Etienne de Harven

1928-2019

Professor Etienne de Harven was a highly respected member of the Board of Rethinking AIDS for many years, including a stint as president of the organization. He was a prominent scientist who was brave enough to go as far as concluding that HIV does not even exist.

“An error does not become truth simply because it is repeated, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.”   —  Mahatma Gandhi

He obtained his medical degree (first class) from the University of Brussels in 1953. From 1955-6 he worked at the Institute of Cancer of Villejuif under Charles Oberling and Wilhelm Bernhard, where he made pioneering observations of the structure of centrioles.

At the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, from 1956-1981, he worked alongside Charlotte Friend and studied viruses, mostly in mouse systems, related to the causation and incidence of leukemia and other malignancies. Later, he provided the first description of viral budding. While at Sloan-Kettering, he was part of a team which discovered "virus-like particles" in cells taken from patients suffering from Hodgkin's disease. He was professor of cell biology at the University of Cornell from 1968-1981 and later professor of pathology at the University of Toronto from 1981-1993, where he researched the marking of antigens on the surface of lymphocytes, and ended his formal career.

As former President of the Microscopy Society of America, he published several papers, mostly related to Cancer Pathologies and electron microscopy procedures for viral experimentation. He held many positions on editorial boards, as a peer reviewer, and on committees.

Etienne was a prominent skeptic of the HIV=AIDS=Death dogma and was one of a group invited in 2000 to South Africa by president Thabo Mbeki to serve on a presidential panel on AIDS. He published a book in 2005 entitled Les Dix Plus Gros Mensonges sur le SIDA (The Ten Greatest Lies About AIDS).

Etienne eventually concluded that HIV did not exist as an infectious pathogen, he believed that measures like ‘viral load’ were detecting HERVs, Human Endogenous RetroViruses, which are generated within our body, not from infection. This position was counter to other AIDS dissidents, some of whom believe that HIV was infectious, but not pathogenic, or only pathogenic with co-factors. Others went even further in the other direction. However, Etienne did not use his belief to divide the movement, he wanted to find factors that unified people, such as the toxicity of medications, and a search for other causes of illness, such as environment and lifestyle.

Etienne remained active until ill health forced him to withdraw from the debate. As late as 2012 he chaired a conference of AIDS rethinkers in the south of France.

Rethinking AIDS remembers all of his accomplishments, and also his contribution to the group, including leading it as President from 2006 to 2008.

Professor Etienne De Harven died on March 6th, 2019.

Comments from the Board of Rethinking AIDS

Marco Ruggiero (board member)

I take this opportunity to express my most sincere condolences for the loss of Prof. De Harven. I had the honor to meet him in person twice in 2009 and 2010, at the RA Conference in California and then at the Conference organized by Christian Fiala and Uta Santos-Koenig in Vienna in concomitance with the World AIDS Conference of that year. Every time I heard his presentations, I felt that the consistency of his observation was indeed flawless. As far as I know, as of today his observation about electron microscopy and HIV have never been disproved and I feel that for a scientist this is the greatest acknowledgement.

Joan Shenton (board member) 

We all loved Etienne de Harven. He was warm, generous and immensely kind. He shared his knowledge gladly and never veered away from his firm conviction that the HIV/AIDS hypothesis was a total fraud. He was a leading expert in electron microscopy. When we interviewed him in 1998 he said, “When finally electron microscopy was used to verify the presence of ‘HIV’ virus particles in samples that for fifteen years were regarded as ‘pure virus’, to my greatest dismay these particles were showing practically nothing else but cell debris.”‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Martin Barnes (member)

Etienne served as the conference chair in the AIDS dissident meeting I organized in Vers Pont du Gard, France in 2012. As president of Rethinking AIDS, he attempted to bring together the two general factions of the organization (the virus exists, no it doesn’t) under the common belief that AIDS results from lifestyle and environmental causes. His own position was that the virus does not exist and what is being observed are retroviral fragments in the blood from disintegrating DNA resulting from illness. He welcomed me in his home near the Riviera several times and enthusiastically shared his views. I will always remember his emails were overly punctuated ! with exclamation marks !! ...projecting his strong condemnation of the HIV/AIDS paradigm.

Georg von Wintzingerode (member) 

I personally remember Etienne as a warm hearted, intelligent and humorous person. I always felt home in his nearness. I miss him a lot.