HIV sequence from virus

Patrick O'Neil patrick at corona
Thu Jun 8 23:13:42 EST 1995

On 8 Jun 1995, Todd Miller - Pharmacology wrote:

> sequence data derived from particles, and when this is considered
> along with the absence of EM's of pure HIV, I have to doubt it's
> existence.  Why isn't this data available?  All you thousands of
> scientists working on this and no one can provide me this info.

As I mentioned previously, by this logic there are other viruses to 
doubt, not just HIV so I still wonder why HIV specifically is the 

Be that as it may, I have not forgotten you nor have I blown you off, 
that is, I can now divert attention to a hunt for purified virion EM shots.

Curious about one thing:  Why is it, if HIV is imaginary, that consistent
DNA can be reverse transcribed from infected cells, and that the cDNA
contains all the elements of any retrovirus.  Same organization, and so
on, as with HTLV, MLV, SIV, FIV, etc?  Yet the repeatedly identifiable
cDNA (or even RNA) is not *identical* to these other swarms, indicating a
separate subspecies?  Are all the other retroviruses also phantasms?  Or
would you classify the HIV virus as an HTLV variant, which amounts to
nothing but a label change, not a denial of existence.  The bottom line
would be a retrovirus (of course, HIV was previously labeled HTLV III, I
believe).  You cannot lay it off as an artifact of RT-PCR because errors
in the process would be largely random and so you would not find a
consistent, blatant PCR error that could be interpreted consistently as an
independent virus species (in case you think that a mere transposon is
being pulled).  At best, you could expect a consistent number of point
mutations standard for RT-PCR to be eliminated as simple background noise. 


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