Peter Duesberg

He supports the aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer that was first proposed in 1914 by Theodor Heinrich Boveri.

Duesberg rejects the importance of mutations, oncogenes, and anti-oncogenes entirely.

Peter H. Duesberg (born December 2, 1936) 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 the genetic aspects of cancer.

He is a proponent of AIDS denialism, the claim that HIV does not cause AIDS.

Duesberg received acclaim early in his career for research on oncogenes and cancer.

He moved to the US in 1964 to work at the University of California, Berkeley, following completion of a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Frankfurt.

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.

In the 1970s, Duesberg won international acclaim for his groundbreaking work on cancer.

Duesberg's early work on cancer included being the first to identify the oncogene v-src from the genome of Rous sarcoma virus, a chicken virus believed to trigger tumor growth.

Duesberg disputes the importance of oncogenes and retroviruses in cancer.

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 the retrovirus known as '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.

Since Duesberg published his first paper on the subject in 1987, scientists have examined and criticized the accuracy of his hypotheses on AIDS causation.

Duesberg entered a long dispute with John Maddox, then-editor of the scientific journal Nature, demanding the right to rebut articles that HIV caused AIDS.

For several years Maddox consented to this demand but ultimately refused to continue to publish Duesberg's criticisms:

In his 1996 book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, published by Regnery Publishing, a politically conservative book publisher based in Washington, D.C., 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 poppers (alkyl nitrites) among some homosexuals, asserting a correlation between AIDS and recreational drug use.

This correlation hypothesis has been 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.

Duesberg along with other researchers, 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.

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.

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."

A consequence of Duesberg's aneuploidy theory of cancer is his opposition to Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccination, as Duesberg has challenged the causal relation between past HPV infection and the eventual development of cervical cancer.

Although Duesberg generally favors vaccination, he vehemently opposed the rollout of the HPV vaccine stating it was all risk and no benefit.

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."

In 2021, Peter Duesberg had a stroke that left him with severe aphasia affecting speech, reading and writing, according to his partner.

Duesberg grew up during World War II, raised as a Catholic in Germany.