Does HIV cause AIDS?

I read a book called Dancing Naked in the Mind Field by Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize Winner in 1993 for discovering the Polymerase Chain Reaction. Very interesting book, but not what I want to talk about.In it I heard for the first time the suggestion that HIV does not cause AIDS. He explains in the book about his search for a reference paper that establishes that HIV is the most likely cause for AIDS. He says he has never been able to find it, and he's asked everyone.The following quote is from www.virusmyth.net:

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Although more than 75,000 scientific papers have been published on AIDS, no paper has seriously considered all relevant evidence and attempted to prove that HIV causes AIDS. Some papers respond to specific objections but begin by assuming that HIV causes AIDS, which is the very question at issue. If such a paper were possible to write, it would have been written, and been the most widely cited scientific publication of this century. Since such papers do not exist, it is impossible to refute or substantiate the arguments they might contain. Papers on HIV and AIDS exist, of course, but they assume HIV causes AIDS, which is the very question at issue.

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Of course, one immediately wonders about the amount of study that AIDs patients have had and why they all have the HIV antibody if it has nothing to do with AIDS. That site goes on to say:

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You don't need to be a medical scientist to see at once that HIV is associated with every AIDS case: if you have tuberculosis and no evidence of HIV, you are a tuberculosis case; if you have the same disease and show a HIV positive antibody test, then you are an AIDS case. By definition, this would mean that every official AIDS case would have an antibody to HIV.

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I know that Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis can be a crackpot, who is at least somewhat pro-LSD and thinks that he was saved from a bad accident involving laughing gas by a woman passing by on an astral projection trip. This is not good for his credibility. However...Can anybody refute his claim that there is no good original study showing that HIV is the likely cause for AIDS? Do any of you scientists know anything about the scientists who have signed on with the folks at Peter Duernsburg and the folks at virusmyth.com?I've researched this with Google searches, but I'm a bookkeeper, not a scientist. I did find a medical journalist who agrees with this guys, but not much else addressing their claims. It's always a little scary when people are claiming to be shut out of scientific journals (probably means they're really crackpots), but there are some pretty impressive (to me) names involved here.Any info?

First, on your disingenuous comment: I can't really be disingenuous on this issue, because I'm of the opinion that people shut out of peer-reviewed journals are shut out (in general) because their science is bad, not because the journals are biased against them. I'm not in any way sold on virusmyth.com, and I hope my post made that clear.But, on the above, am I missing something? I thought the reason they tested for the HIV antibody in the 80's was because they hadn't isolated the virus. Do they really have a picture of the virus attacking a white blood cell that's from the 80's? This would have been good enough for me in the past, but scientists with a lot more knowledge than me were being "disingenuous," as you put it, and suggesting that what you say here isn't true.I'm perfectly willing to believe that this is true, but not just because you say it. There are links in the posts before yours that seem to me to say that this quote of yours is true. You provided a link, too...thank you. I wish my google searches had turned those sites up, too, but apparently I was searching on the wrong words or something. I looked pretty hard, I thought, but clearly I didn't do a very good job, so that's why I asked what I did.It looks like y'all are right, at least to me, and I suspected that's what I would find by asking, as, like I said, the "I'm blocked out of the peer-reviewed journals because of prejudice against me" is almost a certain sign that your science is bad. Looks like that's true in this case, too.Thanks for the help.

I need to ask about this, too. This statement was in your link and in the other one I looked at:

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With regard to postulate #1, numerous studies from around the world show that virtually all AIDS patients are HIV-seropositive; that is they carry antibodies that indicate HIV infection.

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"Virtually all" means almost all, not "all." Why are they saying "virtually all."Again, I am not saying I agree with Mullis and Duernsburg. It seems clear that they have avoided giving all the facts. An honest, unbiased skeptic would give all the facts, and Mullis and Duernsburg have left out some awful pertinent facts in presenting their case. However, I have got to ask about the "virtually all" statement. What about the exceptions? Is there an explanation?

Thank you.

I give in already! I surrender!Actually, I really appreciate all the information. It was exactly what I was looking for.Still, though, it's so disappointing to find out that a nut like Mullis wasn't on to something. This really causes some credibility problems with the shining, talking raccoon and his astral-projecting mistress who pulled the frozen nitrous oxide tube out of his mouth as she was passing by.So sad...