Conduct unbecoming…

As science correspondent of the venerable British newspaper The Sunday Times between 1991 and 1994, Neville Hodgkinson persistently questioned the role of HIV in AIDS, the danger to heterosexuals and the growing dimensions of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Now he has written the portentously entitled AIDS — The Failure of Contemporary Science (Fourth Estate), which describes and attempts to perpetuate his campaign. Having failed to persuade the scientific community, the pharmaceutical industry and the journals and institutions of science of their monumental error over HIV, he now presses the need for a “radical rethink” of the “methods, checks and assumptions” of science in its entirety. Two features of the Hodgkinson affair are of particular interest for those concerned with the relationship between science and the media: the propriety of specialist correspondents commenting in print on the work of their colleagues in other publications, and the consequences of Nature’s initiative in monitoring coverage of HIV/AIDS in The Sunday Times. Journalists are reluctant to criticize their peers in print. They did so on this occasion because they were provoked by the relentless and dramatic presentation of a heterodox, minority view of HIV/AIDS, to the neglect of consensual opinion. “The primary cause of AIDS is HIV,” wrote The Observer’s Robin McKie in 1993. “Yes, Mr Hodgkinson, there are other factors involved in the disease’s spread and no, not all are known. But there is one unequivocal connection. When, and where, you have HIV infections, you have AIDS.” McKie and others were right to take on The Sunday Times. They were wise on health grounds, given that Hodgkinson may well have undermined advice designed to reduce the transmission of HIV. And they were on firm journalistic grounds too. They did not ignore dissenting theories about AIDS, notably those of Californian virologist Peter Duesberg whose ideas formed the basis for much of Hodgkinson’s work. But they did set them in their proper context. The person who provided a distorted picture for over three years was Neville Hodgkinson. His claim now that The Sunday Times gave readers “a chance to learn of both points of view” can be substantiated only on the highly dubious basis that his perverse coverage of AIDS after 1991 contrasted with his conventional treatment of the issue previously. He now has difficulty in comprehending why not only scientists but also other journalists attacked his work.