Pity poor Peter Duesberg; even Medical Hypotheses has dissed him
Posted by Orac on September 15, 2009
Pity poor Peter Duesberg.
Back in the 1980s, he was on the top of the world, scientifically speaking. A brilliant virologist with an impressive record of accomplishment, publication, and funding, he seemed to be on a short track to an eventual Nobel Prize. Then something happened. The AIDS epidemic happened. Something about the AIDS epidemic led this excellent scientist in the late 1980s to fall directly into pseudoscience and crankery by latching onto and promoting the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS. Of course, at the time scientists didn’t yet know a lot about the virus and how it slowly destroyed the immune system. There was a lot of room for new knowledge. It might have been possible that something other than HIV was contributing to the development of AIDS. However, science and evidence accumulated. More importantly, in the 1990s, new antiretroviral drugs were developed. The success at prolonging the lives of HIV patients of drug cocktails designed to target HIV by different mechanisms and thus forestall the development of resistance represented the final evidence that HIV definitely caused AIDS. Scientists’ understanding of the virus had led for the first time to effective therapies–and in record time, a mere decade A deadly disease became a chronically manageable one.
None of this mattered to HIV/AIDS denialists. They continued to believe that it couldn’t possibly by HIV that cause the slow destruction of the immune system suffered by AIDS patients. They continued to insist that it must be some combination of pills, diseases spread by promiscuous sex, or other vague, unnamed factors. And Peter Duesberg was right there among them, destroying his own scientific career in the process. Oh, sure, he’s recently tried to resurrect it by pushing an interesting “everything old is new again” hypothesis for cancer causation, but even doing that he’s behaved like a crank by branding his hypothesis The One True Cause of Cancer and castigating other scientists for not immediately appreciating his brilliance.
About a week ago, for some reason that still escapes me, a whim took me and I decided to see what Duesberg was up to, scientifically speaking. So I did a quick PubMed on Peter Duesberg’s name, and I came across this abstract for a Medical Hypothesis article by Duesberg. My first reaction was to think was that Duesberg has really come down in the world if he’s actually publishing in Medical Hypotheses these days. My second reaction was laughter, and lots of it. Read the abstract and you will see why:
WITHDRAWN: HIV-AIDS hypothesis out of touch with South African AIDS – A new perspective.
Duesberg PH, Nicholson JM, Rasnick D, Fiala C, Bauer HH.
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Donner Laboratory, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
This Article-in-Press has been withdrawn pending the results of an investigation. The editorial policy of Medical Hypotheses makes it clear that the journal considers “radical, speculative, and non-mainstream scientific ideas”, and articles will only be acceptable if they are “coherent and clearly expressed.” However, we have received serious expressions of concern about the quality of this article, which contains highly controversial opinions about the causes of AIDS, opinions that could potentially be damaging to global public health. Concern has also been expressed that the article contains potentially libelous material. Given these important signals of concern, we judge it correct to investigate the circumstances in which this article came to be published online. When the investigation and review have been completed we will issue a further statement. Until that time, the article has been removed from all Elsevier databases. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at
404.
Oh. My. God. Does it get any lower than having your article withdrawn by Medical Hypotheses?
