Genial and soft-spoken, Essex shoots down Duesberg’s ideas about ARVs by saying: “There are now 15 or 20 different drugs that act in 8 or 10 different ways, and the only thing they have in common is that they inhibit the virus from replicating and lower the viral load to negligible levels. If you include three of them at once…as soon as that happens, the immune system recovers.”
For the stances he has taken, Duesberg has faced such ferocious personal and professional attacks that in 1996 Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet and himself a critic of Duesberg, broke ranks and wrote in The New York Review of Books: “Duesberg deserves to be heard, and the ideological assassination that he has undergone will remain an embarrassing testament to the reactionary tendencies of modern science. Irrespective of one’s views about the validity of some of Duesberg’s arguments, one is forced to ask: At a time when fresh ideas and new paths of investigation are so desperately being sought, how can the AIDS community afford not to fund Duesberg’s research?”
Sitting in the small, cramped laboratory to which he has been relocated in Berkeley’s Donner Hall, Duesberg surprises this writer when he observes, “Scientific isolation has its advantages.” In the years since he took his stance on HIV, he has seen his resources dwindle, but he has also been cut loose from the strings that come with public funding. “I was free to pursue things the way I saw them,” Duesberg says. Sitting amid floor-to-ceiling shelves overflowing with papers, boxes of journals, and textbooks on oncology, AIDS, medical virology, biochemistry, and immunology, Duesberg responds to a question about one book, Thou Shalt Not Think: The Brutally Frank Guide to Life by David Jack. “The author sent that to me,” he says of the book, which explains how orthodox thinking is enforced. “We’re supposed to be ‘good soldiers’ following orders from the higher-ups,” he adds disdainfully.
In the late 1980s, while continuing to defend his stance on HIV, Duesberg threw himself back into his original work: trying to solve the puzzle of cancer. If bad genes weren’t the cause of cancer, what, then, was causing cells to run so horribly amok? Searching for clues in the scientific literature, he came across the forgotten work of Theodor Boveri. In 1914 Boveri observed that sea urchin embryos with abnormal amounts of chromosomal material, a condition called aneuploidy, looked cancerous. After continued study, Boveri surmised that aneuplody could cause cancer.
Duesberg found Boveri’s observations intriguing. Gene mutations were far less likely to create the kind of havoc that deranged chromosomes containing thousands of genes could cause. Genetic mutations, whether inherited or acquired, Duesberg says, are akin to removing one or two workers on an auto assembly line; cars would still be produced with virtually no flaws. But damage to an entire chromosome, he says, is like removing an entire section of an assembly line and plunking it down where it shouldn’t be. Suddenly cars would be produced with two engines or no engine at all—or with a carburetor where the exhaust system should be.
Having no money, no support, and no staff in 1996, Duesberg placed a call to his old friend and colleague Ruediger Hehlmann, a highly respected professor of medicine at the University of Heidelberg in Mannheim, Germany. Recently Hehlmann, wearing a full-length lab coat over a dark blue suit in his meticulously neat office, discussed Duesberg and his many successes. Hehlmann is a strong supporter of his friend’s cancer research, calling him the “father of oncogenes” and a genius in the field. But when the subject of AIDS comes up, his face clouds over. “I think he’s wrong (pdf). That’s what I think, and I tell him.”
Even so, Hehlmann approached the medical school’s dean for money to fund a professorship. The dean, who had known and admired Duesberg’s father, responded enthusiastically, saying: “Oh, that’s the son! OK. We’ll take him.” Since his appointment at the University of Heidelberg in 1997, Duesberg has spent each of the last 10 summers in Mannheim down the hall from Hehlmann, conducting experiments in cancer and aneuploidy. Mannheim, which sits at the junction of the Rhine and Neckar rivers, its cobblestone streets lined with upscale shops and outdoor cafés, provides a quiet workplace and sanctuary for Duesberg during these summers. It is here that he has refined his theory of aneuploidy as the cause of cancer.
It was also in Germany, in 1993, that Duesberg met his future wife, Sigrid Sachs. An attractive blonde with sky-blue eyes, Siggi, as everyone knows her, was smitten with Duesberg right away. “It was nice from the beginning,” she says. “I liked his sarcasm, and he was different—very funny and intelligent.” The two met at a conference in Bonn that Siggi helped organize and to which Duesberg had been invited to speak, along with his nemesis Robert Gallo.
Right or wrong, for more than two decades Duesberg has surely paid a price for his beliefs.
When Duesberg arrived at the registration desk manned by Siggi, he saw an opportunity for mischief. He had overheard that Gallo had cancelled at the last minute, so when she asked his name, he boldly announced, “I’m Dr. Gallo!” The joke was up within minutes, but both Duesberg and Sachs enjoyed the prank, and it became a running gag between the two. Shortly after the conference, she resigned her position to move to Berkeley, where she now organizes Duesberg’s research data and his conferences on cancer and aneuploidy.
Cancer, according to Duesberg’s theory, occurs when chromosomes fail to divide properly. During cell division, or mitosis, the 23 pairs of chromosomes must line up and divide perfectly to yield 46 individual chromosomes, with exactly half—one chromosome from each pair—going to each of two daughter cells. Sometimes the division is faulty and the pairs rip apart eccentrically, like a paper towel that fails to tear along the perforation. The separation gives too much chromosomal material to one daughter cell and shortchanges the other. This aneuploidy, or unequal distribution of chromosomes, is often fatal to the cells. But in some instances the aneuploidic cells survive. Then, like a top spinning out of control, each new cell division can cause more bizarre changes in the chromosomes. Lacking the correct blueprint for growth, the process produces cells that are increasingly unrecognizable. They are neither liver nor nose, breast nor testicle. Nor are they confined to the organ in which they originated. They are cancer, a cluster of cells that grow without regard for what they should be and how they should behave.
Duesberg’s theory on cancer has triggered almost as violent a reaction in some quarters as did his assertion that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Several researchers interviewed, after asking to go off the record, erupted in venomous attacks on Duesberg, saying that aneuploidy is the result of cancer, not the cause. But recently a number of mainstream scientists have come around, agreeing that aneuploidy may play a role (even if not an exclusive one) in cancer. In 2005 Duesberg was invited by the National Institutes of Health—which had long since dismissed him and his research—to give a grand rounds presentation on his aneuploidy work. Other researchers, such as Thomas Ried of the National Cancer Institute, are conducting their own studies and joining Duesberg at international conferences on the subject. Several scientific journals have even published Duesberg’s writings on the topic, including, in 2007, Scientific American. Editors there, wary of Duesberg’s reputation, ran a lengthy editorial entitled “When Pariahs Have Good Ideas,” explaining their reasons for choosing to publish his paper. They wrote, “To dismiss a scientist solely for holding some wrong or controversial views risks sweeping away valuable nuggets of truth.”
