Peter H. Duesberg is a German American molecular biologist and a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his early research into genetic aspects of cancer. He played a pivotal role in the AIDS denialism controversy as a proponent of the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS.
Duesberg received acclaim early in his career for research on oncogenes and cancer. With Peter K. Vogt, he reported in 1970 that a cancer-causing virus of birds had extra genetic material compared with non-cancer-causing viruses, hypothesizing that this material contributed to cancer. At the age of 36, Duesberg was awarded 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 from the National Institutes of Health in 1986, and from 1986 to 1987 was a Fogarty scholar-in-residence at the NIH laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland.
Long considered a contrarian by his scientific colleagues, 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 or antiretroviral drugs, and that HIV is a harmless passenger virus. In contrast, the scientific consensus is that HIV infection causes AIDS; Duesberg's HIV/AIDS claims have been addressed and rejected as erroneous by the scientific community. Reviews of his opinions in Nature and Science asserted that they were unpersuasive and based on selective reading of the literature, and that although Duesberg had a right to a dissenting opinion, his failure to fairly review evidence that HIV causes AIDS meant that his opinion lacked credibility.Duesberg's views are cited as major influences on South African HIV/AIDS policy under the administration of Thabo Mbeki, which embraced AIDS denialism. Duesberg served on an advisory panel to Mbeki convened in 2000. The Mbeki administration's failure to provide antiretroviral drugs in a timely manner, due in part to the influence of AIDS denialism, is thought to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable AIDS deaths and HIV infections in South Africa. Duesberg disputed these findings in an article in the journal Medical Hypotheses, but the journal's publisher, Elsevier, later retracted Duesberg's article over accuracy and ethics concerns as well as its rejection during peer review. The incident prompted several complaints to Duesberg's institution, the University of California, Berkeley, which began a misconduct investigation of Duesberg in 2009. The investigation was dropped in 2010, with university officials finding "insufficient evidence ... to support a recommendation for disciplinary action."
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Times of London (11 May 1992)
