dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Excerpt

2005

Transcript from an interview with Kary B. Mullis,1993 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, at the 55th meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany, June 2005. Interviewer is freelance journalist Marika Griehsel.

I mean, that’s what the whole, I think, that’s the whole – and I’ve published this but nobody pays any attention because there’s a sort of a world wide frenzy of AIDS researchers who are focused on the first HIV sequence that was ever isolated and they’ve just been spinning their wheels for 20 years and they’re not noticing it and aren’t curing the disease but I think it’s sort of that disease is caused by a genus, by the whole of retroviridae and it’s the mechanism for, it’s complicated to be talking about, you know, without a blackboard and everything, but there is a reasonable mechanism that you can postulate and you could say and the reason that we’re now seeing that for the first time, even though retroviruses have been here throughout our whole, you know, we’ve got many copies of Deadmans in our genome so we’ve been around them for a long time, why haven’t they ever caused any diseases? They haven’t caused any diseased because our behaviour has never been quite the same. It’s required in this mechanism that I’m postulating, it’s required that you be infected by a whole lot of different strains of, and that’s what does it.

That’s what the problem is, in your point of view.

Kary B. Mullis: That’s what the problem is. They’re sort of, your immune system is kind of being overrun by a lot, there’s a tremendous variety of similar things that are able to get into you in very small numbers when they come in, and sit in and then they go for your white blood cells for certain, and they insert into the DNA.

So that makes it even more complicated to find some kind of vaccine or treatment, I would imagine.

Kary B. Mullis: Yes. Well, treatment for retroviruses in general, they’ve come up with some that will kill them, certain ones. They’re usually only looking for things that are associated closely with HIV. There aren’t any nice tests for the whole genus. In other words, you don’t do a test for retrovirus; there are tests that would be useful there but they’re not amplifiable and they’re kind of insensitive, to see the whole genus and I think there’s where the problem lies, is that the people who are working in that area don’t realise that they’re only working on one little piece. They’re only looking at this one species, that it’s the pseudo-species in the first place because it’s changing its sequence all the time, but they’re thinking of it as one infectious agent and if you can stop this, you can cure the disease and most of the drugs get better developed or…

They’re too narrow.

Kary B. Mullis: They’re not terribly narrow but they’re not recognising the problem.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1993/mullis/25900-interview-transcript-1993/

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