But Duesberg was the consummate scientist, believing researchers ought to experiment and reason from what they observe and ruthlessly question every orthodoxy, including their own. Duesberg therefore subjected his oncogene theory to more rigorous tests than had any of its critics. Before he got the magical call from Stockholm, Duesberg became convinced that his own momentous discovery had been a clinically irrelevant lab fluke. Publicly shrugging off his hypothesis, which had already electrified a new field—Duesberg himself debunked the theory, incinerating his Nobel prospects and his friendship with Peter Vogt. Harvey Bialy, Duesberg’s biographer, reports Duesberg saying, “I would prefer to be honest even against my own interests.”16
Duesberg was uncompromisingly committed to clean functional proof, at a time when electron microscopy and other technologies for detecting new viruses were making biology—particularly the study of viruses—increasingly murky. Fame and finance were driving the frenzy in viral research. With official and commercial encouragement, researchers were blaming newly discovered viruses as the culprits in an assortment of ancient diseases. NIAID and pharmaceutical companies readily funded this research, which often opened a straight path to patentable antivirals. A virologist who convincingly linked a “new” virus to an existing cancer or disease could enjoy relevance, rich financial remuneration, and professional glory. Pharmaceutical companies were minting profits from a pharmacopoeia of patented antivirals devised by isolating these viruses and identifying compounds that could kill them. Every research scientist was aware of the Nobel committee’s bias toward breakthroughs that boosted Pharma’s profit potentials.
From the outset, Duesberg had nagging doubts about Robert Gallo’s findings. From an evolutionary standpoint, it didn’t make sense that an ancient retrovirus would attack its human host. Retroviruses, in the form of incomplete strands of DNA inserted into human DNA, have no metabolism and no proven capacity to digest, reproduce, or evolve. They are not, by accepted definition, a life form. It would be a surprise if evolution had, through some unknown mechanism, transformed any of these into a cancerous or a killer cell.
Gallo’s outspoken ambitions for the Nobel Prize were notorious: “What else would you expect from a person like Gallo who had studied retroviruses all his life— that he would say that it was a retrovirus causing AIDS. That seemed to be the first coincidence that made me wonder whether that was an authentic claim. But to me, it was not a surprise that he would say that. He said it before, that it would cause Alzheimer’s or leukemia or neurological diseases and it failed. So I was not too impressed that this was going to be a winner.”17
Following Gallo’s announcement, Duesberg spent eighteen months studying every scientific publication on HIV and AIDS. He finally published his observations in the prominent journal Cancer Research in March 1987, in an explosive article with the banal title Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality.18
Duesberg’s article was a tour de force from the reigning father of retrovirology, calling for sobriety in the booming field that he saw spinning out of control. A young generation of virologists, armed with electron microscopes and other novel instruments and seeking wealth and career advancement, were pinning retroviruses as the culprits for every malignancy, with meager functional or empirical proof, or rigorous evidence-based science to explain the mechanism by which they caused disease. Duesberg exploded the idea that retroviruses cause leukemia, cancers in general, and finally AIDS (the cellular opposite of leukemia). He pointed out that, however one feels about the HIV hypothesis, it was a total reversal of the universal consensus about retroviruses before Gallo’s April 1984 press conference. Duesberg reminded his colleagues that retroviruses—which have been a part of the human genome for as long as three billion years—are not “cytocidal” (cell killers). AIDS, Duesberg mused, is a disease of cell death, while leukemia is a disease of cell proliferation. By claiming initially that HIV caused leukemia, and later, AIDS, Gallo was accusing the bug of opposite reactions. Furthermore, Duesberg adds, “it would have been the first time that a retrovirus would have been pinned down as a cause of a human disease. Or even a disease in wild animals.”19
Duesberg argued that HIV is capable of causing neither cancer nor AIDS. It is instead, he declared, a harmless passenger virus that has almost certainly coexisted in humans for thousands of generations without causing diseases. Duesberg concluded that the creature Gallo claimed to be a pandemic pathogen was simply one of many harmless passenger viruses, which innate and adaptive human immunity quickly hold at bay. “There are no slow viruses” causing AIDS, the acid-tongued Duesberg quipped, “only slow scientists.”20 HIV is not pathogenic, either in the industrialized world or the Third World.
Duesberg’s Cancer Research paper was a lengthy, highly technical paper that raised a series of clear, compelling questions challenging point by point the basis of Gallo’s HIV/AIDS hypothesis.
Duesberg’s opus was a sweeping reality check against overblown claims for retroviruses, written by the man who at that point in history was thought to know them better than anybody. Many of his colleagues who studied Duesberg’s research came to the same conclusion: something was terribly wrong with the war on AIDS.
In 1997, Berkeley’s brilliant cell biologist, Dr. Richard Strohman, recalled the impact of Duesberg’s elegantly structured arguments in the elite universe of cancer research: “It was a remarkable review and it raised the fundamental issues about virus as a cause of both cancer and immunosuppression—basic questions that haven’t been really responded to in any meaningful way in the almost ten years since the date it was published.”21
Do Retroviruses Cause Diseases?
Duesberg’s skepticism about HIV/AIDS hypotheses quickly spread across the research community. The most fertile ground for incredulity was among researchers who knew the most about retroviruses. During the late 1990s, diverse teams of elite scientists began working on decoding the Human Genome. The idea of a cell-killing retrovirus made little sense to them from an evolutionary standpoint. Molecular biologist Harvey Bialy, scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology, remembers where he was when he first heard the news that NCI’s Bob Gallo had found the cause of AIDS and that it was a retrovirus. “A colleague told me,” says Bialy. “I was on my way to New York. It was January 1984. I remember laughing. ‘A cytopathic retrovirus? This is just more Gallo bullshit,’ I said. I said, ‘it will never fly.’”