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Peter Duesberg is a “critic-at-large.” For this reason, argues Richard Strohman in the preface to Infectious AIDS. Have we been misled?, Duesberg should be “given a medal and a large grant simply to continue this invaluable service.” Duesberg’s ‘invaluable service’ commenced in 1987 when Duesberg was (as he still is now) a full professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley. For his “steadfast refusal to disregard uncomfortable facts (sic)” (Strohman’s words again), Duesberg was awarded a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Award Grant from the National Institutes of Health in 1987, and other awards and grants followed suit. Then, in 1995 Duesberg’s funding was exhausted and his research was brought to a standstill. No new research grant was forthcoming, despite that Duesberg was still “vibrant, capable (and) full of research ideas.”
Why, one might ask incredulously, has Duesberg encountered such apparently unjust treatment? Has Duesberg not courageously, almost single-handedly, ventured against the global consensus that HIV causes AIDS? Has he not with great valour maintained that recreational and anti-HIV drugs – and not HIV – cause AIDS? In fact, he has even engineered an ingenious strategy to once and for all bury the scourge of AIDS: ban the anti-HIV drug AZT; education against drug use; termination of recreational drug use; and treating AIDS symptomatically (i.e. Kaposi’s sarcoma with conventional cancer therapy and weight loss with good nutrition).
Why, Duesberg must feel himself greatly wronged to have invented the do-it-yourself cure for AIDS and still few seems to take any meaningful notice. His genius remains unacknowledged, his research remains unfinished, and his status as a crank lingers unerringly. In Infectious AIDS. Have we been misled?, however, Duesberg’s followers and admirers have the opportunity to peruse his life’s work. Here one can see how “science goes wrong in dealing with internal controversy,” states Strohman, and thus “we all suffer when (critics) are treated in such a shabby manner.” Here the creed is outlined (couched in scientific jargon), the doctrine stated, and its antagonists confronted. What does it matter if only a few take notice, or if the majority of the scientific community remains unconvinced? Such is the frustrated and lonely life of an AIDS dissident.
Infectious AIDS is a collection of articles and letters written by Peter Duesberg between 1987 and 1995. We find Duesberg’s provocative article “HIV is not the cause of AIDS,” in which the author argues that HIV is not the cause of AIDS because “it fails to meet the postulates of Koch and Henle, as well as six cardinal rules of virology.” This article of Duesberg produced a reply from scientists favouring HIV as the cause of AIDS, and in this article (also published in Infectious AIDS) the authors point out to Duesberg that “the Koch-Henle postulates of 1840 and 1890 were formulated before the discovery of viruses.”
In another article entitled ‘AIDS epidemiology: Inconsistencies with HIV and with infectious disease,’ Duesberg concludes that “American AIDS is not infectious, and (suggests) that unidentified, mostly non-infectious pathogens cause AIDS.” In an article entitled ‘AIDS acquired by drug consumption and other non-contagious risk factors,’ Duesberg continues his argument by concluding that “all American/European AIDS diseases, that exceed their normal background, result form recreational and anti-HIV drugs. African AIDS is proposed to result from protein malnutrition, poor sanitation and subsequent parasitic infections.”
In the article ‘Foreign-protein-mediated immunodeficiency in hemophiliacs with and without HIV,’ Duesberg concludes that “AIDS cannot be prevented by elimination of HIV from the blood supply and cannot be rationally treated with genotoxic antiviral drugs, like AZT. Instead, hemophilia-AIDS can be prevented and has even been reverted by treatment with pure factor VIII.” In the last article in Infectious AIDS, entitled ‘How much longer can we afford the AIDS virus monopoly?,’ Duesberg attempts to deliver the coup-de-grace to HIV: “The drug hypothesis predicts that AIDS is an entirely preventable and in part curable disease. The solution to AIDS could be as close as a very testable and affordable alternative to the HIV hypothesis – the drug-AIDS hypothesis.” Besides, writes Duesberg, “in addition to saving about 100,000 lives per year from AIDS, the drug hypothesis could save the American tax payer up to $20 billion annually.”
Can this not be too good to be true? Duesberg has unearthed a way out of the global AIDS malaise, yet somehow he is still seen as unfit to fill the shoes of Pasteur, Koch, and other big names in the history of microbiological research. Surely there can only be one explanation, Duesberg must be thinking: conspiracy. He was well on the way to ridding the world of the terror of AIDS when the carpet was pulled from under his feet. At the end of the day all Duesberg’s laborious swimming against the tide of global consensus brought him nowhere. In Infectious AIDS we find the work of a man determined to put into effect Einstein’s instruction ‘never to stop questioning,’ and we encounter the frustrating, lonely life of a man destined to swim against an overbearing tide all his life. Such is the life of an AIDS dissident.
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