21 Facts About Peter Duesberg

Peter Heinz Hermann Duesberg was born on December 2,1936 and is a German-American molecular biologist and a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Peter Duesberg is known for his early research into the genetic aspects of cancer.

Peter Duesberg is a proponent of AIDS denialism, the claim that HIV does not cause AIDS.

At the age of 36, Peter Duesberg was awarded tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, and at 49, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Peter Duesberg received an Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health in 1986, and from 1986 to 1987 was a Fogarty scholar-in-residence at the NIH laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland.

Long considered a contrarian by his scientific colleagues, Peter Duesberg began to gain public notoriety with a March 1987 article in Cancer Research entitled "Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality".

Reviews of his opinions in Nature and Science asserted that they were unpersuasive and based on selective reading of the literature, and that although Peter Duesberg had a right to a dissenting opinion, his failure to fairly review evidence that HIV causes AIDS meant that his opinion lacked credibility.

Peter Duesberg served on an advisory panel to Mbeki convened in 2000.

Peter Duesberg disputed these findings in an article in the journal Medical Hypotheses, but the journal's publisher, Elsevier, later retracted Peter Duesberg's article over accuracy and ethics concerns as well as its rejection during peer review.

In 2021, Peter Duesberg had a stroke that left him with severe aphasia affecting speaking, reading, and writing, according to his partner.

Peter Duesberg grew up during World War II, raised as a Catholic in Germany.

Peter Duesberg moved to the US in 1964 to work at the University of California, Berkeley, following completion of a Ph.

In 1998, Peter Duesberg co-authored a paper reporting a correlation between chromosome number and the genetic instability of cancer cells, which they dubbed "the ploidy factor," confirming earlier research by other groups that demonstrated an association between degree of aneuploidy and metastasis.

Peter Duesberg asserts that AIDS in Africa is misdiagnosed and the epidemic a "myth", claiming, unlike the WHO, that the diagnostic criteria for AIDS are different in Africa than elsewhere.

Peter Duesberg argues that retroviruses like HIV must be harmless to survive, and that the normal mode of retroviral propagation is mother-to-child transmission by infection in utero.

Since Peter Duesberg published his first paper on the subject in 1987, scientists have examined and criticized the accuracy of his hypotheses on AIDS causation.

Peter Duesberg entered a long dispute with John Maddox, then-editor of the scientific journal Nature, demanding the right to rebut articles that HIV caused AIDS.

Mainstream AIDS researchers argue that Peter Duesberg's arguments are constructed by a selective reading of the scientific literature, dismissing evidence that contradicts his theses, requiring impossibly definitive proof, and dismissing outright studies marked by inconsequential weaknesses.

Peter Duesberg has been described as "the individual who has done the most damage" regarding denialism, due to the apparent scientific legitimacy his scientific credentials give to his statements.

In 2000, Peter Duesberg was the most prominent AIDS denialist to sit on a 44-member Presidential Advisory Panel on HIV and AIDS convened by then-president Thabo Mbeki of South Africa.

Peter Duesberg said that HIV does not replicate in the body and that antiviral drugs, which he calls "inevitably toxic," do not inhibit HIV.