The hypothesis which has cost UC Berkeley Cell and Molecular Biology Professor Peter Duesberg his funding, his reputation, and most of his graduate students is simple: HIV does not cause AIDS.
In 1987, Duesberg first published his question with the commonly- held "HIV causes AIDS" theory. Put simply, he does not believe that the immune failure called AIDS, is caused by any infectious organism, but rather by drug use and poor health in general. When he started making these statements, he did realize the effect it would have on his career. According to Bryan Ellison, a former graduate student who worked with Duesberg, it has only been recently that Duesberg has noticed that his former colleagues don't just disagree with him-they hate him.
Today, the lab with which Duesberg made pioneering achievements in the field of retrovirology is almost empty. A lone graduate student makes her way between the beakers and centrifuges conducting the few experiments for which the lab still has funding.
The only activity is in the office next door. It is the only part of Duesberg's space at UC Berkeley that is still noisy and alive-so alive that Duesberg is overwhelmed to keep track of it all. The phone rings too often for him to answer as he sifts through stacks of articles and monitors a computer screen which keeps track of incoming and outgoing faxes.
Duesberg is still very busy, but not the way he wants to be. He would rather be swamped with experiments and graduate students than answering phone calls from journalists and conspiracy theorists. He often jokes about the time when he was "a real scientist." But it has become clear that the arena for his current scientific battle is not a laboratory.
Duesberg akins himself to a modern-day Galileo, unable to get the truth accepted by an orthodoxy $4 billion entrenched in studying HIV. He is so sure his theory is right that he has offered to inject himself with the HIV virus to prove the virus is harmless. But critics, such as Dr. Donald Francis, who has been involved with AIDS since its discovery in the early 1980s, say he has become an incompetent scientistÑeither unwilling or unable to process the overwhelming data that confirms HIV's role in AIDS.
Francis will agree that at one time Duesberg was a brilliant scientist, and has contributed a great deal to the study of retroviruses and oncogenes. But Francis, like many other Duesberg critics, says that somewhere along the line, Duesberg cracked.
Cancer was where the funding was, where the publishing was, and where a scientist could make breakthroughs that would capture the attention of not only the science community, but the world. The National Institute for Cancer had a seemingly unlimited budget and scientists were free to study almost any aspect of science they wanted. So when popular theories began linking retroviruses to cancer, it seemed the ideal study for Duesberg.
According to Duesberg, one reason researchers suspected retroviruses to be the hard sought-after viral cause of cancer was because they replicated in cells without killing them. This made them seem an ideal cause of cancer, because cancer is, as Duesberg says, "a disease of ever-growing cells." So Duesberg set out to decode the RNA of retroviruses, hoping that this would reveal insight into cancer.
Duesberg's work was a giant step for the field of retrovirology. The field grew rapidly, and Duesberg was one of the kings. Through this work, Duesberg was also able to map the structure of certain oncogenes, genes believed to cause cancer. For this work he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigious club of scientists who serve as an advisory board to the president of the United States. Being a member of such an elite club helps ensure funding, and somewhat guarantees publishing privileges in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Impressed with his work, the National Cancer Institute, under the National Institutes of Health, the primary funding body of all medical research, awarded Duesberg an Outstanding Investigative Grant-one of a handful awarded by the NIH, a high honor for any researcher.
A letter in the scientific publication Nature said Duesberg deserved a Nobel Prize for his work with oncogenes, but for some reason, Duesberg began presenting theories which downplayed the significance of his oncogene work. His critiques were dismissed by almost all other scientists in the field. In short, he proposed that the circumstances which would make these genes cause cancer are so rare they are irrelevant. No other scientists believed his theory (today oncogenes are still believed to commonly cause cancer), but it was enough to ensure that no prize would be forthcoming. Duesberg says he doesn't care. This is science, he reasonsÑif something doesn't happen, then it doesn't happen. But later, when Duesberg would question HIV, his skepticism would cost him much more than an award.
This downfall began on April 23, 1984. On that day, then Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler, along with Robert Gallo, a retrovirus researcher from the NCI, announced that the mystery Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome had been solved. A retrovirus called HTLV-III was the culprit.
The retrovirus, which would later be renamed HIV, was attacking and killing CD4 t-lymphocytes, key cells to the immune system. This theory didn't make sense to Duesberg. "My first thought was that it was either not a retrovirus, or it's not killing the cells."
There would be articles in the scientific journal Science by both Gallo and French Virologist Luc Montagnier discussing the finding of a retrovirus in the lymphocytes of AIDS patients, but none that would support the statement Heckler made to the world that the new-found retrovirus causes AIDS.
Duesberg didn't believe it, and the more he researched, the more he believed that the scientists of the world were on the biggest wild goose chase in medical history. And in 1988 he said so.
"I was romantic at the time. I believed we were truly scientists, and I was serving my job as a scientist best with criticism," Duesberg says.
To understand the significance of the first part of Duesberg's argument it is necessary to understand the common test scientists use to determine if a disease is caused by an infectious organism-Koch's postulate.
Koch's postulate is named after Robert Koch who discovered the cause of tuberculosis. The first premise of the postulate is that the organism which is said to cause a disease must be found in every case of that disease. The second premise to the postulate is the organism must be isolated in the laboratory, then injected into a healthy animal. To conclude this second premise, the injected animal must come down with the disease, and the infective organism must be re-isolated from the animal.
Duesberg says there are more than 4,600 cases of AIDS-defining illness without HIV infection.
The first acknowledgement by the medical industry of what seems to be AIDS without HIV came in July 1992 at the Eighth International Conference on AIDS. Several cases of AIDS diseases with unexplained immune system failure were reported from different parts of the world.
After the conference, the Center for Disease Control acknowledged five cases in the July 31, 1992 issue of the CDC's publication The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly. Each of the patients in the report had unexplained and persistent low T-cell levels, and several had AIDS-defining diseases.
On August 14, 1992, the CDC hosted a meeting to discuss the cases, and gave the newly recognized syndrome a name: Idiopathic CD4+ T-lymphocytopenia, and began an effort to explain the syndrome. Today, it is still unexplained.
According to Duesberg, HIV be found in only one in every 500 T-cells of patients, even during full-blown AIDS. Because the body creates a significant number of T-cells every day, it is impossible for HIV to have an effect on the immune system, even if it killed every cell it infected.
Duesberg says that the low levels of T-cells are the reason it was so difficult for Robert Gallo and Luc Montagier to isolate the virus back in the early 1980s.
For study and use in HIV antibody tests, HIV must be grown in abundance in a laboratory.
According to Duesberg, when HIV is grown in the laboratory, it is grown in T-cells, the very cells it is said to kill. Duesberg says that it can be grown indefinitely, and the cells never die the way they are said to in the body. This, he says, is congruent with what has been always known about retrovirusesÑthey grow indefinitely in cells without killing them.
According to Duesberg, the HIV virus has a replication cycle of no more than two days. He says this is the longest anyone has ever claimed a retrovirus could takes to duplicate. Figuring in exponential growth, if the virus is left alone (not inhibited by some aspect of the immune system), it would infect 1014 cells in 14 days, literally every cell in the human body.
In the case of a virus which causes a disease, most of the time the immune system reacts, but too slowly to stop the virus. There becomes a race in the body between the immune system and the virus to see which will prevail, and if the immune system is drastically slower than the virus, the person will die. According to Duesberg, the claims being made about AIDS is that the race doesn't begin until months after infection, and no disease shows until 10 years later.
"If you get infected by an infectious disease, you will get sick within weeksÑmonths at the latest," Duesberg says. The latency period, according to Duesberg's theory, is much better explained by a build up of toxins in the bodyÑspecifically drugs.
AIDS, Duesberg says, is like smoking. After 20 or 30 years of smoking, emphysema will develop. In Duesberg's theory, AIDS comes after years of continuous drug use, specifically the use of amyl and butyl nitrates, or "poppers." Poppers, says Duesberg, became very popular during the 1970s among homosexual men, who used them to enhance sexual prowess.
The other primary toxin Duesberg says causes AIDS is AZT, the drug used to combat HIV. AZT is acknowledged to be an extremely toxic drug that inhibits DNA replication. This makes AZT, as Duesberg says, "incompatible with life."
These are the major parts of the hypothesis that Duesberg has staked his career on. Every one of them has been refuted, often repeatedly, by scientists working with AIDS. Here is how:
In a 1993 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, then sole head of the National Institute of Health, Anthony Fauci, wrote an article addressing the syndrome called Idiopathic CD4+ T-lymphoctopenia. While he has yet to explain the cause of the syndrome, he said that the syndrome was probably not new. According to the article, there have been cases of unexplained persistent low T-cell levels for a long time, and it has probably been under the close watch for AIDS that they seem new. Fauci also said that the syndrome occurred outside the normal risk groups for AIDS, such as drug users.
Ann Auleb, a biology professor at San Francisco State University who has been teaching about HIV and AIDS since 1984, says that in order to understand the problems with Duesberg's hypothesis about ICL, it is necessary to understand the broader spectrum of what AIDS is.
"AIDS is a rather arbitrary definition of what is the terminal phase of 'HIV disease'," Auleb says. Before an AIDS patient dies of what is necessary to meet the CDC's definition of AIDS, the patient will have symptoms such as an initial flu-like state and swollen lymph nodes. None of the cases of ICL listed in the CDC or NIH documentation report other "HIV disease" indicators.
According to Auleb, many undetectable things such as radiation, can cause depletion of T-cells. People died of AIDS-defining diseases before the discovery of AIDS, according to Auleb, but when they appear clustered all at once (such as homosexual men in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco) that indicates something common is causing it. It is currently believed by the NIH, and the CDC that the cases of ICL do not have a common cause.
As to as the rest of Koch's postulates, Francis says it has now been shown that HIV fulfills them all. Tragic laboratory accidents have forced people to become models of the postulate. One case Francis points out is a healthy laboratory worker who was infected with a synthetically made strand of HIV and 68 months later developed AIDS.
An article in the April 16, 1993 issue of Science, reported that new improvements in the Polymerase Chain Reaction by Stephen Wolinsky's lab at Northwestern University have enabled the lab to "routinely find HIV genetic material in as many as one in 10 blood cells."
Auleb, who has noticed the numbers in Duesberg's claim drop from one in a million, to one in 10,000, to one in 1,000, to the current figure of one in 500 over the years, says there is a reason why HIV is not found commonly in the T-cells.
"The initial response to HIV is very effective," Auleb says. "The immune system is able to get the virus under control, so you don't see a lot of virus in the blood stream at that point. What you do see is seeding of the virus into the lymphatic system, and into the lymph nodes."
Auleb also says that even if Duesberg's one-500 figure is correct, HIV could still cause AIDS.
In addition to the constant stress placed on the immune system by constantly fighting a virus, Auleb explains that HIV has been found to kill T-cells without actually infecting them.
Auleb's explanation for this is the dropping of gp120 by HIV into the bloodstream; gp120 is the protein which allows HIV to attach to the walls of T-cells. But gp120's bond to HIV is not very strong. WHen gp120 falls off the virus, it can float around in the blood and eventually attach to a T-cell wall. When this happens, the T-cell will be killed by the immune system, because to the immune system, it looks to be infected. In this case, HIV has killed the T-cell without ever infecting it.
"Would you like to see a picture of HIV killing a laboratory T-cell?" Auleb chuckles in reaction to the statement which she has heard several times from Duesberg.
According to Auleb, the reason Gallo and Montagnier had a hard time isolating HIV was not because there was no virus in the cells, but because the virus killed the lymphocytes too quickly. Later, Auleb explains, Gallo was able to create a cell wall which would survive HIV, and the virus could then be reproduced in great numbers for study.
"How can Duesberg claim that a baby born to the wife of a hemophiliac was doing poppers?" asks Francis. He bluntly asserts that there is no common parallel between people with AIDS and drug use. But all of the AIDS patients, according to Francis, have HIV.
"The virus is constantly being destroyed, and so are the lymphocytes in this constant battle that's going on," Auleb explains, "and over a period of time the immune system loses the battle in many people." The differences in how long the virus takes to kill the immune system in different people varies according to the strength of a person's immune system, and whether or not a person has a virus that acts as co-factor to the final AIDS condition.
Auleb says, "You have a whole bunch of people out there who are in denial, who would like to think they don't have to make any lifestyle changes, and I think that Peter Duesberg is probably responsible for the deaths of some people who have listened to him and believed him."
Duesberg and his former graduate student and chief supporter, Bryan Ellison, feel these emotion-based statements of people like Auleb are the product of a waning defense of an orthodoxy highly motivated by money and reputation, and a medical industry that is developing into what could be compared to a military industrial complex.
After World War II, the United States, the World Health Organization and many other countries set out to eliminate infectious disease. Francis was a part of this project, and was one of the doctors who eliminated small pox from the planet. During this time the United States and the rest of the world developed an intricate system for detecting and fighting infectious disease. Duesberg thinks because everyone was so geared up to battle infectious agents, the government didn't spend enough time exploring toxic causes for AIDS.
Duesberg says that because the theory of HIV was endorsed by the Secretary of Health before it was even published, the government staked a claim and has been very adamant about protecting that claim. The NIH is the chief funding body for any medical experiments in the county, so Duesberg feels that they can protect their claim by funding only experiments involving HIV.
Ellison says that now there is a movement by the medical industry to suppress Duesberg's theories. He points to an article in the scientific journal Nature which looked at Duesberg's theory of drugs as the cause of AIDS. The study was performed by two men from the California Department of Health Services and two men from the Biomedical and Environmental Health Services at UC Berkeley, and found that there was no support for the theory that drug use caused AIDS. When Duesberg wrote a response to Nature, Editor John Maddox refused to publish it. Ellison says this is just the kind of censorship that is keeping the truth from coming out about HIV and AIDS.
In an editorial in the May 13, 1993 issue of Nature, Maddox explained why he did not run Duesberg's article. Maddox wrote that he felt Duesberg was hanging onto unanswered questions as proof that the HIV=AIDS hypothesis was wrong. "But unanswered questions are not falsifications," Maddox explained.
Maddox went on to say that Duesberg is irresponsible for bringing a scientifically weak argument before an infected community which will believe that HIV is not fatal.
Ellison claims that the NIH influence is so effective it indirectly led to his dismissal from Berkeley. According to Ellison, within the halls of Berkeley, Duesberg's theories cannot even be discussed for fear that a professor might overhear and begin to question a student's academic ability.
Back in Duesberg's lab, Jody Shwartz, one of the two graduate students who still works with Duesberg, is conducting experiments which have nothing to do with AIDS, but she is unable to escape the controversy.
"It's a daily struggle," she says, hesitant to speak on the subject at all. "I don't know how he puts up with it."
Shwartz was warned not to work with Duesberg by advisors and peers. Just being associated with his lab could stigmatize her and inhibit her ability to get a teaching position.
"He is hated here the most," Shwartz says, referring to the Cell and Molecular Biology Department at Berkeley. "Well, except maybe for the NIH."
Ellison says that some people in the department, such as Randy Schekman, who was the division head of the department at Berkeley from 1990 to 1994, have interests in the HIV=AIDS hypothesis because they consult for firms who work with HIV.
Schekman is a consultant for the firm Kiron, but he says he does not consult on anything related to HIV. What he does consult on is the secretion of proteins from yeast used for studies on insulin.
And Schekman points out that the request for Ellison's dismissal came from Duesberg himself.
But Duesberg has many supporters aside from Ellison. Among them is Nobel Lauriate Kary Mullis, of recent fame for his connection with the O.J. Simpson trial. Mullis says that he has looked a long time for proof that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, and has never been able to find a single document to prove it.
In the past couple of years, a network of scientists and doctors have formed and published a monthly newsletter called Reappraising AIDS. The group continually publishes any and all current information questioning the AIDS hypothesis, and holds Duesberg and Mullis as two of its chief references.
But, as Auleb points out, Mullis and some other members of the group may not be as irresponsible for Duesberg's statements alone. Mullis and other members of the group are simply questioning the evidence that HIV causes AIDS, not stating it isn't infectious. This does not present the same danger, Auleb says, because it does not indicate that people no longer need to use condoms or clean needles.
"I think Mullis is asking a legitimate question," Auleb says. "If he wants to know the answer, he needs to do a little more reading."
Auleb's biggest problem with the group is that they have aligned themselves with a political movement.
Last March, the Office of Minnesota Representative Gil Gutknecht sent a letter to the National Institutes of Health demanding to know the answer to the question, "How do we know HIV causes AIDS?"
In the a recent issue of Science, Gutknecht's advisors said they were determined to expose the "greatest medical conspiracy of all time."
This kind of politics, Auleb says, could result in loss of funding by politicians who still want to lay the blame of AIDS on those who have the disease.
After years of fighting to get his theories accepted, Duesberg is still not ready to back down from his stance. He says he is willing to conduct the one expirementr that would settle the argument one way or another-inject himself with HIV.
Duesberg is not the first to suggest this experiment. At a 1994 alternative medicine meeting in Greensboro, N.C., a Florida physician named Robert Willner stuck a needle into the finger of a man who claimed to be infected with HIV. He then poked himself twice in the hand with the same needle and declared that HIV does not cause AIDS.
Doctors say that the chances of HIV infection from such actions are small, and Willner is still HIV negative. But Duesberg is as certain as Willner appears to be that such an injection would be harmless, and wants to do it himself.
"I would do it [inject himself with HIV] if I could get a grant for it," Duesberg says. "If you do it like Willner, you sort of give it away, and it just looks like a stunt."
All Duesberg says he needs is money and an independent scientist to record the experiment. "I will write down the way I am going to do it, I want it to be reviewed, and then the bet is on. If I am wrong, and I am dead five years later or have AIDS, then I have done my contribution to science. I've done my homeworkÑI couldn't find any evidence against it [his theory], and I will have done the ultimate experiment," Duesberg says.
At one point, Duesberg made the offer to Francis. "I wish I let him do it," Francis says. "He's one nut we can do without."
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