Telling Stories
For those of us able to avoid the worst excesses of lockdown, there were benefits to living on the margins of society. During my exile in 2020-2021, a period when I was constantly on the move, my greatest pleasure was having the time to read Emile Zola’s “Rougon-Macquart” cycle of twenty novels, which were set in France during the Second Empire (1851 to 1870). (My X profile name -- @FouanPere – is derived from the main tragic character of Zola’s masterpiece “La Terre”, the 17th novel in the cycle.)
LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE HERE:
The Second Empire to the end of the 19th century was a time of great intellectual ferment. It was heavily influenced by the doctrine of positivism, developed by Auguste Comte, who believed human progress could only be achieved by the application of science to politics and society. In one sense, this is not much different from “Trust the Experts”. Intellectuals such Zola were sought after as newspaper commentators on any subject under the sun, whether literary, political, or scientific. The Rougon Macquart series of novels are structured on Zola’s eccentric theories about personality inheritance: heredity as destiny. The final novel in the series, Le Docteur Pascal, loosely based on Zola himself, is about a doctor/scientist who spends his entire life in the laboratory analysing his dysfunctional extended family, who ultimately fails in his goal to cure his family of their hereditary defects by means of a medical injection.
In her recent Substack “Is Tuberculosis Contagious?”
Sasha Latypova posted a link to a book by French doctor Jean-Antoine Villemin, active in the second half of the 19th century. Villemin claimed to have proved that tuberculosis is a transmissible disease. Sasha asked if anyone was willing to look at the book to see what was the nature of evidence for this claim. I took her up on her offer, and published the following as a Comment on her Substack:
From Chapter 16 of “Studies on Tuberculosis” by J-A Villemin. “On 6 March 1865, we took two three-week-old bunnies away from their mother. With one bunny we inserted into a small opening behind each ear two small fragments of tuberculosis, and a little puriform liquid from a pulmonary cavity taken from the lungs and intestines of a phtisic who had been dead for 33 hours. On 30 March and 4 April we repeated the inoculation with the first bunny’s brother. On June 20 there were no appreciable changes in the health of the bunny number one (now a rabbit!) other than the fact that it had grown a lot (amazing!). We sacrified it and when we opened it, we noticed a teaspoon of serosity in the peritoneum, some swelling (tubercule) along the curve of the stomach, on two parallel tracks of each side of the median line, and formed with grey granulations, which were oblong, and very small. Some of those granulations had a tiny little yellow dot in the center. In the intestine, there was a tubercule the size of a hempseed. (Yes, a hempseed. And the French invented the metric system! Go figure.) Other smaller tubercules which were less prominent were scattered in the small intestine. Later, the brother of the first bunny was also killed and showed absolutely no "tubercule" when they opened him up. He was totally healthy. “
It's all quite silly when you read it now.
What I thought was interesting about “Studies on Tuberculosis” was how easily Villemin convinced the world that these experiments indicated transmission. They clearly violate Koch’s postulates. The experiments described in chapter 16 are the only interesting part of the book. They are preceeded by 600 pages of pointless descriptions of symptoms of tuberculosis, and even more pointless theorizing and analogizing about how tuberculosis is like some other diseases, for example, syphilis. Villemin even uses the word “virus”, although not in the sense that we use the word now.
Villemin reminds me of Zola’s Doctor Pascal. “Studies on Tuberculosis” is essentially a work of fiction, but written by a hack rather than a literary genius.
Germ theory is just a story, and a very successful one. For excellent posts on the origins of germ theory, see the X account @Aldhissla45.
Why did everyone believe germ theory?
I don’t think it’s coincidental that these scientific fables arose in France, the UK, and Germany during second half of the nineteenth century. Back then, every intellectual worth his or her salt was fascinated by science, in the same way that people are fascinated by AI today -- especially science coupled with the idea of human progress, i.e. positivism. Why those fables weren’t refuted in the 20th century is almost certainly due to the fact that these fables are very profitable for pharma.
HIV -- Germ Theory on Steroids
Fast forward to 1996. Gay men are still dying of “AIDS”, but with AZT having being phased out, there is only a year or two left until the last deaths from AZT occur. Once that occurs, no one will fear AIDS, and the Big Pharma juggernaut will screech to a halt.
They needed to come up with a new story. Something building upon viral transmission, but with a twist.
David Ho came to the rescue with the “HIV reservoir” concept.
From Grok:
The concept of an HIV reservoir emerged in the mid-1990s as researchers studied why HIV persists in the body despite antiretroviral therapy (ART). Key developments include:
1995-1997: Studies showed that even with effective ART, HIV could remain latent in certain cells, particularly resting CD4+ T cells. A pivotal 1997 study by David Ho and colleagues (published in Nature) demonstrated that HIV integrates into the DNA of these cells, forming a stable, transcriptionally silent reservoir that ART cannot eliminate.
Terminology: The term "reservoir" was coined to describe these hidden pools of infected cells that harbor replication-competent HIV, evading both the immune system and ART. This was further supported by work from Robert Siliciano’s group, who quantified the latent reservoir and its slow decay rate (Nature, 1999).
Key Insight: The reservoir concept arose from understanding that HIV’s ability to establish latency in long-lived cells (like memory T cells) and anatomical sites (e.g., lymphoid tissues) explained the failure to achieve a cure despite viral suppression.
“Latent viruses” were a brilliant fabrication. I certainly believed in them. Here were these deadly little viruses hiding in your CD4+ T cells, waiting to pop out and attack unless you took this toxic new ART.
The other brilliant fabrication was “viral resistance”. The HIV virus was evolving so fast – VaRiAnTs – that drug pushers Big Pharma could roll out new drugs before the old ones went off-patent. I suspect viral resistance was invented by analogy from antibiotic resistance (which is a real thing). Amazingly, despite the fact that the HIV virus was constantly mutating in unknown ways and evading the defences of ART, it was still possible to detect HIV and quantify viral load with a PCR test.
Hmmm….
Moral
It’s perfectly okay to tell yourself stories. It’s also okay to listen to other people’s stories.
Just don’t assume that they’re true.