Despite the 1996 call by The Lancet’s editor to fund Duesberg’s research on AIDS, and despite Scientific American’s plea more than a decade later that the scientific community consider his theories on cancer, Peter Duesberg is still fighting daunting scientific battles. And he is doing so with meager funding and only a small band of supporters. One, Christian Fiala, an obstetrician and gynecologist based in Vienna, says Duesberg “is obviously following a rational and evidence-based thinking and argues accordingly.” Fiala first doubted that HIV was the cause of AIDS when experts warned that the disease was set to spread beyond the known risk groups—gay men, intravenous drug users, and hemophiliacs. That didn’t make sense to him. Diseases that are confined to risk groups stay confined to risk groups, he says, unless there is some major event like the organism’s mutating into some new, more highly virulent form of disease, and there was no evidence of that.
Fiala cautions against writing off researchers like Duesberg, saying there is a history of dissenters’ being right. “They persecuted Semmelweis, too,” Fiala says of the famed 19th-century Hungarian who practiced medicine in Vienna. Although that city now has a hospital named in honor of Ignaz Semmelweis, Fiala recounts how the physician was pilloried, fired from his job, and banned from the city for his suggestion that doctors were largely to blame for the deaths of many thousands of women during the 1800s from “childbed fever,” an infection of the uterus that occurred shortly after birth. It was a number of years and many more deaths before doctors realized that Semmelweis was right: Doctors were infecting women during childbirth. Childbed deaths fell to one-tenth their previous level when doctors followed Semmelweis’s admonition to wash their hands.
Another parallel with Semmelweis may be more instructive. Historians have suggested that Semmelweis was his own worst enemy—that he was obstinate and imperious, refusing to write up his findings. Had he been more politic, they say, perhaps his ideas would have been more carefully evaluated. The same may be true of Duesberg. Where Semmelweis wouldn’t put pen to paper, Duesberg, many say, won’t listen or shut up.
Although Duesberg can be remarkably charming, he can also be disturbingly crass. For example, he repeatedly refers to gay people as “homos” and blacks as “Schwartzes.” In defending Nobel laureate James Watson’s controversial remarks on race, he says: “Here you’re supposed to be the honest scientist and base everything on evidence, and then you’re supposed to say, OK, we’re all the same and we feel equally sorry for some black in Africa [and] one relative here in Berkeley or friend in Berkeley or whoever it is. Obviously you don’t.”
Siggi Duesberg is well aware of the charges of racism that swirl around her husband. Duesberg’s influence on President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa—who has cited his theories when denying the use of ARVs for HIV/AIDS patients in South Africa—makes Duesberg complicit, his critics charge, with a government policy responsible for what they call the “murder” of many Africans who have died without ARV treatment. Max Essex believes that history will judge Duesberg as either “a nut who is just a tease to the scientific community” or an “enabler to mass murder” for the deaths of many AIDS patients in Africa. Although Essex doesn’t make the charge of racism, he says that Duesberg’s claims must derive from some “ulterior motive or serious psychological blind spot.”
Duesberg, for his part, does little to dispel the festering controversy. As his wife stands outside a Berkeley restaurant, she can’t help but look exasperated and roll her eyes at his behavior, saying: “My husband has just a very bad mouth sometimes, and I tell him, ‘Just keep your mouth shut. People who don’t know you that well don’t know your kind of humor sometimes.’” During a later phone call, she says, “He is not a racist.” But she adds that the couple have had “lots of arguments” about the way he talks. Then she sighs and says: “I also realized that I cannot really change him. Nobody can change him.”
The only refuge, besides Mannheim, from the controversies that dog Duesberg is within the four walls of his Berkeley lab. As he enters to conduct an undergraduate class, several students greet him with broad smiles. There is an air of industry as the students hold up pieces of paper and stare at them intently. They are performing Southern blot tests to detect the lambda viral genome they’ve inserted into the DNA of Escherichia coli. A few students approach Duesberg to ask advice about other projects. He gives each one his full attention.
Huddled in one corner of the lab amid microscopes, gas jets, and flasks, half a dozen students talk about their professor. One says Duesberg is one of the “most pro-student teachers on campus.” The other students nod in agreement. “Other teachers hide from their students, but not Dr. Duesberg,” another adds. “He’s the best teacher here.” When the students are asked what they think about the controversies surrounding their professor, their faces go blank. It is obvious that they are unaware of the imbroglio surrounding him. Some of these members of the Peter Duesberg fan club were not even born when the controversy over AIDS and HIV hit its boiling point in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One student, uncertain about what is being asked, offers tentatively, “Almost all of our professors are famous.”
Away from the students, Duesberg, his mind ever racing, explains how eager he is for studies that could prove or disprove his hypotheses about HIV—studies like treating mice or rats with poppers for extended periods to see if they develop AIDS and Kaposi’s sarcoma. That’s the sort of functional evidence that he says is sorely needed and not pursued by researchers today.
He also suggests tracking the health of applicants to the U.S. military—over the past 22 years, the military has tested millions of potential recruits for HIV. Some of those testing positive are being treated, and some are not. Duesberg says such a study would show “whether otherwise healthy people with HIV get AIDS-defining diseases above the norm for matched controls without HIV.” If HIV is just a “harmless passenger virus” as he believes, untreated HIV-positive individuals might be expected to do at least as well as, or better than, HIV-positive patients who take antiretroviral drugs.
Essex dismisses such a study, saying, “I think that would be totally unethical.” Only when there is no existing treatment for a condition, Essex says, should a placebo or no medical intervention be allowed. “As soon as somebody said, OK, this drug does better than a placebo, then it would be the standard that you test the next drug against or a combination of drugs against. That’s the first thing you learn in ethics…like doing the infamous syphilis experiment at Tuskegee. It’s exactly like it. It’s totally unethical.”
Duesberg doesn’t see anything wrong with studying untreated patients. “What’s unethical about it?” he asks. “No one would be asked not to take drugs.” A small contingent of scientists, including two Nobel laureates, agree with Duesberg and think it’s unethical not to test his theories. Perhaps surprisingly, a number of people who have tested HIV-positive or even been diagnosed with AIDS also believe Duesberg is right. One, a 47-year-old gay man who lives in New York City, has been HIV-positive for 23 years and has never taken antiretroviral drugs. He believes they are “toxic,” and he credits Duesberg with his survival. “I watched my friends take more and more drugs and get sicker and sicker,” he says. ARVs, not HIV, he claims, are responsible for their deaths.
Right or wrong, for more than two decades Duesberg has surely paid a price for his beliefs. Even close friends have begged him to back off some of his statements, if only so he isn’t targeted and shunned. Asked why he persists in raising questions about AIDS when it has resulted in financial losses, professional rejection, and social isolation for him and his family, Duesberg, pushing his bike along a walkway that winds its way through the lush grass and stately trees of the Berkeley campus, stops walking, thinks for a few moments, and says, “I don’t want to be a ‘good German.’”
