Peter H. Duesberg (born December 2, 1936 in Germany) is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, best known for identifying and mapping the src gene, considered the first true oncogene, in 1970,Biography of Peter Duesberg, hosted by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences . Accessed 2008-11-24. and more recently for his claims that HIV is harmless and not the cause of AIDS.

Duesberg, along with Peter Vogt, was one of the first scientists to discover a cancer gene (oncogene). In 1970, Duesberg and Vogt reported that a cancer-causing virus of birds had extra genetic material compared with non-cancer-causing viruses. At the age of 36, Duesberg achieved tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, and at 49 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He received an Outstanding Investigator Grant (OIG) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1986, and from 1986 to 1987 was a Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the NIH laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland.

Although long considered by his scientific colleagues to be a "contrarian," Duesberg began to gain public notoriety with a March 1987 article in Cancer Research entitled "Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality". In this and subsequent writings, Duesberg proposed his hypothesis that AIDS is caused by long-term consumption of recreational drugs and/or antiretroviral drugs, and that HIV was a harmless passenger virus. Duesberg's HIV/AIDS claims are rejected as disproven and incorrect by the scientific community.
Duesberg's denial of HIV/AIDS science is cited as a major influence on the public health policies of South Africa under the administration of Thabo Mbeki. Duesberg also served on an advisory panel to Mbeki, convened in 2000. The consequent failure of South Africa to provide antiretroviral drugs in a timely manner is thought to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable AIDS deaths and HIV infections.

Work

On AIDS

In his 1996 book Inventing the AIDS Virus and in numerous journal articles and letters to the editor, Duesberg asserts that HIV is harmless and that recreational and pharmaceutical drug use, especially of zidovudine (AZT, a drug used in the treatment of AIDS) are the causes of AIDS outside Africa (the so-called Duesberg hypothesis). He considers AIDS diseases as markers for drug use, e.g. use of alkyl nitrites among some homosexuals, pointing out a correlation between AIDS and recreational drug use. This correlation hypothesis is considered disproven by evidence showing that only HIV infection, not homosexuality or recreational/pharmaceutical drug use, predicts who will develop AIDS.
Duesberg asserts that AIDS in Africa is misdiagnosed and the epidemic a "myth," claiming incorrectly that the diagnostic criteria for AIDS are different in Africa than elsewhere and that the breakdown of the immune system in African AIDS patients can be explained exclusively by factors such as malnutrition, tainted drinking water, and various infections that he presumes are common to AIDS patients in Africa. Duesberg also argues that retroviruses like HIV must be harmless to survive, and that the normal mode of retroviral propagation is mother-to-child transmission by infection in utero.

Since Duesberg published his first paper on the subject in 1987, scientists have examined and criticized the accuracy of his hypotheses on AIDS causation. A number of scientific criticisms of Duesberg's hypothesis were summarised in a review article in the journal Science in 1994, which presented the results of a 3-month scientific investigation into some of Duesberg's claims.

In the Science article, science writer Jon Cohen interviewed both HIV researchers and AIDS denialists (including Duesberg himself) and examined the AIDS literature in addition to review articles written by Duesberg. The article stated:

The article also stated that although Duesberg and the AIDS denialist movement have garnered support from some prominent scientists, including Nobel Prize winners such as Kary Mullis, most of this support is related to Duesberg’s right to hold a dissenting opinion, rather than support of his specific claim that HIV does not cause AIDS. Duesberg has been described as "the individual who has done the most damage" regarding denialism, due to the apparent scientific legitimacy his scientific credentials give to his statements.

On cancer

Duesberg disputes the importance of oncogenes and retroviruses in cancer. He supports the aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer that was first proposed in 1914 by Theodor Heinrich Boveri.

Although research into aneuploidy and cancer is nothing new (about 5000 scientific papers were published on aneuploidy before Duesberg became involved), Duesberg rejects the importance of mutations, oncogenes, and anti-oncogenes entirely. Duesberg et al., in a 1998 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported a mathematical correlation between chromosome number and the genetic instability of cancer cells, which they dubbed "the ploidy factor," confirming earlier research by other groups that demonstrated an association between degree of aneuploidy and metastasis. Although unwilling to concur with Duesberg in throwing out a role for cancer genes, many researchers do support exploration of alternative hypotheses. Research and debate on this subject is ongoing. In 2007, Scientific American published an article by Duesberg on his aneuploidy cancer theory. In an editorial explaining their decision to publish this article, the editors of Scientific American stated: "Thus, as wrong as Duesberg surely is about HIV, there is at least a chance that he is significantly right about cancer."

Consequences of AIDS denialism

In 2000, Duesberg was the most prominent AIDS denialist to sit on a 44-member Presidential Advisory Panel on HIV and AIDS convened by then-President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. The panel was scheduled to meet concurrently with the 2000 International AIDS Conference in Durban and to convey the impression that Mbeki's doubts about HIV/AIDS science were valid and actively discussed in the scientific community. The views of the denialists on the panel, aired during the AIDS conference, received renewed attention. Mbeki later suffered substantial political fallout for his support for AIDS denialism and for opposing the treatment of pregnant HIV-positive South African women with antiretroviral medication. Mbeki partly attenuated his ties with denialists in 2002, asking them to stop associating their names with his.
In response to the inclusion of AIDS denialists on Mbeki's panel, the Durban declaration was drafted and signed by over 5,000 scientists and physicians, describing the evidence that HIV causes AIDS as "clear-cut, exhaustive and unambiguous."

Two independent studies have concluded that the public health policies of Thabo Mbeki's government, shaped in part by Duesberg's writings and advice, were responsible for over 330,000 excess AIDS deaths and many preventable infections, including those of infants.
A 2008 Discover Magazine feature on Duesberg addresses Duesberg's role in anti-HIV drug-preventable deaths in South Africa. Jeanne Linzer interviews prominent HIV/AIDS expert Max Essex, who suggests that,

Controversy over Inventing the AIDS Virus

Duesberg's book Inventing the AIDS Virus was initially co-written with Bryan Ellison, one of his graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. However, following a 1994 dispute over manuscript changes, Ellison published the manuscript himself, under the title Why We Will Never Win the War on AIDS, listing himself as the lead author. A dispute between Duesberg and Ellison resulted, with Ellison charging that Duesberg was "doing favors on behalf of several people in the government" who wished to suppress the book. Duesberg's website describes the dispute in terms of Ellison becoming "disenchanted with Duesberg's and his publisher's insistence on careful documentation."
Ellison also charged Duesberg with "cooperat[ing] with some of the very hostile factors to have me thrown out of school right before I could submit my thesis and get my Ph.D." For his part, Duesberg stated, regarding Ellison, that "...since he didn't talk to me anymore and didn't show up at the lab, I couldn't pay him anymore." Ultimately, Duesberg and Regnery Publishing sued Ellison, winning a "six-figure verdict" and an injunction against Ellison's manuscript. Duesberg's version of the manuscript was published by Regnery under the title Inventing the AIDS Virus.