That cannot be said for several desired goals that have been hyped by researchers as well as by politicians and pundits. President Nixon declared a war on cancer more than 4 decades ago, and it has gotten nowhere, just as the (relatively few) honest and informed scientists had predicted: Because we still do not know how cancer starts or what it really is in terms of biological mechanisms.
Also much hyped since the human genome was decoded has been the desirable (as most people believe) goal of “gene therapy”: to replace known “bad” genes with good ones. Several decades of trials and errors have killed a number of human guinea pigs but have had none of the promised successes: Because we do not yet understand the workings of the human genome well enough. “Genes” are not immutable entities in their everyday operation; elaborate signaling mechanisms and feedbacks govern “gene” actions. (For an accessible description, see Gil Ast, “The alternative genome”, Scientific American, April 2005, pp. 58-65.)
Moreover, we do not know how to get “good” genes into the right place in the genome.
Those are just a few reasons why it was silly (some might say thoughtless or even criminal) to jump into human trials of “gene therapy”.

Now I read of another such pie-in-the-sky initiative: To provide more resources for “cure research” on HIV/AIDS:

“Congressman Henry Waxman Meets on Cure for HIV [26 February 2013]
(Sent by AHF on behalf of the campaign for a Cure for HIV)
LOS ANGELES — On January 31st, 2013, a team comprised of leading cure scientists and AIDS support group leaders met with Congressman Henry Waxman . . . to address a cure for HIV and the problem of inadequate funding” [emphases added].

I was dumbfounded by “cure scientists” and “inadequate funding”.

The implication is unavoidable, that the Campaign for a Cure for HIV believes that there are presently researchers on HIV/AIDS whose ambition does not include finding a cure. What then are they doing? Quite a lot else, evidently, since “the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocates a mere 3% of its 3 billion dollar HIV research budget to cure research” — according to “Gerald Gerash, . . . a longtime gay rights advocate whose recent passion has turned toward a cure for HIV/AIDS”.
The absurdity should be apparent if just a few moments are devoted to thought. Unlimited fame, glory, wealth awaits anyone who comes up with a “cure” for HIV. No researcher is unaware of that. They will follow any inspiration that offers a hope for that, and they would be given grant funds without stint to pursue that hope — so long as their peers agree that the hope seems reasonable and the method feasible. But the current proposals fail the test of plausibility rather obviously and badly.

What “cure research” means here was explained by the (grant-seeking) scientists present at the meeting with Waxman:
“Drs. Mitsuyasu and Cannon . . . discussed their ongoing, extraordinary and promising efforts in the area of anti-HIV gene and stem cell therapy . . . . Inspired by ‘the Berlin patient’ . . . who was cured of HIV by the use of blood stem cells from a person who was born with T-cells lacking CCR5, they hope to duplicate his result in a safe way for people with HIV. Their novel approaches are at the forefront of AIDS cure research, one already at the early stage of human testing” [emphases added].
As already remarked, gene therapy has gotten nowhere. Stem cell therapy has not yet gotten even that far. The “human testing” cannot possibly be at the level of actually trying out the “cure” as such (or at least it shouldn’t be); it will just be early preliminaries — otherwise the call would not be for research funds but for resources to provide the cure to all “HIV-positive” people.

As for inadequate funding . . . . What has been provided for HIV/AIDS research is enormously in excess of what has been devoted to the ailments that most people suffer from and eventually die of, for instance cardiovascular disease, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), diabetes (Open Letter to my Representatives in Congress).

As to “cure research”, I had evidently missed an earlier (26 July 2012) Media Release by the International AIDS Society on the occasion of their XIXth International Conference:
“Last week the Inaugural Global Scientific Strategy Towards an HIV Cure was launched amid renewed optimism from the world’s leading HIV/AIDS scientists that the future prospects for finding an HIV cure are increasing. . . . Towards an HIV Cure identifies seven important priority areas for basic, translational and clinical research and maps out a path for future research collaboration and funding opportunities” [emphasis added].

If further comment seems needed, see “The Research Trough — where lack of progress brings more grants”;
“From Dawn to Decadence: The Three Ages of Modern Science”;
“80% unemployment?! The research system is broken”;
“Dishonesty and dysfunction in science”.
As a general rule, it is good to bear in mind that just because words can be put together doesn’t mean that a feasible reality is being described. “Gene therapy”, “cure research”, “stem cell therapy” and many more are just words and wishes. They are perfectly suited to science fiction but not (at present; yet?) to science policy.

Junk HIV/AIDS science from Max Essex and others

A fellow Rethinker was interested in an article by Max Essex, “The Etiology of AIDS”, in the monograph AIDS in Africa, so I got it on Interlibrary Loan and made the mistake of glancing through it. The book is replete with factual errors. It illustrates much about the AIDS industry: researchers publish incessantly for no good reason, just for self-promotion; and this is abetted by publishers who know they can make a handsome living by producing high-priced tomes that all-too-many academic libraries feel obliged to purchase (AIDS in Africa is listed at $195 on amazon.com).

The following refers to the 2002 (second) edition of AIDS in Africa, which was first published in 1994. The Preface by Essex and co-editors (Souleymane Mboup, Phyllis J. Kanki, Richard G. Marlink, Sheila D. Tlou) raises a number of points worth pondering, for instance, that in some African countries “more than a third of young women are HIV-infected”. Recall that HIV crossed to humans from apes in Africa, some unknown time before it arrived in the USA via Haiti, according to the current mainstream fable. If there are now countries where so many young women are “HIV-positive”, it’s difficult to understand how there is any population there at all, at least 4 decades after the deadly virus first began to spread. Especially since “65% to 85% of teenagers in some countries will die of AIDS unless major changes occur now”. Again: Why weren’t they dying while HIV was spreading after its ape-to-human jump at least 4 decades ago?
During the 1980s, Essex at al. inform, the focus regarding AIDS was on the USA and Europe, it was largely ignored in Africa even by African governments. Evidently not too many Africans were dying of AIDS!? But “there has been a massive expansion of the AIDS epidemic in Africa . . . [o]ver the last eight years”. Again there’s something obviously wrong here. Where was HIV/AIDS in Africa hiding up to ~1994? Why has it exploded only since it did become of wide concern, including at least rudimentary provision of antiretroviral drugs and other interventions? Some of which have been praised for remarkable success in bringing down infection rates?

Why no vaccine, after “more than 15 years . . . of intent to develop a vaccine”? Essex et al. know why: resources have not been great enough, and in general “[p]reventive medicine has never been as popular as therapy”.
Balderdash.
There’s no vaccine because despite a variety of attempts, there have been nothing but failures — for which the most plausible reason is that “HIV” isn’t an infectious agent.

Essex et al. not only distort the past and present, they can even see into the future: “The new edition . . . reflect[s] the current and future epidemics” [emphasis added]. They may well be right, given that the AIDS epidemics are nowadays manufactured by the AIDS industry and its researchers.

Chapter 1, “The Etiology of AIDS” by Max Essex and Souleymane Mboup, begins in unpromising fashion if one cares for accuracy. The first identification of AIDS in 1981, they say, was in “young adults” and comprised “Kaposi’s sarcoma, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, and Mycobacterium avium tuberculosis” as “the most frequently observed”.
But the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention HIV/AIDS Surveillance Reports specify only Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia and “Other opportunistic diseases” up to 1988. For the first time in 1989 is Mycobacterium avium tuberculosis mentioned separately, and then it comprises only 1243 definitive plus 105 presumptive cases out of a total of 48,109. Even including M. tuberculosis and other mycobacterial disease only brings the total to 2770 (i.e., less than 6%) compared to 18,288 for Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. In reality, TB has only comparatively recently become an “AIDS” disease. A cynic might suggest that Essex and Mboup want TB to have been a AIDS disease from the beginning because in Africa it is one of the most common manifestations of “HIV/AIDS”, that is to say one of the most common pre-existing diseases to be included under “AIDS” in order to boost the numbers.
As to “young adults”, Michelle Cochrane found in the original medical records that the average age of AIDS victims in the early 1980s was mid-to-late 30s, much more compatible with a lifestyle explanation than with a sexually transmitted disease (The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, pp. 187-8).

Much else would be grist for criticism in “The Etiology of AIDS”, for example that the title does not describe the contents and that the cited references include more Essex publications than could be objectively justified. But instead of continuing this thankless and frustrating analysis, I’ll just refer to some egregious errors in the discussion of testing. There are no tests or combination of tests that can by themselves diagnose infection by HIV, inevitably so since there is no gold standard because pure HIV virions have never been isolated from an AIDS patient or an “HIV-positive” person (Stanley H. Weiss & Elliot P. Cowan, “Laboratory detection of human retroviral infection” in Gary P. Wormser [ed.], AIDS and Other Manifestations of HIV Infection). Yet here are some of the statements to be found in AIDS in Africa, Chapter 7, “Serodiagnosis of HIV Infection”, by Aissatou Guèye-Ndiaye:

“Serologic assays have been an established method for the clinical diagnosis of HIV infection since the early 1980s”, citing none other than Stanley H. Weiss for his 1982 paper on screening, which is not diagnosis. Then the crucial distinction between screening and diagnosis is explicitly muddied: “These techniques for detecting HIV infection have also been fundamental to the screening of blood donations, and to the epidemiologic monitoring of . . . the AIDS epidemic” [emphasis added]. Further, “direct detection is based on the identification of whole viral particles . . . . [T]he polymerase chain reaction (PCR) [is] . . . the most common direct detection assay”.
These gross mistakes are not ameliorated by admissions that the “genetic variability of HIVs” means that some strains may not be detected; the real problem is that none of the tests are a sound basis for demonstrating infection.
“[A] screening assay [is] followed by a supplementary or confirmatory assay . . . . [C]onfirmatory assays . . . distinguish true infections from nonspecific reactions” [emphasis added] — but supplementary is not the same as confirmatory, and no “HIV” test is confirmatory, indeed cannot be since there is no gold standard for these tests since pure HIV virions have never been isolated from an AIDS patient or from a person who is “HIV-positive”.
As is so often the case with the mainstream HIV/AIDS literature, reasonably close reading by any half-awake person would suffice to undercut the wrong assertions. Thus Guèye-Ndiaye mentions that interpretation of ELISA results hinges on setting cut-off values for color reactions, in other words “positive”, “indeterminate”, and “negative” are based on arbitrary decisions. And although Western Blot is called “the gold standard of HIV testing”, the subsequent Table 1 describes five quite different criteria for what constitutes a positive, according to the World Health Organization, the Food and Drug Administration, the American Red Cross, France, and Japan. If there are five quite different criteria, none of them can be authoritative. (Not mentioned is Britain, where the Western Blot is used only for research purposes because it is not suitable for confirmation or diagnosis of HIV infection.)

Not surprisingly, Weiss and Cowan are not cited by Guèye-Ndiaye, even though their chapter is in a monograph first published in 1987 and now in its 4th edition (2004). Already the 2nd edition in 1992 described the unreliability of the Western Blot and that PCR is prone to false positives (as its inventor, Kary Mullis, has himself pointed out).

I read no more than these two chapters in any detail, recalling the long-ago words of  David Grahame, a singularly meticulous and ground-breaking electrochemist at Amherst College: It is not a productive endeavor to be spending time ferreting out mistakes in other people’s work.
The important point is made amply by the above-demonstrated flaws. The monograph AIDS in Africa contains plainly wrong, dangerously misleading material on central issues about HIV/AIDS; which is all the more disgraceful and inexcusable since this is its 2nd edition (the copy I borrowed gives Kluwer Academic/Plenum as publisher, but amazon.com credits it to Springer).

Why is HIV/AIDS a disease of black people?

“Throughout last month’s International AIDS Conference, HIV advocates highlighted the enormous disparities afflicting U.S. women of color, for whom HIV infection rates are skyrocketing and reaching levels similar to those of sub-Saharan Africa. . . . the rate of new HIV infections among black women was 15 times that of white women and over three times the rate among Hispanic/Latina women” — “HIV/AIDS Rates Rocket for Black U.S. Women”, ForbesWoman 8/13/2012.

Note first that the disparities are NOT enormous for “U.S. women of color”, only for black women, since they are affected 3 times as much as “Hispanic/Latina” women. Moreover, “Hispanic/Latina” is a highly artificial ethnic-linguistic category, within which genetically black people are affected by “HIV/AIDS” far more than whites: West-Coast “Hispanics”, who are largely Mexican, test “HIV-positive” at about the same rate as Native Americans and not much more than white Americans, whereas East-Coast “Hispanics”, who  are largely Caribbean and black, test “HIV-positive” at about the same rate as African Americans (see copious data from official sources cited in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory).

As also shown in that book, the reason why black people test “HIV-positive” far more often than others — whites, Asians, Native Americans — is because the “HIV” tests are racially biased: something about the genetic haplotypes common in some sub-Saharan natives, probably related to the Bantu, produces a very high rate of testing “HIV-positive”.

But don’t go to the bother of looking at the data, which are conclusive. Just use common sense. Either African Americans and sub-Saharan natives share an inescapably determinative cultural or genetic proclivity for promiscuous and unsafe sex, or there is something physiological about their shared genetic ancestry that conduces to testing “HIV-positive” — bearing in mind that testing “HIV-positive” can result from innumerable conditions, including pregnancy or getting vaccinated.
The degree of promiscuous and unsafe sex needed to explain the “HIV” “pandemic” in sub-Saharan Africa has been calculated by Dr. James Chin, former epidemiologist for the World Health Organization and for California: 20-40% of adult Africans must be having about a dozen sexual partners at any given time and must be changing them about annually, to generate the network needed for the apparent “spread” of HIV (The AIDS Pandemic, 2007).

So which are you willing to believe?
That about one third of African Americans, women in particular, have about a dozen sexual partners at any given time, without practicing safe sex, and changing those partners about annually

 OR

  that there’s something about those highly non-specific “HIV” tests that responds to proteins commonly found in the sera of people with sub-Saharan genetic haplotypes?

Déjà vu all over again

I started this blog nearly 5 years ago, with the immediate aim of applying to continuing “news” about HIV/AIDS the insights I had gained from collating HIV-test results, namely, that what these tests detect or measure is not an infectious entity, nor is it correlated with the published numbers for “AIDS” (The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory).
Comments from various quarters helped me to learn much more, especially about why gay men have been so much involved; and I was prompted to further analyses of official data, which revealed yet more flaws in HIV/AIDS theory:

• Since “HIV” doesn’t cause “AIDS”, why were gay men the first victims of AIDS, and why do they so often test “HIV-positive”?
  John Lauritsen  and  Michelle Cochrane (When AIDS Began, 2004 had given good answers to the first point: It was not young, previously healthy, gay men who succumbed to AIDS in the early 1980s, it was predominantly drug-abusing fast-living men in their mid- to late thirties who happened also to be gay.
  Tony Lance answered the second point for me with the intestinal dysbiosis hypothesis, confirmations of which have been coming in increasingly from mainstream sources; see “GRID = Gay Related Intestinal Dysbiosis? Explaining HIV/AIDS Paradoxes in Terms of Intestinal Dysbiosis”    and “What really caused AIDS: Slicing through the Gordian knot”; “AIDS as intestinal dysbiosis”; “Unraveling HIV/AIDS”; “More mainstream alternative treatment for ‘HIV/AIDS’”; “Must read”; “Intestinal Dysbiosis theory confirmed”; “Intestinal dysbiosis theory confirmed again”; “Intestinal dysbiosis: more and more confirmations”.

• I came to realize that the crucial point is that “HIV” tests do not diagnose presence of active HIV virions: “HIV tests are not HIV tests”, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, 15 (#1, 2010) 5-9. See also “‘HIV’ tests are self-fulfilling prophecies”; “‘HIV’ tests are demonstrably invalid”; “The Wonderland of ‘HIV’ ‘tests’”; “Health-threatening and life-threatening tests”.
  Etienne de Harven has indicated why “HIV-positive” is misleading: “Human Endogenous Retroviruses and AIDS research: Confusion, consensus, or science?”, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 15#3 (2010) 69-74.

•  Analysis of mortality data shows that “HIV-positive” and “AIDS” are not  diseases, because the mortality of people in those categories does not increase with age whereas mortality from all diseases increases with age, for the obvious reason that our general capacity to resist stress decreases as we age.
  Moreover the supposed latent period between HIV infection and onset of AIDS does not exist: “‘HIV disease’ is not an illness”; “How ‘AIDS Deaths’ and ‘HIV Infections’ vary with age — and why”; “HAART saves lives — but doesn’t prolong them!?”; “Living with HIV; Dying from what?”; “HIV, AIDS, and age: HIV/AIDS theory is wrong”; “Age shall not wither them — because HIV really doesn’t kill”; “No HIV ‘latent period’: dotting i’s and crossing t’s”.

• Many confirmations have appeared from different countries and circumstances of the epidemiological regularities I had found in the largely USA data analyzed in my book, perhaps most strikingly the racial disparities and perhaps most mysteriously the correlation with population density.

• I’ve noted a fine array of absurdities: pregnant women more likely to become “HIV-positive” than non-pregnant women; breast-feeding protective against becoming “HIV-positive” despite being a supposed avenue for transmission of HIV; mainstream activists urging that drug addicts be given fresh clean needles so that they could more safely kill themselves through drug abuse; assertions that HIV is transmitted in different ways in different parts of the world; and more.

As time has passed, fewer and fewer items appeared in the media that were both new and noteworthy and therefore worth blogging about. Microbicide and vaccine trials continue to fail — what more can be said about that except that it confirms over and over again the vacuity of HIV/AIDS theory? Official agencies continue to trumpet the danger of HIV/AIDS even as fewer and fewer people are affected by it — how often is that worth mentioning? Mainstream sources continue to applaud the lifesaving benefits of antiretroviral drugs even as the official Treatment Guidelines and primary literature continue to report the dangerous toxicity of antiretroviral treatment and the continual production of new drugs intended to be less toxic — how often is that worth writing about? And what more can be said about the continuing mis-direction by mainstream sources of labeling as “HIV-associated” ailments that are actually owing to antiretroviral drugs: lipodystrophy, kidney failure, heart failure, and much more (in addition to the re-labeling in Africa of well known diseases as “AIDS”: tuberculosis, malaria, and more).
So after a few years of blogging here, media coverage of HIV/AIDS has become for me déjà vu all over again (cr. Yogi Berra).
At the same time, I’ve become increasingly aware that what’s wrong with HIV/AIDS is no different in principle from what’s wrong with medical science as a whole. For example, the morphing of “AIDS” from a manifest clinical syndrome of Kaposi’s sarcoma and a couple of fungal infections into something defined by lab tests and numbers (“HIV-positive” and CD4 counts) is precisely what has happened in the last half century or so in medical practice as a whole: feelings of illness and diagnosis by a physician have been supplanted by lab tests and surrogate markers: blood sugar, clotting time, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, PSA, X-rays, CT scans, etc. (see e.g. Jeremy Greene, Prescribing by Numbers). The result has been over-testing and over-treatment and administering drugs to perfectly healthy people who don’t need them, don’t benefit from them, and may indeed be harmed by them, statins being a notable example of actual harm (see e.g. http://www.spacedoc.com).
Volumes could also be written about the mistakes made by medical science because of incompetent applications of statistics. Douglas Altman has been writing articles about it for a couple of decades, without apparent effect, for example, “The scandal of poor medical research” (British Medical Journal, 308 [1994] 283) or “Poor-quality medical research: what can journals do?” (JAMA, 287 [2002] 2765-7). John Ioannidis has even been featured in popular magazines for demonstrating the pervasive flaws in statistical analyses, for example that only 7 of the 35 most highly cited studies of drugs confirmed in use the favorable results claimed when the drugs were approved (Ioannidis and Panagiotou Ioannidis, JAMA, 305 [2011] 2200-10). Already 25 years ago, in Science magazine (242 [1988] 1257-63), Alvan Feinstein had discussed the rotten quality of epidemiologic studies relevant to matters of everyday life: “Despite peer-review approval, the current methods need substantial improvement to produce trustworthy scientific evidence”.
When articles like that in one of the leading scientific periodicals have made no difference, and incompetent statistics continues to be accepted for publication, what hope is there for improvement? No wonder that experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claimed a correlation between AIDS and HIV when their own cited data contradicted the claim (Curran et al., Science 239 [1988] 610-6; see p. 110 ff. in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory), or that those experts took a correlation as proving causation (Dondero and Curran, Lancet 343 [1994] 989–90; see p. 194 in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory)?
The large lesson is that common sense should be applied whenever the media, or official press releases, or indeed the primary scientific literature asserts results that are patently absurd. This blog post was stimulated by this one:

Parents less likely to catch colds and flu,
New Scientist, 14 July 2012, Magazine issue 2873.
Children bring many things to their parents’ lives: happiness, sleepless nights… and viruses. But although parents do catch infections from their kids, it seems parents are also more resistant to colds and flu. Sheldon Cohen and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, reviewed three studies in which researchers put either a flu virus or a rhinovirus, which causes colds, into people’s noses, then tracked who fell ill. Cohen’s team found that parents were only 48 per cent as likely to develop an infection as people with no kids. The more children there were in the family, the more parents were protected against illness. But the kids did not need to be present: parents whose children had already left home were only 27 per cent as likely as the childless adults to get sick (Psychosomatic Medicine, DOI: 10.1097/psy.0b013e31825941ff). Levels of antibody to the viruses used were the same in the parents as in the childless subjects. So what could explain the results? Cohen’s team speculates that parenthood brings happiness and reduces stress levels, which can boost the immune system.
That, or parents just don’t have time to get sick — so they don’t.

The media are very adept at making cute comments like that last sentence. But they report such BS as though it might mean something. Parents overall are less likely to become ill by 52%, but those whose children have left home are less likely by 73%?
I suppose parents’ stress levels are even lower, and happiness even greater, after children have left home? And happiness boosts the immune system without changing antibody levels?
Possible, of course; just as it’s possible that the Sphinx was built by extraterrestrials.
But plausible? NO. Worth promulgating as breaking news? NO.

Mainstream HIV PSEUDO-science

When at long last researchers find out how to keep HIV in check, that naturally makes news:

“Secret of HIV’s natural born killers out”
“Revealed: Secret of HIV’s natural born killers”
“SFU scientists contribute to HIV breakthrough — Natural resistance to AIDS may be key in developing a vaccine”
“Study digs into secrets of keeping HIV in check”
“People with rare natural ability to fight AIDS virus have potent ‘killer’ cells that recognise and destroy infection”

That’s just a sampling of what Google turns up about this just-announced phenomenal breakthrough. I was inspired to get the research article itself, published on-line ahead of print in Nature Immunology, 10 June 2012; doi:10.1038/ni.2342.
It’s a highly technical 12 pages long, with a rather technical title: “TCR clonotypes modulate the protective effect of HLA class I molecules in HIV-1 infection”.
There are 21 authors from 6 laboratories in 4 countries (Canada, Germany, Japan, USA).
The number of authors is greater than the number of studied subjects, who totaled 10: 5 of them “elite controllers”, the other 5 “HIV-positive” people on HAART.

Even the news reports cited researchers not involved in the work who pointed out that this in itself means nothing at all, given not only the small number of subjects but also the fact that “elite controllers” have never been found to be all alike in the immunological characteristics that seem to matter.

It is no mystery, of course, why such an inconclusive little bit of possible progress would be published: the vast majority of research articles are like this, adding no more than tiny bits of possibly useful information — LPUs, least-publishable units.
It is also no mystery, why the media would trumpet about it: Their attention was drawn to it by the paper’s authors, so that further grants and kudos would flow in their direction. After all, this work would not have been possible without grants from:
“Harvard University Center for AIDS Research . . . , the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation . . . , the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation . . . , the US National Institutes of Health . . . , the Howard Hughes Medical Institute . . . , the Mark and Lisa Schwartz Foundation . . . , the Intramural Research Program and the Office of AIDS Research of the US National Institutes of Health . . . , the Canadian Institutes for Health Research . . . and the Canada Research Chair in Viral Pathogenesis and Immunity . . . .”

The lead author, cited in the news stories, appears to be Bruce D. Walker, “professor at Harvard School of Public Health”.
One can only hope that he was not quoted correctly to the effect that “One person has been fending off AIDS since 1978”.

It would be a nice trick, after all, to have diagnosed “HIV infection” some 6 years before the purported discovery of HIV.
Not, of course, that reporters who cover such stories need know anything about the subject.
Nor, of course, that researchers studying elite controllers need know anything about the history of the discovery of “HIV”.