Hero or Heretic? : Peter Duesberg, One of the Country’s Top Virus Specialists, Risks Reputation With Theory That HIV Doesn’t Cause AIDS

Peter Duesberg is learned, charming and urbane. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, an august body that does not elect underachievers. He is listed in Who’s Who, the thinking person’s National Enquirer. Silver hair accents a twinkle in his eye, signaling a sharp sense of humor beneath his essential seriousness. In short, he seems almost as perfect as Mary Poppins--even if you tack on demerits for a lousy tennis serve.

But for many of his peers, microbiologist Duesberg is the devil in disguise.

Over the last four years, the brash German-born scientist has made himself a controversial--some would say heretical--figure in the war on AIDS, the relentless and baffling conglomerate of immune deficiency-sparked diseases that so far have claimed more than 106,000 lives in this country. In the process, Duesberg has transformed himself from one of the country’s most respected virus specialists into a gadfly whose critics have relegated him to the nut fringe of science.

None of this has stopped Duesberg. Like a coyote raiding a henhouse, he has stalked the conventional wisdom about AIDS, snapping and biting whenever he spies an opportunity--which is often.

Using scientific publications, newspapers, magazines and television documentaries as pulpits, the 53-year-old UC Berkeley professor has pitched a startling warning to AIDS researchers, doctors and health care bureaucrats: “Everything you know is wrong.”

It is not what people want to hear anytime, especially not when they are locked in a deadly struggle with a mysterious microbe.

In a nutshell, Duesberg has developed a sweeping attack against the idea that AIDS is a viral disease. He asserts that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) tagged as the cause of AIDS has nothing to do with the disease. The virus, he maintains, is at best an indicator of at-risk behavior for contracting AIDS.

Rather, Duesberg says, AIDS is not caused by a virus at all. It is, he suspects, a disease stemming from conditions unique to the late 20th Century, primarily widespread drug abuse--especially intravenous drug abuse--that wears away the immune system, leaving the body prone to fatal infection by “old” diseases such as pneumonia and lymphoma.

He dismisses as so much hogwash the widely accepted principle that the virus lies dormant for 10 or more years before wreaking havoc with the immune system in full-blown cases of the disease.

Ironically, Duesberg was the first virologist to map the genetic structure of retroviruses, the virus class that is smaller and genetically simpler than viruses such as polio. Retroviruses include HIV, widely believed to cause AIDS. Thus, one of Duesberg’s major achievements helped prepare the way for the study of HIV.) And he is not alone in questioning HIV as the cause of AIDS.

He has found a small following in the gay community where official AIDS gospel is frequently questioned.

More important from a professional point of view, other scientists also have begun to question the link between HIV and AIDS.

Luc Montagnier, the French co-discoverer of HIV and thus a major figure in the AIDS universe, has backed away from his earlier belief that HIV is the only cause of AIDS. Like a growing but still small number of scientists, Montagnier now thinks the virus sometimes needs another microbe--called a mycoplasm--as a catalyst to produce full-blown AIDS. Montagnier and others who support this thesis also have been criticized and shunned in their professional communities, but not to the same extent as Duesberg.

Duesberg probably is the most radical dissenter, with his disavowal of any meaningful connection between HIV and AIDS. Duesberg holds to this exposed position with the tenacity of Super Glue. In fact, he is so convinced of his own correctness that he might risk death to prove himself. Under the right circumstances, he would accept a challenge--issued last year by Michael Fumento, author of “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS”--to be injected with HIV.

Whenever Duesberg’s astonishing and shocking arguments appear in print they provoke strong reactions. Many readers appear to be struck by literary apoplexy, firing off letters and articles full of invective. For example, he has been called “a flat-Earther” in a British science magazine. On campus here, graduate students sometimes refer to him as “crazy old Duesberg” and no longer vie to work with him.

Less stridently, both researchers and science writers have rebutted Duesberg’s arguments almost point by point--without moving Duesberg an inch. The counter-arguments center on the voluminous evidence linking HIV with AIDS and point to subtleties of viral behavior that Duesberg is thought to have overlooked or ignored.

Duesberg has taken such overwhelming rejection largely in stride, thanks in part to an apparently planet-sized ego. One illustration of his self-confidence is an apocryphal story, apparently dreamed up by a colleague. The joke claims that during court testimony Duesberg is asked to name the most prominent person in his field. “I am,” he answers. The judge admonishes Duesberg that his reply, while possibly true, is hardly humble.

“But I am under oath,” Duesberg replies.

Duesberg chuckles when he is reminded of this anecdote and calls it a “true joke,” a not-so-oblique acknowledgment that the tale contains a kernel of truth.

But Michigan State University physiologist Robert Root-Bernstein, a frequent ally of Duesberg in AIDS battles, believes that Duesberg’s public persona masks a man driven by concern that medical science has been able to do little for AIDS victims.

“I think he really does care about the people who are dying,” Root-Bernstein says.

A native of Munster, Germany, whose childhood was punctuated by World War II Allied bombing raids, Duesberg first came to Berkeley in 1964, after studying chemistry and molecular biology at the universities of Wurzburg, Basel, Munich and Frankfurt as well as the Max Planck Institute. He was named a full professor at Berkeley in 1973.

For most of his 27-year career here, Duesberg was a high-flyer, regularly attracting federal research grants and producing results that made him one of the world’s leading virologists. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986, the professor of molecular and cell biology has been a pioneer in cancer gene research as well as retroviruses.

In 1985, Duesberg received an Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health. One of only 23 researchers in the country singled out for the distinction, Duesberg was shocked to learn last fall that the funding would not be renewed. The loss of roughly $500,000 in yearly funding threatens his viability as a scientist, Duesberg says.

The institute’s review committee wrote that in recent years Duesberg’s research had been “less productive, perhaps reflecting a dilution of his efforts with non-scientific issues. Thus, this investigator gives little indication of being likely to make further important contributions.”

Although institute officials have denied it played any role in their review, the phrase non-scientific issues was an apparent euphemism for Duesberg’s unilateral declaration of war on the AIDS Establishment, he says.

But Duesberg seems little troubled by setbacks on this balmy spring day as he serves up cups of loose-leaf tea and gestures out his window to the sprawling green campus.

“Sometimes you have to be very cranky and speak up, if social responsibility means anything,” he says. “I mean after all the taxpayer paid for that view and for this lab for 25 years for me to gain expertise in retroviruses. If I’m not now speaking up, when am I going to do it?”

By going off on a seeming tangent, Duesberg realizes he’s not only taken a big professional risk.

He also may be wrong.

“I could be a nut. . . . The chances are always high that a minority view is crazy,” he concedes in a rare moment of self-criticism.

The shock value of Duesberg’s theories has made him famous, not to mention notorious, in the subcultures spawned by the AIDS crisis.

But in the larger world, Duesberg and his theories remain relatively obscure--mostly, he maintains, because the scientific Establishment has been partially successful in bad-mouthing him to the media.

On the other hand, Duesberg’s critics charge he is a publicity hound of the first order and that his ideas have received excessive exposure and debate. Some detractors even wonder if Duesberg’s message is too dangerous for public consumption.

In his recent book, “Virus Hunting,” Dr. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, devotes more than 10 pages to Duesberg and his ideas.

Gallo writes that “I tend to agree” with those who believe that Duesberg’s search for publicity “has its dangerous side.” And he concludes that Duesberg’s persistent attacks on established AIDS knowledge and treatment have “diminished confidence in science and scientists, medicine, physicians and health care workers.” Two years ago, Gallo told Science magazine he couldn’t respond to Duesberg’s ideas “without shrieking.”

Generally, Gallo lashes at Duesberg’s qualifications, saying he is not a doctor, has never worked with human diseases and never studied HIV in the laboratory. Which is true.

In reply, Duesberg scoffs and says he is an expert laboratory sleuth with an intimate knowledge of retroviruses. Duesberg classes Gallo as a less-than-perfect microbe detective, pointing to the long-running controversy about whether Gallo or French researcher Montagnier was first to discover the HIV virus.

(Earlier this month the French Pasteur Institute said it had new evidence that laboratory data supported claims that an AIDS virus sample Montagnier sent to Gallo in 1983 contaminated a virus the American was working on in his own laboratory.)

Moreover, Duesberg notes that he has read all the relevant AIDS literature, a laborious job comparable to sifting through a mountain of sand with a kitchen sieve.

While he maintains a sense of humor and exhibits a visible buoyancy, Duesberg admits that ostracism by the scientific community is taking a toll.

“Sometimes you feel a bit isolated from the old boy network to which I belonged,” he explains. “You miss the buddy system and the meeting where they say, ‘How’s it going now?’ and ‘I liked your paper.’ ”

Duesberg debuted as an HIV-AIDS skeptic in March, 1987, when he published a major paper expressing his doubts in Cancer Research, a leading medical journal.

In that paper, Duesberg wrote of his puzzlement that so little of the immune-deficiency virus can be found in many AIDS patients. The virus--generally transmitted by the exchange of bodily fluids through sex, intravenous drug use or blood transfusions--is thought to invade immune cells, called T-helper cells. After remaining latent for about a decade, the virus destroys a victim’s immune system, paving the way for many kinds of infections, including pneumonia, dementia and lymphoma.

Also--and this was perhaps the earliest signal for Duesberg--retroviruses such as HIV do not usually destroy host cells. Rather, they are benign parasites that depend on the cell’s health for their own survival, he says.

At the time of the Cancer Research paper, Duesberg could find no record of high incidences of the HIV virus in AIDS patients. Typically, he wrote in another paper, active HIV was found only in one out of every 10,000 cells while dormant HIV was found in fewer than one in 500 T-helper cells. In neither case is there enough HIV--which requires elaborate testing for detection--to cause an infection, let alone a fatal one, he asserts.

“In all other microbial diseases-- all, no exceptions known to me at least--viruses, bacteria alike, you don’t get sick from a latent infection,” Duesberg says. “It’s like invading a country with an army. If you have sufficient freedom fighters on the ground or B-52s in the sky you can get your enemies down. You can’t do it with just Gen. Schwarzkopf and George Bush.”

Thus, Duesberg wasn’t surprised when researchers recently announced that in the first 10 to 20 days after infection the AIDS virus multiplies at a huge rate, causing a flu-like illness, before the body produces antibodies to stem the invasion.

Duesberg maintains that this recent discovery supports his contention that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS, that the virus is a more or less typical infection to which the body responds in a more or less typical way.

“Now they say we want to find out how the immune system knocks it (HIV) out so we can cure AIDS,” he says. “Why can’t they realize now that obviously if the immune system can knock it out in a couple of weeks that therefore it (AIDS) has to be (caused by) something else?”

Gallo and others dispute all of these points vigorously, implying that Duesberg is remaining willfully ignorant. Among other things, they say viruses do not have to be located in every cell, or many cells, to cause an infection.

They cite studies showing that HIV increases as the disease increases. They also respond that “slow” viral diseases are far from unknown, particularly among animals. Moreover, they dismiss a favorite Duesberg argument that the standard blood test for AIDS does not even attempt to measure the virus but identifies only antibodies to the disease. Medicine uses many other antibody tests for disease, they note.

Unmoved, Duesberg stands by one of his cardinal principles: Because it fit their prejudices, the discovery of HIV in the mid-1980s enabled most scientists to make the leap of faith that the virus causes AIDS, Duesberg says.

“All scientists . . . have an intuitive preference for germ theory, for disease caused by microbes,” he explains. “If you have a microbe you can deal with it in the laboratory. . . . And it promises easy fixes. The big times in medicine, in fact the only ones in medicine, are infectious diseases. . . . We have not really cured cancer or aging or dementia or any of the real serious big problems.”

Now Duesberg is trying to stir up another tempest.

He is combing all available literature to bolster his argument that drug abuse may be the crucial factor in AIDS.

“Twenty- to 40-year-old males are consuming most drugs and that’s the age group hardest hit by AIDS,” he claims. “There are so many indicators that would make so much sense to put the two together.”

If he can get the drug-AIDS paper whipped into shape, he will have argued his entire case.

“I can’t do it forever,” he says. “If I can get this drug paper published, I have done my job. I have said virtually everything I can say.”

But he is not optimistic he will ever sway the scientific world to his side. “Big science,” he says, doesn’t admit to wholesale mistakes. That’s why he finds the emergence of co-factors a disturbing development.

“They cannot say they got it wrong because there are hundreds of people in it and millions of dollars in it,” he says. “They say they have to learn more about it and it’s not as simple as we thought it was. . . . That’s why the co-factor is a very critical issue. . . . If HIV is not doing it alone, then a very plausible alternative is that it’s not doing it at all. But they wouldn’t say that for a long time. They’ll say it’s HIV plus an atom bomb or a cruise missile or a truck.”

Maybe it is his fate, he says, to be an unheeded anachronism.

“I’m a 19th-Century scientist, almost,” he says. “I’m saying very old, conventional things and no one will listen.”