The article below is titled "Doubting Peter" and talks about a man I met some years ago in what can only be described as serendipity. He was an AIDS Denier.
I was at the time ghost-writing a book for a well-known medical authority on AIDS who was convinced that there was not just controversy but dangerous conspiracy around the then still mysterious disease.
This medical doctor believed that AIDS was virulently contagious - and as part of my background research for her book, I interviewed one of her fiercest opponents, Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., renown German scientist in the molecular biology field.
The world was Peter's oyster. He was young, energetic, and highly esteemed. He had just been given a $7 million granr for his research, considered tops in his field. He had come within an inch of the Nobel Prize for his work on retroviruses believed to be the cause of cancer. It seemed he had it made.
That was ***before he turned Denier*** and risked his reputation and career in what is eerily reminiscent of what we have just seen of David Irving.
Peter believes with all his heart - and has the stats to back it up - that what kills patients afflicted with AIDS is not the illness but the treatment. Imagine saying that in our world controlled by a fiercely protective monopoly of orthodox medicine?
What Peter said was radical. He said that drugs were the culprit - both legal and illegal drugs. He said that homosexual lifestyle was the culprit. That's almost as extremist as denying the fabled six million!
I never forgot Peter Duesberg and his odd, controversial, politically incorrect stance - which, I confess, sounded entirely convincing, the way he explained it to me. So when I had an opportunity a couple of years ago, I talked Ernst Zundel into a little detour to Berkeley University to meet and interview this scientist for his revisionist, world-wide "Voice of Freedom" television program.
It was a thought-provoking interview. Both Ernst and I were struck by just how similar the persecution of so-called Holocaust Deniers mirrored the persecution of a small, dogged group of Scientist AIDS Deniers, led by this lone, fierce fellow who bucked the system. Big time. Convinced that he was right.
Here is an essay about Peter Duesberg, written by a student confronting for the first time a true blue researcher who puts his science over dogma - and damn the consequence:
One day in 1996, I walked into the County Library in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in search of a book about AIDS. I had recently read "And The Band Played On," by Randy Shilts, and wanted something more technical, less bombastic, and more current.
The book I found was "Inventing The AIDS Virus" by Peter H. Duesberg.
I didn't know when I picked it off the shelf that "Inventing The AIDS Virus" was a controversial book. I didn't even know that much about AIDS. But the book turned out to be a piece of dissident literature arguing from a scientific perspective that HIV doesn't cause the syndrome we know as AIDS.
To my insulated collegiate mind this was weird stuff. But weirder still was that less than four years later, I would be sitting across a table from Dr. Duesberg at UC Berkeley, listening to him go on and on about AIDS science.
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To many brilliant minds, Peter Duesberg is a menace.
Born in Germany to scientist parents in 1936, Duesberg grew up in the ruins of World War II. He was a university-trained scientist, receiving his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Frankfurt in 1963.
In 1964, his impressive academic record got him a job as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. His work isolating a cancer gene in 1970 took his career far; in 1973, he became a full professor with tenure in the UCB Molecular & Cell Biology Department.
His work on retroviruses throughout the 70's and 80's earned him accolades from his peers, and membership in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1986.
In 1987, he threw away his career.
Or, perhaps more optimistically, he put his career on the line. With a paper in the March 1, 1987 issue of Cancer Research, "Retroviruses As Pathogens and Carcinogens: Expectations and Reality," he concluded that HIV, discovered by Dr. Robert Gallo in 1984, can't cause AIDS.
And for the last 13 years, he has not backed down. The paper, and dozens more like it he has published since 1987, as well as 3 books, have made him the poster scientist for an international "dissent" movement, reviled and dismissed by scientists and governments worldwide.
The mainstream says there is no question that HIV causes AIDS. To question the hypothesis, they say, is irresponsible, conspiratorial, and outright deadly to potentially infected people.
For his views, Duesberg has been ostracized from his department, kicked out of numerous organizations that once welcomed him, denied graduate research assistants, and forced to move into a smaller lab.
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An undergraduate biology section in Stanley Hall is the only class that has been assigned to Dr. Duesberg for many semesters now.
He believes he is given the class as a punishment from the department . (In a similar vein, Duesberg has been appointed head of the UCB Molecular & Cell Biology Faculty Picnic Committee.)
The first time I found him, he was sitting alone in a lab, staring intently at data on a computer screen. At first, my entrance startled him. But after I told him that I had read his book, he wouldn't stop.
Duesberg carries himself like someone who has been on alert for the past sixty years. His thick, clipped German accent gives him an air of authority, and his dry wit turns every phrase into a self-evident truth. Duesberg doesn't ever just talk; he instructs, and his audience listens.
When people speak to him, he often cuts them off mid-sentence because he's already ahead of what they're saying. He does this to me, often.
"I'm from the Graduate School of Journalism, and --"
"Hello," he said quickly.
"Do you have a few--"
"Yes, sit down," he said.
Dr. Duesberg believes that AIDS is a disease much like lung cancer or emphysema, a so-called "lifestyle" illness that takes years to manifest itself. He concludes that long term use of both illicit and anti-HIV drugs causes irreversible immune system damage.
It's a complex argument that isn't as ridiculous as it may seem at the outset. No one in the scientific community gives his argument any credence, as they say it has been disproved by almost two decades of intensive AIDS research.
I asked, "has anything changed since your book was written?"
"If my book was not written, you would not be here," he said.
Many thoughts raced through my mind as I compared the picture on the back of the book jacket I had saved in my mind with the sixty-something hawk-like scientist in front of me:
Is this man a left-wing "conspiracy terrorist," as he was called by the SF Bay Guardian, or is he associated with right-wing anti-Semite groups, as Mother Jones magazine recently suggested? (The magazine rather pejoratively lumped "AIDS deniers" in with "Holocaust deniers," almost certainly at the behest of some zealous public health official.)
Or, is Duesberg, as he himself believes, simply the one sane man in a scientific establishment gone insane?
"How does it make you feel," I asked, "to be personally challenged for things you hold as purely scientific truths?"
"Insecure," Duesberg said, "just like all other minorities in an intolerant and aggressive majority."
I think anyone who examines the man objectively would be hard-pressed to condemn him as a terrorist or a fascist, regardless of the validity of his work and his point of view.
In the time I spent with Duesberg, I tried desperately to figure out why a man would hold convictions that make him a laughing stock with his peers and threaten his professional livelihood.
But Duesberg genuinely believes the science of what he advocates. There seems to be very little personally at stake for him in the war on AIDS. He's not a gay man with HIV or AIDS, and no one in his family has the illness; he's a straight German scientist married to one of his former research assistants.
The academic zeal he has for his research is plainly evident. He doesn't seem to want to make a name for himself; instead, he wanted to talk about his research, the hypocrisy of the AIDS establishment, and he desperately wanted to make me understand. In Duesberg's world, there's no choice.
Others aren't convinced.
"I have spent too many hours on the subject of Duesberg and have called a halt to it," said Dr. Stuart Linn, head of Duesberg's department. "Some people play the gadfly, some the martyr. Perhaps a psychologist would serve you well for an interview."
Duesberg has made bitter enemies of nearly every scientist working on AIDS, from Dr. Gallo to Dr. David Ho, the researcher who pioneered 'cocktail' drug treatments in 1997.
When I told Duesberg that Ho spoke at my graduation from Swarthmore College in 1998, he chuckled, and mumbled "Dr. Ho" under his breath like a Nazi villain from the Indiana Jones movies.
Duesberg challenged me. "You clapped when Ho spoke, didn't you?"
I stammered.
"Of course you did. People think Ho is saving them," he said.
Duesberg dismissed Ho's work in mid-sentence when I brought it up. He said Ho's ideas of "hidden virus" and "viral load" are "science fiction" and "pure fantasy" respectively, and he referred me to a paper he had written on the topic.
Like a buzzing mosquito in the ear of the drug companies and AIDS establishment, he has written numerous papers saying that AIDS drugs themselves have caused the syndrome they seek to prevent.
He has accused Burroughs Wellcome, the manufacturer of AZT, of genocide, and he has written ceaseless letters to the editors of every major scientific journal in the United States accusing them of shoddy science and censorship.
And in his most brazen, most desperate act, Duesberg offered to inject himself with HIV, to prove that it is harmless. The only catch: Someone has to pay for the experiment and monitor it in a controlled environment. The idea was dismissed by all the major grant foundations as a "suicide experiment."
"I would do it tomorrow," he told me. "But I would not do it if they would be able to discredit me. There is no question in my mind that I would not get sick."
I asked Duesberg about ACT UP San Francisco, and similar groups like Alive & Well in San Diego, that have sprung up all over the country. They believe Duesberg and other AIDS dissidents like Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein and San Franciscoís own John Lauritsen, and they actively promote the cause.
"What do you do when you know the truth? You throw sticks and stones," Duesberg said, rather elliptically.
Unlike Duesberg, the men in ACT UP San Francisco are young, HIV positive, and very angry. They're the ones responsible for the "HIV is a government lie" stickers all over downtown San Francisco, "Don't get tested," and other memorable slogans.
Their rage has mostly been directed at the AIDS science establishment in San Francisco. They routinely show up to disrupt Castro community meetings, spitting on UCSF AIDS scientists and booing advocates of AIDS treatment off the stage.
Their most high-profile act came when ACT UP San Francisco member Ronnie Burk poured 25 pounds of used kitty litter on the head of SF AIDS Foundation President Pat Christen's head.
"Duesberg should take heart," Burk said. "He has nothing to feel defeated about. We aren't going to stop."
But whereas a recent letter to the editor of the Bay Area Reporter called the members of ACT UP San Francisco "Peter Duesberg-spawned know-nothings and conspiracy fools," Duesberg naturally took a different point of view.
Duesberg seems to be an unlikely pointman for left-wing activist groups, and, aside from occasional speeches he has given at their meetings, he doesn't seem to associate with the activists.
Instead, he focuses on the scientific establishment, which he feels has betrayed him and his work.
"I am one of the few targets where it is still politically correct to attack: My German heritage questioning an 'American discovery.' They say I am socially irresponsible for putting science ahead of safe sex," said Duesberg.
"In addition, I'm heterosexual and thus at least a 'Suspect homophobe,' and to some degree it's treasonous for a virologist to call the presumed role of the most funded virus ever into question."
I asked him what was next. He said there wasn't any more he could do.
"The major journals won't accept my articles because of the peer review process," he said.
"I used to think it would be months or years before the establishment accepted my views," he said. "Now I believe it will be decades or centuries."
"But someday, they will look back and know that I was right."
As the sun was setting and I told Duesberg I had to go, the phone rang in his small lab, and the intensity and urgency that had occupied his voice for more than an hour and a half melted as he cracked a smile and spoke in German to his wife.
Even conspiracy terrorists have a tender side.
This was sent to me by one Joshua.Rosen@oberlin.edu - Why? It is a mystery to me. But I must say that I was very glad.
Ingrid
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Thought for the Day:
"Trust me. I do not need a holocaust to have a life."
(A Giwer Gem)