House of Numbers

[n2doc]

September 26th, 2009 by Ben Goldacre in bad science | 68 Comments »
Ben Goldacre, 26 September 2009, The Guardian.

This week, listening to the Guardian Science podcast, I had a treat. Caspar Melville, editor of New Humanist magazine, leader of something called the Rationalist Association, had been to see two films at the Cambridge Film Festival. One was a dreary creationist movie that famously misrepresented the biologists interviewed for it. This was obvious bad science, he explained. But the other was different: House of Numbers, a new film about Aids, really had something in it.I have now seen this film. It presents itself as a naïve journey by one young film maker to discover the science behind HIV. In reality it’s a dreary and pernicious piece of Aids denialist propaganda.

All the usual ideas are there. It’s antiretroviral drugs themselves that are the cause of symptoms called Aids. Or it’s poverty. Or it’s drug use. HIV doesn’t cause Aids. Diagnostic tools don’t work, Aids is simply a spurious basket diagnosis invented to sell antiretroviral medication for a wide range of unrelated problems, and the drugs don’t work either.

It would take two months of columns to address all the bogus claims of this film, and that blizzard, perhaps, is the point of making it, with all the classic rhetorical devices that have been honed by Aids denialists and creationists over decades. It engages, for example, in repeated overstatement of marginal internal disagreements about the details of HIV research, to the extent that 18 doctors and scientists interviewed for the film have issued a statement saying that the director was “deceptive” in his interactions with them, that it perpetuates pseudoscience and myths, and that they were selectively quoted to make it seem as if they are in disagreement and disarray, when in fact they agree on all the important facts.

At one point there is an extended sequence explaining that you can’t take a picture of the HIV virus: or maybe you can, but if you can, different scientists disagree on how, and whether their method is best. This is an infantile world view where stuff only exists when you can easily take a photograph of it, and where the internet, compound interest, and magnetism don’t exist either.

more:

http://www.badscience.net/2009/09/house-of-numbers/#more-1364