Here at Sex and the 405, we have heard many rumors about the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) since we started reporting on their war on pornography, chief among them that they opposed research into an AIDS/HIV vaccine. Not content to become part of the gossip mill, we decided to dive into the allegations.

When our editrix asked Lori Yeghiayan, associate director of communications at AHF, whether its president Michael Weinstein does not support further development of an HIV vaccine, she responded: “no, that’s not accurate. There was a time — this was probably about five years ago that we had put out an argument about not spending exorbitant amounts of money on clinical trials for a vaccine when it was not really producing results. Not really basic research but actually clinical trials in several countries with thousands of people and that there had been several failures with the vaccine search in that way so we had made an argument about putting money into proven efforts, which is treatment. We are for basic research into HIV and HIV vaccines and new drugs and all that. It’s not accurate to say we’re against it.”

Okay. That makes perfect sense. But just to be sure we had all the information we hit up Google. What we found, from AHF itself, was disheartening.

On May 5, 2008, the 11th Annual Conference on Vaccine Research was scheduled to convene in Baltimore, Maryland. A little over a month before the conference, an editorial (which has since been yanked) appeared on Baltimore Sun in which AHF President Michael Weinstein and AHF Chief of Medicine Dr. Homayoon Khanlou wrote about the futility of continuing to fund vaccine research. The editorial, which remains on RedOrbit.com reads:

To control AIDS, funding must be invested in strategies that work: effective prevention efforts, routine testing and universal access to treatment — and not spent on expensive vaccine research that over 20 years has yielded little of promise other than discovering how not to make an AIDS vaccine.

The latest round of vaccine trial failures (including a large-scale Merck trial halted when the vaccine turned out to have possibly increased subjects’ risk of acquiring HIV) has added to a growing consensus in the scientific community that an AIDS vaccine is a decade or more away, if one can be developed at all.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), recently stated: “We have to leave open the possibility … that we might never get a vaccine for HIV.” That view was shared by leading AIDS expert David Baltimore, who conceded last month that the scientific community is no closer now to discovering an HIV vaccine than it was 20 years ago.

Twenty years of research and the fact remains: a vaccine against a retrovirus, the family of viruses HIV belongs to, has never been successfully developed. It is highly unlikely that there will be an AIDS vaccine — certainly not by any current standard definition of the word.

Having met the public’s criticism of his position, Weinstein elaborated on his position in an editorial for the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks later:

There are not just two or three AIDS vaccine candidates that have failed. Every AIDS vaccine candidate to date has failed. Leading scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Dr. David Baltimore, have even gone so far as noting that we are no closer to the discovery of an AIDS vaccine today than we were 20 years ago.

In fact, not only have all the AIDS vaccine candidates failed, the latest was hurriedly pulled from clinical trial after the vaccine was found to actually put people at a significantly increased risk of contracting HIV. Twenty-seven years into the AIDS pandemic, countless billions in taxpayer (and private) vaccine funding later, and our leading researchers can’t even meet the most fundamental tenet to “do no harm.”

[...] Currently, the AIDS vaccine establishment continues its taxpayer-funded, repeatedly unsuccessful search for a preventive AIDS vaccine while an alternative many have seen work on multiple levels — successful antiretroviral treatment as both treatment and prevention — goes unchampioned.

This is why the AIDS Healthcare Foundation believes that it is time to pull the plug on U.S. taxpayer financing of the search for a vaccine, and leave it to private donors to back what has been and continues to appear to be a fruitless goal. To continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a government-funded search for an AIDS vaccine in the vain hope of success someday while millions worldwide suffer and die is simply unacceptable when other currently available strategies offer practical — and effective — alternatives.

Dr. David Baltimore, incensed by the name-dropping that linked him to Weinstein’s indictment of the “vaccine establishment” responded in an editorial co-written with Dr. Seth Berkley, a medical epidemiologist and CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI):

This very pessimistic view of the possibility of success in the vaccine quest is a misreading of the situation.

Yes, the Merck trial of an experimental vaccine failed to show efficacy. But it was not a failure as a trial. It had a hugely important outcome: We now know one preparation that will not work as a vaccine. Before this trial we knew only one other direction that had failed, so our knowledge has doubled.

Knowing what not to do is useful because it informs further research. Of course, we would rather have successful trials that tell us we are going in the right direction, but AIDS vaccine development is hard, and negative trials are not a surprise. Because the trial was so professionally accomplished, we can trust its results.

Now what we need are more such trials of materials different enough from the Merck materials that we can learn something from them. The job of the research community is to make the judgment of what materials fit this criterion. But to give up at this point would be criminal. Luckily, the cool heads in the AIDS research community are not giving up — they are searching for new directions. There is a healthy debate about what those directions should be. But to our minds, we need more human clinical research, not less, if we are to find the magic formula that will protect people against AIDS.

Not to be outdone by the Nobel Prize winner, Weinstein returned to the Los Angeles Times opinion page condemning efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine as “self-serving.” He writes:

The search for an AIDS vaccine has lost its scientific purpose and turned into a self-serving quest.

How else to explain the remarks found in David Baltimore and Seth Berkley’s “Keep funding the AIDS vaccine”? Saying simply that “AIDS vaccine development is hard” is not a credible response to recent criticism leveled at the ballooning U.S. budget for AIDS vaccine research and the meager results it has produced. The argument is particularly weak when you consider that nearly $1 billion in public funding is poured annually into this fruitless quest, while millions globally lack access to the revolutionary, life-saving AIDS treatment that was developed more than 12 years ago: antiretroviral medication.

We understand the desire to make treatment available to those affected by HIV and AIDS worldwide, but to actively campaign to kill all public funding for an HIV vaccine is unconscionable. And speaking of self-serving, here’s a question we leave with you: does AHF provide the above-mentioned unchampioned treatments for HIV and AIDS?

The answer, from the AHF website: “Our healthcare centers offer thousands of clients — many of them uninsured — the finest HIV-centered primary care, and our pharmacies specialize in HIV medications. Our researchers conduct trials of the newest drugs and treatment protocols to improve patient quality of life. Through Positive Healthcare, our managed care program in California and Florida, we provide HIV positive Medicaid recipients extra tools to manage their disease.”

Image of test tubes by Horia Varlan.

When confronted with reminders of their mortality, people have been shown to play up their cultural views, belittle opposing views, and reinforce their self-esteem. In studying these effects, the question of how thoughts of death affected the libido came up.

An initial study in Israel involving 40 men and 36 women found that thinking about death led the men to say that they’d be more likely to hookup with a stranger at a bar than the control group, which had thought about a visit to the dentist. This, curiously, was not the case for the women in the experiment.

However, when a study performed here in California investigated the same relationship between death and sex and went a little further by having 163 study participants first imagine a candle-lit dinner and engaging conversation before being exposed to the morbid thoughts and the possibility of hooking up, both men and women considered the sex.

A third study investigated the relationship a little further, offering 89 men and women the option to have romantic love-making or hedonistic sex after being primed with thoughts of death or thoughts of a visit to the dentist. Those exposed to thoughts of death expressed a heightened desire for loving, romantic sex than did those who thought about going to the dentist.

“There was a slight trend for participants to be put off this latter kind of sex,” writes Christian Jarrett at BPS Research Digest. “Perhaps because morbid thoughts make some people want to escape their animal nature, not be reminded of it.”

That’s how it goes for us meat bags. Sorry, Jacob. You’re not short on near-death experiences, but Edward’s refinement has the upper hand here.

Via Jason Goldman.

Right whales, massive sea giants once hunted almost to the point of extinction in the days of the whaling industry — who would have guessed these rotund, leisurely mammals entertained such scandalous sex lives? Not only is the right whale exhibitionist, swimming to the surface of the water to mate, but apparently, they’re quite fond of group sex as well!

In Observations of a Female North Atlantic Right Whale (Eubalaena glacialis) in Simultaneous Copulation with Two Males: Supporting Evidence for Sperm Competition in Aquatic Mammals, 2005, Mate, et al., describe the instance of a threesome that unfolded before researchers.

To put it in perspective for us, Sci, who blogs at Scienceblogs’ Neurotic Physiology gives some detail about a male right whales’ equipment:

You see, the male right whale is…pretty well endowed. Ok, REALLY well endowed. Male right whales are, on average, between 13-16m long. The penis is around 2-2.5m long. 15% of the male’s total length. Compare that to the human, average male human height, 1.75m (ish), average penis length, 0.15m = 8%. Buuuurn.

Not only that, whale penises are BENDY. Due to the potential mechanics of whale mating, this isn’t too surprising. During whale mating, you’ll get a whole group of males crowding and shoving around a female, waiting for an in. In many documented cases, the female will roll on her back, while the male is nearby on his side. He then snakes his penis up and around to get to the female’s vagina. Obviously it’s good to be both long and bendy.

That’s NOTHING to the BALLS. Right whales have the biggest testicles of any mammal on the planet. Together the balls weigh a TON. A literal TON. We’re not even going to do the human comparison because it will just make everyone feel inadequate.

Let’s just say the image at the top of this post is the imaginary, safe for work version. Here’s what a whale threesome actually looks like (we have added color to help you make sense of what is happening).

As Sci notes in her post, there is a correlation between the size of a species’ testicles and promiscuity among members of that species, the logic here being that if you’re going to be competing with a lot of dudes to have her babies, you’d better have a big tool and a lot of man juice to get that egg fertilized.

Chimps have pretty big balls and are pretty promiscuous. Gorillas, on the other hand, don’t have such big balls and aren’t so promiscuous. Humans fit in the middle of all of this. But nothing compares to the right while, which, as mentioned, has epic balls. It’s just more evidence supporting that big balls are related to much competition, a proven by this aforementioned instance of a threesome that has everyone talking.

Sex sells everything — even science. Hurray! We’re down with having threesomes for science.

Top image by Dunkoman. Secondary image from Aquatic Mammals.

The questions of whether couples should wait before having sex, and how long, and if it even matters, are robust perennials for news organizations, eager for traffic. Every year, a good handful of studies come out to feed the slow news days, and blogs trip over themselves to regurgitate the information, delighted to tap into fears or hit the jackpot of all things web: a slut- or virgin-shaming comment war to send those pageviews through the roof.

We’re no better. But instead of being snarky about the fact of course a Brigham Young University study found that having sex within the first month of dating led to the worst relationships, we’re going to focus on a compelling aspect of the discussion.

“What seems to happen is that if couples become sexual too early, this very rewarding area of the relationship overwhelms good decision-making and keeps couples in a relationship that might not be the best for them in the long-run,” researcher Dean Busby told LiveScience.

Past research has shown sex, specifically orgasm, enables bonding. Oxytocin, released during orgasm, is directly related to generosity and trust. With this in mind, we have to wonder: could early sex — early, dynamite sex — make it difficult, if not impossible to coolly assess a partner’s characteristics and values to ensure they are compatible with our own?

Entirely possible.

Worry not! We have found the middle ground! Enact an intensive screening period over social media for all potential suitors. Six months to a year should be enough to determine whether the person’s values, goals and communication skills are up to par.

Upon deciding a suitor is a match, go out. Feel free to skip dinner and get right to business. Reverse Asian cowgirl. Trust us.

The Carnal Carnival is a site run by a group of wild science writers who want to bring knowledge to us unwashed masses. This month, they’re surveying studies on orgasm. Ready to take a look at male and female genitals during coitus, as delivered by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)?

Scicurious over at Neurotic Physiology has the run-down of the rest of the studies featured. Go have a look!

No matter what we do, it always seems to come back to semen.

We’re blaming this one on Jesse Bering over at Scientific American, who recently decided to examine the evolutionary merits of premature ejaculation.

Ejaculation, biologically speaking, has one function: to shoot semen into the female body, in the hopes that one of the sperm survives the hostile reception long enough to penetrate an egg. “Given these basic biological facts, and assuming that ejaculation is not so premature that it occurs prior to intromission and sperm cells find themselves awkwardly outside of a woman’s reproductive tract flopping about like fish out of water,” Bering reflects, “what, exactly, is so “premature” about premature ejaculation?”

He goes on to hypothesize that in the very distant human past, ejaculating as quickly as possible may have even been preferable for the human species. Sexual reproduction in the wild is, after all, a dangerous thing. Survival requires attention.

Bering isn’t alone in this. A 1984 study by California State University sociologist Lawrence Hong, published in the Journal of Sex Research, offered the same line of thought. Bering notes:

The author compares the mating habits of human beings to other rapid–and not-so-rapid–ejaculators in the primate family, noting that the faster a primate species is in the coital realm, the less aggressive it is when it comes to mating-related behaviors. He calls this the “slow speed-high aggressiveness hypothesis.” For example, male rhesus macaque monkeys often engage in marathon mounting sessions, where sex with a female can be drawn out for over an hour at a time (including many breaks and therefore non-continuous thrusting). That may sound great, but libidinous anthropomorphizers beware: macaque sex is a chaotic and violent affair, largely because the duration of the act often draws hostile attention from other competitive males. By contrast, primate species whose males evolved to ejaculate rapidly would have largely avoided such internecine violence, or at least minimized it to a considerable degree.

Key to Hong’s analysis therefore is the idea that intravaginal ejaculation latencies in males is heritable — there was initially greater within-population level variation in the male ancestral population, he surmises, but over time, “the ancestry of Homo sapiens became overpopulated with rapid ejaculators.” This is because, according to Hong, young reproductive-aged males who ejaculated faster (i.e., had more sensitive penises) avoided injury, lived longer and therefore had a greater chance of attaining high status and acquiring the most desirable females.

The notion that premature ejaculation is an inherited trait, one possibly naturally selected for, is supported by research by Finnish psychologists, who published an article on the topic last year in the International Journal of Impotence Research.

Where is female orgasm in all this? It’s not. Female orgasm, you see, is not necessary for conception. Bering notes several critiques of this aspect of Hong’s research, among them the sexual aggressiveness of females in species that follow this “survival of the fastest” model and the problems resulting from lack of arousal and thus, lack of lubrication in females.

These critiques don’t seem to take into account research on female response during sexual assault, which report genital arousal, leading one to wonder whether sexual “readiness” has much to do with actual desire. A fast vaginal response to sex greatly reduces the likelihood of injury, which, because said injury could lead to death or impair fertility, would also result in being naturally selected.

Compelling. Of course, the game has changed. Sex is no longer something we have for the purpose of reproduction alone. Our immediate surroundings are no longer hostile. Some 50 years after the introduction of the birth-control pill, sex is something we enjoy for pleasure and the emphasis on conception has shifted dramatically to mutual pleasure. So much so, in fact, that we medicate hypothesized evolutionary advantages like premature ejaculation and seek out partners who display maladaptive traits, such as the ability to go and go and go for hours.

Via Scientific American.