Peter H. Duesberg, 89, renowned biologist turned HIV denier, has died

Peter H. Duesberg, a renowned molecular biologist who became famous for his groundbreaking work on the basis of cancer but was infamous for his assertion that HIV does not cause AIDS despite evidence to the contrary, died on January 13 in Lafayette, California. He was 89 years old.

His death at a nursing facility near his home in Oakland was due to kidney failure, said his wife, Sigrid Duesberg.

In the late 1960s, when scientists still knew little about the cause of cancer, Dr. Duesberg discovered a virus called Rous sarcoma that has been linked to malignant tumors in chickens. In 1970, he published the results of his experiments and showed that the virus carried a gene called Src, which caused cancer in the birds.

It turned out to be the first known cancer-causing gene, or oncogene.

Dr. Duesberg’s work at the University of California, Berkeley paved the way for other researchers to show that normal cells in many animals, including humans, carry a version of this gene, known as a proto-oncogene. Modern cancer treatments are based in part on the understanding that these proto-oncogenes can transform into cancer-causing oncogenes when damaged over time by carcinogens, radiation, or random mutations.

At the beginning of his career, Dr. Duesberg received some of science’s highest honors: He was named Scientist of the Year in 1971 by the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles (now the California Science Center); he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986; and that same year he received an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health.

But he didn’t pursue his research on oncogenes any further. Instead, in his work at Berkeley and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, where he held a position beginning in 1997, he focused on the more established theory that cancer is caused by damage to chromosomes, the structures that carry our genetic material.

And in a stunning about-face, he inexplicably contradicted his own research and insisted that oncogenes did not, in fact, cause cancer; He even went so far as to harass colleagues at scientific meetings if they supported this idea.

In the 1980s, Dr. Duesberg took a different contrarian view and publicly rejected the theory that the newly discovered disease AIDS was caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a connection that is now widely accepted. The theory he promoted was that AIDS was caused by poverty, malnutrition, use of recreational drugs, and azidothymidine, or AZT, an early antiviral drug used to treat the disease.

Dr. Duesberg insisted that HIV was a harmless passenger virus – and his opinion carried weight.

“He was incredibly smart; he spoke well,” said David Sanders, a Purdue University virologist who was a graduate student in the 1980s. Duesberg’s department at Berkeley was, in an interview for this obituary in 2021. “When HIV first emerged, he correctly pointed out that we did not fully understand how it caused disease.”

Throughout his life, Dr. Duesberg stuck to his position that HIV does not cause AIDS, a claim that raised questions about the dangers of undermining public trust in established scientists during an epidemic.

Critics said his misleading advice to former South African President Thabo Mbeki in the early 2000s was instrumental in persuading Mr Mbeki’s government to adopt a policy against importing antiviral drugs, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

But Dr. Duesberg’s anti-establishment views also gained him a large following, including through two documentaries about him and his 1996 book “Inventing the AIDS Virus.” For some, he was the embodiment of a romantic ideal: the brilliant rebel fighting against overwhelming odds in the name of truth.

“Duesberg appealed to all sorts of parts of our national psyche,” said Dr. Sanders.

He could be funny and charming, said Randy Schekman, the Dr. Duesberg’s laboratory in his role as chairman of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Berkeley. “He had this appeal and people were drawn to him,” added Dr. Schekman added. “But he had a dark side.”

After taking an unorthodox position on AIDS, Dr. Duesberg was marginalized by his colleagues, no longer invited to scientific meetings or asked to take part in discussions.

“The whole idea of ​​dissidents attracts a lot of crazy people,” he said in a 2009 interview with Newsweek. “And then, all of a sudden, without realizing it, you became one of them.”

Peter Heinz Duesberg was born on December 2, 1936 in Münster, Germany. His mother, Hilde (Saettele) Duesberg, was an ophthalmologist. His father Richard was an internist and volunteered as a medic for the German Wehrmacht during World War II to avoid being forced into the NSDAP.

Peter Duesberg attended the University of Würzburg in Germany and the University of Basel in Switzerland, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1959. He then studied at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and received a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1963.

The following year he moved to the United States to take a position at Berkeley, where he focused on one of the most fascinating scientific mysteries of his time: What caused cancer?

He began researching the Rous sarcoma virus—a strange retrovirus that pathologist Peyton Rous had observed in a single chicken coop on Long Island. In 1966, Dr. Rous won a Nobel Prize for his work on retroviruses and for the discovery that viruses can cause cancer.

Dr. Duesberg wanted to find out which part of the virus causes cancer in chickens.

Using a technique called oligonucleotide fingerprinting, he dissected the virus’s genetic material. Then he and a collaborator, Peter Vogt, showed that by removing a piece of the material, they could eliminate the virus’s ability to turn a normal cell into a cancer cell.

The piece they removed was the Src gene – the first known oncogene.

Across the bay, at the University of California, San Francisco, two of Dr. Duesberg, Harold E. Varmus, and J. Michael Bishop advanced his findings by sequencing the Src gene and developing a special probe that could detect it in cells. This led to the surprising discovery that even normal cells carry a version of the Src gene.

Dr. Bishop and Dr. Varmus, who shared the Nobel Prize in 1989 for their work, used technology more powerful than oligonucleotide fingerprinting, which allowed them to “rush ahead” in research, Robert A. Weinberg, a cancer researcher at MIT, said in an interview. (Dr. Weinberg’s lab later showed that mutations in proto-oncogenes can convert them into oncogenes and cause cancer without the involvement of a virus.)

In 1984, another scientific rival of Dr. Duesberg, Robert C. Gallo, a virologist at the National Cancer Institute, gained public attention through his research into a new disease called AIDS that was sweeping the gay community. Dr. Gallo believed that the disease was caused by a retrovirus that can introduce genetic material into its host.

As Seth Kalichman reports in the 2009 book “Denying Aids: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience and Human Tragedy,” Dr.

But the relationship soon turned bitter, wrote Dr. Kalichman, with personal conversations that bore “no resemblance to a scientific debate.”

As Dr. By the time Duesberg published his AIDS theory in the journal Cancer Research in 1987, a consensus had emerged about HIV as the cause of the disease. Eventually, scientists figured out how HIV caused AIDS – by slowly destroying a white blood cell called CD4, which is essential for maintaining the immune system. None of the factors that Dr. Duesberg suggested as the cause of AIDS led to this immune collapse.

Nevertheless, his ideas continued to attract attention for years.

In 1994, the journal Science published the results of a study involving more than 50 experts, including Dr. Duesberg in a detailed interview. In 2006, he was quoted in an investigative report in Harper’s Magazine about deaths in clinical trials of AIDS drugs; The article implied that mainstream science completely misunderstood the cause of the disease. In 2012, he was a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

“He loved the spotlight and reporters flocked to him because of his outrageous attitude,” Dr. Schekman, his former colleague at Berkeley.

Dr. Duesberg retired in 2022. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their four children Nicola, Max and Susanne Duesberg and Sibyl Kamdar; two grandchildren; a brother, Hans; and a sister, Christa Noah Duesberg.

Over the years, Dr. Duesberg allies from the religious right, alternative medicine advocates and prominent AIDS deniers, including Christine Maggiore, who campaigned against the use of antiretroviral drugs to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to children; She died of AIDS in 2008 after passing the virus to her three-year-old daughter, who had died three years earlier.

Dr. Duesberg continued his cancer research, although he had difficulty raising money and finding colleagues. In 2007, he published an article on cancer in Scientific American. It was accompanied by an editorial headlined “When Pariahs Have Good Ideas.”

The editorial described him as “the leading scientific torchbearer of the so-called AIDS dissidents” but noted that “as wrong as Duesberg is certainly about HIV, there is at least a chance that he is clearly right about cancer.”

Ash Wu contributed reporting.