Peter Heinz Hermann Duesberg (2 December 1936 – 13 January 2026) was a German-American molecular biologist and a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his early research into the genetic aspects of cancer. He was a proponent of AIDS denialism, the claim that HIV does not cause AIDS. Duesberg received acclaim early in his career for research on oncogenes and cancer. With Peter K. Vogt, he reported in 1970 that a cancer-causing virus of birds had extra genetic material compared with non-cancer-causing viruses, hypothesizing that this material contributed to cancer.
Biography
Early life and education Duesberg grew up during World War II, raised as a Catholic in Germany. He moved to the US in 1964 to work at the University of California, Berkeley, following completion of a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Frankfurt.
Career At the age of 36, Duesberg was awarded tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, and at 49, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He 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, Duesberg began to gain public notoriety with a March 1987 article in Cancer Research entitled "Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality". In this and subsequent writings, Duesberg proposed his hypothesis that AIDS is caused by long-term consumption of recreational drugs or antiretroviral drugs, and that the retrovirus known as 'HIV' is a harmless passenger virus. In contrast, the scientific consensus is that HIV infection causes AIDS; Duesberg's HIV/AIDS claims have been addressed and rejected as erroneous by the scientific community. Reviews of his opinions in Nature and Science asserted that they were unpersuasive and based on selective reading of the literature, and that although Duesberg had a right to a dissenting opinion, his failure to fairly review evidence that HIV causes AIDS meant that his opinion lacked credibility. Duesberg's views are cited as major influences on South African HIV/AIDS policy under the administration of Thabo Mbeki, which embraced AIDS denialism. Duesberg served on an advisory panel to Mbeki convened in 2000. The Mbeki administration's failure to provide antiretroviral drugs in a timely manner, due in part to the influence of AIDS denialism, is thought to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable AIDS deaths and HIV infections in South Africa. Duesberg disputed these findings in an article in the journal Medical Hypotheses, but the journal's publisher, Elsevier, later retracted Duesberg's article over accuracy and ethics concerns as well as its rejection during peer review. The incident prompted several complaints to Duesberg's institution, the University of California, Berkeley, which began a misconduct investigation of Duesberg in 2009. The investigation was dropped in 2010, with university officials finding "insufficient evidence ... to support a recommendation for disciplinary action." In 2021, Duesberg had a stroke that left him with severe aphasia affecting speaking, reading, and writing, according to a woman who described him as her husband in an email to the host of a Radio‑Canada podcast.
His work with diseases
Cancer In the 1970s, Duesberg won international acclaim for his groundbreaking work on cancer. Duesberg's early work on cancer included being the first to identify the oncogene v-src from the genome of Rous sarcoma virus, a chicken virus believed to trigger tumor growth. Duesberg disputes the importance of oncogenes and retroviruses in cancer. He supports the aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer that was first proposed in 1914 by Theodor Heinrich Boveri. Despite having discovered an oncogene, Duesberg rejects the importance of mutations, oncogenes, and anti-oncogenes entirely. In 1998, 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. Although unwilling to concur with Duesberg in throwing out a role for cancer genes, many researchers support exploration of alternative hypotheses. In 2007, Scientific American published an article by Duesberg on his aneuploidy cancer theory. In an editorial explaining their decision to publish this article, the editors of Scientific American wrote: "Thus, as wrong as Duesberg surely is about HIV, there is at least a chance that he is significantly right about cancer." A consequence of Duesberg's aneuploidy theory of cancer is his opposition to the HPV vaccine (against the virus that causes genital warts), as the idea that a virus could cause most cases of cervical cancer is inconsistent with his claims about what causes cancer. Although Duesberg generally favors vaccination, he vehemently opposed the rollout of the HPV vaccine, saying the vaccine was "all risk and no benefit".
AIDS
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