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Peter H. Duesberg (born December 2, 1936 in Germany) is an award-winning professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

He isolated the first carcinogenic gene (cancer gene) from a virus at the age of 33, at 36 earned tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, and at 49 was invited to the National Academy of Sciences. He is also the recipient of a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health. His controversial hypotheses have caused a withdrawal of financial support from some funders. He now funds his research from charitable contributions and from the sales of his books. He lives in Germany for part of the year.

On the basis of his experience with retroviruses, Duesberg has challenged the virus-AIDS hypothesis in the pages of such journals as Cancer Research, Lancet, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science, Nature, Journal of AIDS, AIDS Forschung, Biomedicine and Pharmacotherapeutics, New England Journal of Medicine and Research in Immunology. He has instead proposed the hypothesis that the various American and European diseases that are identified as AIDS are in fact brought on by the long-term consumption of recreational drugs and/or AZT, a drug that is prescribed to prevent or treat AIDS. *

His claims

His most well-known claims are:

  1. He disputes the importance of oncogenes and retroviruses in cancers (1983) and proposed an aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer (1997).
  2. He claims that recreational and pharmaceutical drug use (especially AZT, a drug used in the treatement of AIDS) and not HIV are the primary causes of AIDS outside Africa (the Duesberg hypothesis) (1987/8). He considers that HIV is only a marker for drug use, e.g. use of Alkyl nitrites among highly promiscuous homosexuals, thus the correlation between HIV and AIDS.
  3. He claims that AIDS in Africa is mostly wrongly diagnosed (he believes that the definition of AIDS is different in Africa) and that the incidences of the breakdown of the immune system in Africa are explained by insufficient nutrition, bad drinking water and an overload of infections. Breakdown of the immune system can also be caused by exposure to an overload of foreign proteins, as in haemophilics receiving many blood donations. Since the frequency of AIDS-defining diseases is very different in different risk groups, e.g. Kaposi's sarcoma occurring 20 times more often in homosexual AIDS patients than in non-homosexual AIDS-patients, cofactors as, possibly, the use of different drugs are needed to explain these variations anyway. He does not address the presence or role of HHV-8.
  4. He argues that retroviruses like HIV must be harmless to survive, because after reverse transcription from RNA to DNA, they depend on cell division to replicate (their normal mode of propagation is from mother to child).

In recent years a growing number of scientists have begun to support the idea that aneuploidy may indeed have a role in the formation of some cancers. Research on this subject is ongoing.

South African President Thabo Mbeki voiced support for the Duesberg hypothesis and suffered substantial political fallout as a result.

At the 2000 Mbeki AIDS conference, it was announced that the HIV theory would get proper epidemiological testing by a panel of three or four—Helene Gayle, director of the National Center of HIV/AIDS prevention at the CDC; dissenter Harvey Bialy; and Malegapuru Makgoba, head of South Africa's Medical Research Council. Orthodox and dissenter reporting disagree on whether Duesberg was included.

In 1984, before he questioned HIV's role in AIDS and then lost the support of the mainstream scientific community (effectively cutting off all of his research fundingthe co-discoverer of HIV, Robert Gallo, praised Duesberg[http://duesberg.com/about/pdintroduction.html Later Gallo, like most AIDS researchers, became highly critical of his former colleague.

Criticism of the "Duesberg Hypothesis"

Since he published his first paper on the subject in 1987, mainstream scientists have been extremely critical of Duesberg's theories of AIDS causation. Some of their criticisms were summarised by an eight page special news report published in the journal Science (Science 266: 1642-1649) in 1994, which presented the results of a 3-month investigation into some Duesberg's claims.*

Journalist Jon Cohen interviewed both mainstream scientists and Duesberg and his supporters and examined part of the AIDS literature, including papers written by Duesberg. The article claimed "...although the Berkeley virologist raises provocative questions, few researchers find his basic contention that HIV is not the cause of AIDS persuasive. Mainstream AIDS researchers argue that Duesberg’s arguments are constructed by selective reading of the scientific literature, dismissing evidence that contradicts his theses, requiring impossibly definitive proof, and dismissing outright studies marked by inconsequential weaknesses." The article also claimed that although Duesberg and the dissident movement have garnered support from prominent mainstream scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, most of this support is related to Duesberg’s right to hold a dissenting opinion, rather than support of his claims that HIV does not cause AIDS.

Yale Professor Serge Lang, PhD, a mathematician and author of many articles and a book on scientific controversies, criticizes the article, claiming that the article misrepresented many of Duesberg's claims, ignored most of the evidence he says support his claims, and then argued against positions he doesn't actually take Lang wrote, "the article completely omitted mention of dissenters such as Bialy and Haverkos, as well as many points raised by dissenters. For example, the NIDA meeting of May [1994, the position of Harry Haverkos on nitrite inhalants, the situation in Africa, the fact that malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, and influenza, test false positive on the HIV antibodies test, were still not mentioned in the "Science" article."

The eight page article described itself as a "review" of AIDS literature and interviews with the proponents of either side. Dissidents - a group increasingly described as "denialists" - claim that the Science article failed to address most of Duesberg's central claims, for example, the validity, reliability or accuracy of HIV testing. Dissidents, or denialists, also claim that Science refused to allow any of Duesberg's colleagues the right to reply to many of the articles claims and that the review was written by a reporter, not a scientist and that it was not peer-reviewed for accuracy. Duesberg was allowed a brief reply. The review article was approved by mainstream AIDS scientists. The editor of Science, Daniel Koshland Jr., supported Peter Duesberg for a very short time in finding funding for some of Duesberg's research. Koshland was unable secure funding or support from the mainstream scientific community to critically examine the HIV-causes-AIDS hypothesis.

Bibliography

  • Inventing the AIDS Virus - ISBN 0895263998
  • Inventing the AIDS Epidemic - ISBN 0312112939
  • AIDS: The Good News Is HIV Doesn't Cause It - ISBN 0913571059

See also

External links

Advocacy

Critical

South Africa

1936 births | AIDS dissidents | American scientists | Biologists | Virologists | Living people

Peter Duesberg | Peter Duesberg | Peter Duesberg | Peter Duesberg | Peter Duesberg

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Peter Duesberg".

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