Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, has concluded that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus–HIV–does not cause AIDS. In so doing, he is dismissing the most cherished hypothesis of the world’s AIDS experts.
Two healthy people have sex with the same HIV-infected person. One has sex a hundred times and never gets sick; the other comes down with AIDS after a single experience. Why?
Animals injected with HIV, and most humans accidentally inoculated with it, do not develop AIDS. Yet one of the postulates of the germ theory of disease, developed by the pioneer bacteriologist Robert Koch, is that if a pathogen causes the disease, it must always do so if introduced into a host.
Duesberg does note that immune system damage has long been associated with drug use, and that many of the people (in the West) who are coming down with behavior-linked AIDS–IV-drug users and some male homosexuals–are known to use illicit drugs. His tentative hypothesis, then, is that AIDS may be caused not by a “bug,” but by toxins in the form of poppers, cocaine, speed, and a supermarket of other substances popular in the IV and gay communities, which destroy the immune system, while HIV itself is a harmless fellow traveler along for the ride.
(There’s evidence, however, that a few scientists may be moving over to Duesberg’s side. The New York Native, citing a late-September Los Angeles Times article, reports that 25 “public sector scientists” have been trying to get “any scientific journal” to print a letter they have signed urging that “the HIV-AIDS link be re-evaluated.” According to the Native, “The letter has been rejected by Nature, Science, and The Lancet, despite the impressive scientific accomplishments of its signers.”)
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The NIH’s revocation of Duesberg’s $500,000 grant, by the way, was done despite the fact that the award originally charged Duesberg to “venture into new territory” and “ask creative questions.” In their letter canceling his grant, NIH officials accused Duesberg’s recent research of being “less productive, perhaps reflecting a dilution of his efforts with non-scientific issues.”
And there’s a handwritten letter, taped to the side of his lab refrigerator, that reads, “Dear Mr. Duesberg, I’m not a scientist or a doctor, I’m a security guard in Oakland, and you are the first person who seems to agree with what I’ve always thought about AIDS. I’m not gay, but I used to live in a hotel in San Francisco where five men died of AIDS and they were the most unhealth-conscious, drug-using people in the building. A cold could have killed them, if you ask me, let alone the illegal drugs from God knows where. . . . Don’t they mix coca leaves with turpentine and other chemicals? And gays seem to like amyl nitrite. Oh who knows? Just continue to work hard. . . .”
