Ryan Wayne White, born December 6th 1971, died April 8th 1990. White, a hemophiliac who was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984 became a national celebrity and virtual poster child for HIV=AIDS awareness campaigns when his expulsion from school in Kokomo Indiana became a news sensation. The long and arduous battle that persisted between the White family and the public school system of Kokomo thrust Ryan White into the spotlight and he willingly became a spokesperson for AIDS research and public education. Before people such as Ryan White, Kimberly Bergallis, and Arthur Ashe, AIDS was viewed primarily as a disease associated with homosexual activity. Of course, the main reason for this association is that before AIDS was given that particular moniker for a syndrome of more than 30 previously known diseases, it was known as GRIDS. AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. GRIDS stands for Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome and this was the original name used for the "mysterious" disease that was killing gay men at an alarming rate. Because of an overall ambivalence towards homosexuals the disease that was "officially" declared an epidemic by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), on June 5th 1981 and named GRID in 1982 and finally two months later renamed as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, the short lived Gay Related Immune Deficiency or GRID, however, remained a popular name for this disease for a few more years.

The stigma of homosexuality coupled with the stigma of a really scary disease that seemed to be sexually transmitted gave rise to gay and lesbian political action committees that endeavored to rehabilitate their image as "plague ridden abominations" and when, in 1984, young Ryan found himself diagnosed with the same retrovirus common amongst gay men, the political movement already in full force clung to Ryan White as if he were their savior and to be sure because of White's celebrity, AIDS, that was once called GRID, suddenly became known as the disease that can kill anybody and by 1988 Kimberly Bergalis and Arthur Ashe added to the list of heterosexual people infected with HIV and together joined with other high profile figures sick with AIDS or infected with HIV formed what seemed to be an HIV=AIDS awareness movement with its focus on political privilege and public monies spent towards better research for HIV and AIDS.

The questioner seems to want to frame young Ryan White as some sort of civil rights leader and certainly his battle to be readmitted to his school was courageous and indeed an effort to gain civil rights for HIV infected kids expelled from school by virtue of being infected. When testifying before the Presidents Commission on AIDS on March 3rd 1991 White said:

"I believe in myself as I look forward to graduating from Hamilton Heights High School in 1991. Hamilton Heights High School is proof that AIDS EDUCATION in schools works."

On April 8th, on Palm Sunday, Ryan White at age 18 died Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. Whatever movement White may have led his life was cut too short by a strange and mysterious disease, that remains as strange and mysterious today as it did when the CDC first proclaimed it to be an epidemic in 1981. Or, was his life cut short by this strange and mysterious disease or did he die of complications due to hemophilia? What movement did Ryan White lead? In regards to the whole HIV=AIDS paradigm, there are many movements to pick from. There is the movement of the CDC that in 2007 announced that mandatory testing of citizens from the age of 16-65 was strongly recommended and urged all doctors to convince their patients to test for the virus regularly. There is a movement by the United Nations with their UNAIDS organization to, in the words of Dr. Peter Piot, Executive Director of UNAIDS:

"And that fundamentally we will only defeat AIDS if we change the norms and values in society about sexuality, homosexuality, the relations between men and women, and that in addition, that there is a movement which would put pressure on those in power to tackle AIDS in a serious way to make sure the money is there, the institutions are changed, and that we will make sure that the young generation has all the information and the means to protect"

There is a movement by pharmaceutical companies to promulgate the HIV=AIDS theory as accepted fact as they heavily market extremely toxic drugs such as AZT. There is a movement by celebrities who use AIDS as a means of high profile recognition in the field of charity and political awareness and there is, of course, a "dissident" movement of scientists and patients with HIV who question the whole HIV=AIDS theory and the medicine practiced because of it.

The entire history of HIV and a Certain Dr. Robert Gallo's advocacy of HIV as the likely cause of AIDS is a remarkable and infuriating parallel to young Ryan's life. On April 23rd, 1984, before any science papers were published and conspicuously absent of any peer review, Margaret Heckler, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, along with Robert Gallo announced they had discovered the probable cause of AIDS and had developed a test that could detect this so called "AIDS virus". On December 17th of that year Ryan White was diagnosed with AIDS and informed that at some point, most likely from blood transfusions for his hemophilia, White had contracted HIV.

In 1985 while young Ryan discovered from Superintendent James O. Smith that he would be denied admittance into school a long simmering and acrid debate between Robert Gallo of the CDC and Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute had finally reached its peak. Suddenly there was a history to Gallo's famous patented Eliza HIV test that could detect the virus. Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute had been complaining that samples of a virus known as Lymphadenopathy associated virus, (LAV), which Montagnier had sent to Gallo on several occasions was what Gallo used to develop the Eliza test. In 1987, the same year Ryan started taking AZT, the dispute between Gallo and Montagnier was settled when then President Ronald Regan and French Prime Minister Chirac negotiated a deal that left all equitably happy, except for Ryan White, who was ingesting a toxic medicine so lethal in its toxicity many scientists, including Professor Peter Duesberg, virologist and molecular biologist, have claimed that it was AZT that was killing people, including Ryan White, and not AIDS.

In 1982, two years before Ryan White would be diagnosed with AIDS, two years before he would be denied admission into school, when he was still in school and just learning of science and biology and dissecting frogs and looking through microscopes, Dr. Robert Gallo was forgetting all he was taught in school in favor of a prestigious and lucrative career. Rejecting the scientific method for opportunity, he put forth the hypothesis that the cause of AIDS is a retrovirus. A year later, when Ryan was now 12, it was discovered by Myron Essex and his colleagues that AIDS patients had anti-bodies to the human T cell leukemia virus type I, (HTLV-I), a virus discovered by Gallo years earlier. The HTLV-I was accepted to be one of the cause of leukemia by inducing T4 cell proliferation causing adult T cell leukemia, as it was accepted that that is what causes cancer, a proliferation of cells. But, after Essex's discovery Gallo then advocated a role for HTLV-I in the pathogenesis of AIDS. It didn't seem to bother Gallo or his colleagues that while HTLV-I was accepted as the source of T cell leukemia by inducing cell proliferation, one of the significant symptoms of AIDS was T cell depletion. So much for the scientific method.

While Ryan White was still in school, before his fragile life as a hemophiliac would be diagnosed as even more fragile, he was just learning of genetics through the simple experiments of Mendel, perhaps not even really paying attention and perhaps it was the same for Dr. Robert Gallo when he was in school. The scientific method is the process by which scientists, collectively and over time, endeavor to construct an accurate, reliable, consistent and non arbitrary representation of the world. The scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of bias or prejudice in the experimenter when testing a hypothesis or theory. There are four basic steps to the scientific method:

1.) Observation and description of a phenomenon or group phenomena.

2.) Formulation of a hypothesis to explain the phenomena.

3.) Use of a hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.

4.) Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.

If the experiments bear out the hypothesis it may come to be regarded as a theory or law of nature. If the experiments do not bear out the hypothesis it must be rejected or modified. The scientific method requires that a hypothesis be ruled out or modified if its predictions are clearly and repeatedly incompatible with experimental tests. No matter how popular a theory, it's predictions must agree with experimental results if we are to believe it is a valid description of nature. Experiments are necessary because theory must be testable. Theories that can not be tested because they have no observable ramifications do not qualify as scientific theory.

Keeping in mind that the scientific method attempts to minimize the influence of the scientists bias on the outcome of the experiment, it is imperative that a scientist who favors one outcome over another not let this preference bias the results or their interpretation. It is also expected of the scientist to not rule out data or ignore it if it does not support the hypothesis. So, while young Ryan White was still an adolescent, going to school, playing with friends, and annoying his little sister, Dr. Robert Gallo was ignoring data, such as T cell depletion common among AIDS patients, in order to advocate his pet retrovirus HTLV-I that was believed to cause T-cell proliferation in T-cell leukemia patients, as the likely cause of AIDS. Because ant-bodies of HTLV-I were found in many AIDS patients Gallo rushed to prediction based on correlation, seemingly forgetting that correlation does not prove causation.

In 1986 while Ryan White and his family were knee deep in legal battle after legal battle attempting to get Ryan readmitted in school, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos' of the Perth Group in Perth Australia wrote a paper which was a step by step refutation of the HIV causes AIDS theory and presented evidence suggesting that HIV itself may not even exist. She proposed an alternative non viral theory, and predicated non toxic and relatively inexpensive treatments.

In 1987 while Ryan was being featured on the cover of People Magazine and several USA Today stories, Professor Peter Duesberg, published an invited paper asserting that the majority of retroviruses are virtually harmless. Duesberg argued HIV is neutralised by antibodies shortly after infection, thus the antibodies signal its containment. Before Duesberg published this paper he was a respected scientist and recipient of the prestigious 350,000 dollar grant from the National Institute of Health and Gallo himself had once referred to Duesberg as "the greatest living retrovirologist" and was generally considered to be the "golden boy" of virology. After publishing that paper, while Ryan was appearing on Phil Donahue with Magic Johnson, meeting Elton John and Micheal Jackson and serving as the poster boy for AIDS awareness, the NIH revoked Duesberg's "outstanding investigator" award, Gallo radically changed his opinion of Duesberg and began using such pejoratives as "foolish" and "ignorant" to describe his colleague.

In 1989, the same year ABC aired "The Ryan White Story"and shortly before Life Magazine feature Ryan on the cover, the NIH announced that AZT had been found effective in not only treating AIDS but preventing it. Political pressure what put on the FDA to loosen restrictions and ignore protocols so that the rush for AZT could begin. Doctors across the country began prescribing a known cancer causing chemotherapeutic drug as a long term prophylactic for AIDS in healthy HIV positive patients. In 1990, while Ryan lie dying in a hospital bed, while Elton John performs a Candle in the Wind and dedicates it to Ryan, while an audience holds candles high in solemn prayer for Ryan, other people with HIV who had shown no symptoms of AIDS and were seemingly healthy began demonstrating signs of AIDS after taking the AZT, wasting away and dying so quickly, (some in a matter of weeks!), doctors finally began reducing the dosages and the amount of toxin in the drug itself in a hopeless attempt to keep their patients from dying because of the "cure" they were administering.

When Ryan White died in April of 1989 it was widely reported by the media who had embraced him as a tragic hero, that he died of "respiratory failure" brought on by complications due to AIDS. A little more than a year later in the summer of 1990 Peter Duesenberg wrote a paper where he claimed:

"Hemophilia has always been a fatal condition. This has only been partly alleviated by recent medical advances. Not only are blood transfusions still frequently needed, but blood clotting factors used by hemophiliacs today are somewhat immunosuppressive themselves. Interestingly, the controlled epidemiological study of hemophiliacs, cited above, found evidence to support the idea that hemophilia may be an inherently immune deficient condition on its own. In the case of Ryan White, now often cited as an example of an AIDS death, the Hemophilia Foundation of Indian has confirmed that his death was due to such complications as liver failure and internal bleeding, conditions that typically result from hemophilia itself. Indeed, White already had a severe case of hemophilia, ultimately requiring clotting factor therapy, the dangers of which are reviewed below."

This is what Duesberg said about AZT in that same paper:

"If the virus-AIDS hypothesis is wrong and the risk hypothesis correct, several important conclusions follow. The most urgent of these concerns the current therapy officially approved for AIDS, the drug zidovudine (AZT). The hope is that AZT, by preventing the copying of DNA within cells, will prevent the multiplication of HIV in the host. However, by doing this the drug also kills all actively growing cells in the patient; chief among these are the cells of the immune system. This becomes deadly in light of the risk-AIDS are hypothesis, inhibiting HIV would accomplish nothing, while AZT actually produces the very immune suppression it is supposed to prevent. The effectiveness of AZT at this task is demonstrated by the fact that it was first designed in the 1960's for the purpose of fighting immune system cancers, by killing the rapidly multiplying, cancerous immune cells, AZT was finally shelved because treated leukemic mice in laboratory studies died as quickly as those not given AZT. Some symptoms of AZT toxicity, such as muscle disease and anemia, resemble those of full-blown AIDS cases."

Of course, Peter Duesberg is a known "AIDS dissident" and reviled among the AIDS community and scientific community at large. Dr. Marc Wainburg, Chairman of the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto said this about Duesberg and other AIDS "dissidents":

"As far as I'm concerned, and I hope this view is adequately represented, those who attempt to dispel the notion that HIV is the cause of AIDS are perpetrators of death. And I would very much for one like to see the Constitution of the United States and similar and similar countries have some means in place that we can charge people who are responsible for endangering public health with charges of endangerment and bring them up on trial. I think that people like Peter Duesberg belong in jail."

Did Ryan White die from complications brought on by AIDS or did he die due to complications brought on by hemophilia? Was Ryan White a leader in a movement to give people rights or was he hopelessly caught up in the political maelstrom of the AIDS movement that used him mercilessly as an advocate for political expedience over scientific method? Was Ryan White the tragic hero the media worked so hard to create? Aristotle defines the tragic hero as one who recognizes that his downfall was brought upon him by his own hubris. Was it hubris that cut short this young man Ryan White's life?

Ryan White was not a tragic hero, and it wasn't hubris that ended his life. He was born a hemophiliac, diagnosed at the age of thirteen with an unknown disease, treated with medicine predicated on an untested hypothesis, in fact Ryan and people like him were the test, and he ultimately died of complications, whether it be respiratory or liver malfunction and internal bleeding, he died too young.

Ryan White is not a tragic hero, he is quite simply a hero. A young boy, who in the face of adversity, who only wanted to keep on living the same life he had led for as long as he could but found unreasonable and shameful resistance and heroically stepped outside of himself and stood up and demanded to be heard, to be counted and he did what he thought was the right thing to do.

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