Under a brilliant early-morning sky in Berkeley, California, Peter Duesberg pushes his bicycle along Oxford Street while animatedly explaining his new theory of cancer—oblivious to the fact that he is about to walk in front of a car. A professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, the 71-year-old Duesberg could pass for a younger man. He is slender, with white hair and strong features, and today he is wearing a black leather jacket over a button-down shirt. Cancer is an old passion, a topic he has been researching for more than 40 years. Now his radical theory on the origins of the disease is finally winning serious attention.
He is so absorbed in conversation that only as disaster is about to strike does he look up to see the car bearing down on him. Duesberg giggles as if enjoying a private joke and steps back to the curb, pulling his bike with him. But even before he reaches the safety of the sidewalk, he has resumed his explanation of <a href=">aneuploidy, the basis of his theory about the cause of cancer.
Duesberg is no stranger to controversy—or oncoming traffic. On March 1, 1987, he published a paper in Cancer Research questioning the role of HIV in causing AIDS. The paper became the line in the sand, the demarcation between Duesberg the golden boy of biology—part of the team that first mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses, codiscoverer of the first viral cancer gene in 1970, clever critic—and Duesberg the demon. For 23 years before the publication of that paper, Duesberg says, he never had an application for public funding of his research turned down. In 1986, at age 49, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. That same year he was given a National Institutes of Health Outstanding Investigator Award, one of the most prestigious and coveted grants. Robert Gallo, codiscoverer of HIV and a former friend of Duesberg’s, praised him in 1985 as a “man of extraordinary energy, unusual honesty, enormous sense of humor, and a rare critical sense.” He added, “This critical sense often makes us look twice, then a third time, at a conclusion many of us believed to be foregone.”
Since the 1987 article on HIV, Duesberg has become a pariah among scientists. More than 20 of his grant proposals for government funding have been turned down. AIDS activists have denounced him in public protests and media campaigns. Friends, Gallo among them, have abandoned him. His laboratory, once staffed by two secretaries and numerous graduate students and postdocs, is now occupied by only Duesberg himself and one graduate student—although undergraduates do circulate in and out. He has no secretary. His wife, who pinch-hits as an assistant, talks in a whisper about the pain of his exclusion from the rest of academia, social events, and a normal life. Otherwise mild-mannered scientists known for choosing their words carefully, who might once have called Duesberg the Einstein of biology, now spew vitriol at him, making hurtful comments that he claims roll right off him. In a pointed reference to those who say the Holocaust never occurred, he and others who challenge the prevailing understanding that HIV is the cause of AIDS have been labeled “denialists.”
The label is not without irony. Duesberg was born in Münster, Germany, in 1936 to physician parents; his mother was an ophthalmologist and his father a renowned and groundbreaking internist. Despite the war that would soon be raging in Europe, Duesberg describes his childhood as oddly idyllic, a time when he delighted in play and small pranks. As an altar boy given the task of carrying the thurible filled with burning incense during Catholic services, Duesberg discovered the fun of swinging it faster than necessary, creating plumes of smoke that caused parishioners to cough and choke. It was a source of hilarity for him and the other altar boys, and when the priests scolded them, it only added to the fun. He enjoyed summers at Lake Constance on the border Germany shares with Austria and Switzerland, where he swam, bicycled, and played games with other children “like there was no tomorrow.”
Duesberg insists he was shielded from the war. Yet it was far from invisible, even in the small towns where he lived and played. “I still remember…these speeches on the radio,” he says. “We were supposed to believe in the Final Victory.” His teacher, who wore a swastika on his jacket, told the class that the Reich would win the war with Wunderwaffe—literally, “wonder weapons.”
“We were too young to take it terribly seriously,” Duesberg says, adding that the sound of sirens warning of incoming bombers evoked a boyish sense of excitement. “We would go look at the bombs and collect fragments,” he says. But on December 25, 1944, when the sirens sounded and the Duesbergs hunkered down in a makeshift bomb shelter, the family home at 11a Heinrichstrasse in Kreuznach, near Frankfurt, was bombed. Only in a later conversation does Duesberg admit that even today the sirens of fire engines or ambulances in the streets of Berkeley provoke in him a primitive fear reflex—a lasting effect of the war years.
Duesberg’s parents, both intellectuals who held politics in contempt, were unable or unwilling to openly confront the Nazi threat. In an attempt to evade pressure to join the Nazi Party, Duesberg’s father volunteered for the army. After serving as a doctor in Russia, he was captured by British soldiers in Belgium and held as a prisoner of war for a year in England before being released and returned to Germany in 1946. Duesberg’s parents separated shortly after the war.
Duesberg is self-conscious about his heritage, and it is perhaps inescapable that the war and his father’s role in the German army would have fueled some of this. These factors may also have planted the seeds of a complicated, disquieting side of him that persists to this day. When asked about his father, Duesberg is remarkably restrained, even evasive. He shrugs off questions, his face betraying neither affection nor anger. When asked about his father’s seminal contribution to the understanding of cardiovascular shock, the accomplished son demurs, saying, “I don’t really know what his theory of shock is.”
As it did with his father, though, science would define Duesberg’s life. The postwar years led to “an enormous upswing in science,” he says. The discovery of polymers, or repeating chains of proteins, opened up expanses of research. “This is when insulin was sequenced,” he says. “It’s what kids in high school talked about.” At first Duesberg’s interest was in chemical rather than biological polymers. The possibilities for new inventions were seemingly limitless. However, after he earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Frankfurt in 1963, one of his professors, Theodore Wieland, told him that the most important and exciting work was in the hunt for the viruses thought to cause cancer. Duesberg remembers Wieland’s advising him: “Go west, young man. Go west.” Duesberg, thinking it would make him “rich and famous,” decided to take his professor’s advice and move to the United States.
