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Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS: A Scientific Life And Times of Peter H. Duesberg

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Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS, A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg

by Harvey Bialy

reviewed by Kary Mullis

Why has Peter Duesberg, one of the smartest, imaginative, hard working, and honest biological scientists of the last fifty years, had such a rough time convincing other people and spreading his irrefutably superior ideas in the areas of cancer and AIDS? Why is Peter not incredibly successful and loved as an indefatigable thinker and keeper of the scientific faith? It is a mystery why this man is not a famous and well-funded director of an influential institute leading our young scientists.

Harvey Bialy has been around Peter and molecular biology for forty odd years, observing and collecting notes, and now he tells the intriguing story. I think it is important, because Peter is one in a million never to be repeated again.

His story, predicted by Jean-Paul Sartre when he pronounced somewhere that we all make our own hell out of the people around us, is told up-close and brilliantly by Bialy.

It is about humans taking on a vast responsibility, with the usual suspects - money, glory, and stubbornness. Unfortunately only an insignificant fraction of them seem concerned with the mission of saving lives. Bialy tries to remember it all, with some of the raw edges chewed back by time as he wisely allows the unsavory characters to hoist on their own inelegant petards.

It is a well-told tale with the humor of a sympathetic observer, a humor that reminds me not a little of the same incorruptible humor of his protagonist, Peter Duesberg - head and shoulders above the competition in so many ways, but unable to pull it off. He seems to know that something has damned him to that space, but maintains nevertheless a vital resignation in that razor sharp cortex, which misrepresents nothing and would never in a fair hearing be called on to answer for misdeeds. We meet a lot of the contenders in this well researched and deeply considered book, their powers and their fallibilities - their own statements a most readable report.

I recommend it to anyone who cares to be entertained or educated in the details of how the science of cancer or AIDS has been done in this last half century. But it is far more than that. It is a window cracked not just on Peter's travails but on all of the science and sorcery since the invention of money. A long winter's tale.

Many of the recent reviews posted on this page have been criticisms written by people who show no evidence of actually having read this book, but rather feel compelled to attack the book for the mere fact that it reports Duesberg's controversial (but compelling) views on HIV and AIDS.

Although some of the book's devastating - and fascinating - moments do indeed come when Bialy is exposing some of the more distasteful tactics behind what is surely the most politicized medical issue in history, by focusing on AIDS, many reviews will likely draw attention to a book that is equally important for what it reveals regarding the politics, and the science, of cancer research.

Beginning with Peter Duesberg's unwelcome criticisms of the single gene mutation theory of carcinogenesis and leaving the reader with an introduction to the current theory of aneuploidy on which Duesberg now focuses his attention, Bialy weaves a tale of the man and his mission, which is simply to find out truth. Would that so many scientists have similar motives.

Bialy does his readers the service of never insulting their intelligence, so be warned that this book does get technical at times, but it's worth the effort. Unexpectedly, it's also quite funny and had me laughing aloud at times.

The embroilment of Harvey Bialy and Peter Duesberg in controversy came to our attention when we read George Miklos' glowing review of Bialy's book. Mentally meticulous Miklos, a colleague and a hard-nosed critic (even of our own scientific work) is a focused, profoundly educated cell biologist. We read Bialy with scepticism but with the open-mindedness mandated by the severity of criticism both Bialy's book and Miklos' review provoked. Demand for evidence and criticism are intrinsic to the scientific enterprise.

Bialy's message in his hotly contested book Oncogenes, aneuploidy, and AIDS. A scientific life & times of Peter H. Duesberg is of crucial importance to everyone with an interest in the science that should underlie the practice of medicine. "Oncogenes" are defined as "cancer-causing genes", "aneuploidy" refers to any anomalous number and arrangement of chromosomes in a nucleated (plant, animal, protist or fungal) cell. AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) refers to an illness, a constellation of opportunistic infections and pathologies in a patient with diminished capacity for production of the repertoire of antibodies typical of healthy people. In 1984 a virus now named the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was announced to be the cause of AIDS. Duesberg disagrees. Duesberg's accessible, comprehensive and scientific book, Inventing the AIDS Virus that explains why is more an epiphenomenon of the controversy than its cause. Bialy defends Peter Duesberg.

Duesberg's real sin, as Bialy reports, was his review paper in the most prestigious scientific journal in the United States, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) that questioned the data and interpretations claimed to prove that. Duesberg found a troubling lack of evidence and a number of glaring anomalies in the body of literature.

Duesberg's paper caused such an uproar in the medical research community that it led to rewriting of the rules for submission by members of their own scientific articles for the PNAS. His questions are still valid. Lives are at stake. We find the paucity of evidence published in standard peer-reviewed primary scientific journals that leads to the conclusion that "HIV causes AIDS" appalling. No amount of moralizing censorship, rhetorical tricks, consensus of opinion, pulling rank, obfuscation, ad hominem attacks or blustering newspaper editorials changes this fact. The conflation "HIV-AIDS" may be good marketing but is it science? No. Yet certainly the political and economic implications of the term "HIV-AIDS" are staggering. (See Harper's March 2006 article "Out of Control" by Celia Farber).

Peter Duesberg continues his splendid 35-year research career at the University of California at Berkeley where, since 1986 he has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences and hence, eligible to publish any of his own scientific work. Although his government research funds (like ours, on a far smaller scale) were cut from $350,000 per year to zero, he continues investigations into the cause of cancer with work on aneuploidy.

Harvey Bialy's book may be hard at times for readers with little or no background in this arcane science, but its riveting narrative documents the troubling censorship and punishment of a tenacious scientist seeking answers. Unjustifiably labelled "denialists",

"homophobes", "charlatans", or "Nazis", Bialy and Duesberg are foremost excellent scientists who follow David Bohm's adage "Science is the search for truth, whether we like it or not". It strains credulity to ascribe any other motivation to their stance.

"Cancer keeps more people alive than it kills" claimed a colleague who compared the ample federal budget for cancer research to that for "exobiology" i.e., all NASA's life sciences investigation except manned spaceflight. Bialy's "aneuploidy" in the title of his superb account of the state of life science funding refers to Duesberg's turn of attention to the concept that "genes cause cancer". Peculiar genes, touted to be responsive to other genes that reverse their action are called "oncogenes". (As "onco.." refers to tumors, oncology is the study of cancer.) The other genes, to which oncogenes are responsive are called tumor-suppressor genes. Voilá, the onco.. gene causes the tumor, add the suppressor gene and the tumor disappears. This sort of facile equivocal language added to the universally agreed upon fact: tumor cells are aneuploid with high frequency, led Duesberg to pursue not prizes, just scientific truths.

Cells, in their nuclei, in the bodies of animals and plants are "diploid". Nearly all of the billions of cells contain two sets of chromosomes. In humans the distinctive staining bodies, the chromosomes (made of protein and DNA) are present in pairs: 23 pairs to a total of 46 where one member of a pair is inherited from the mother and the other member from the father. Diploid here means "normal". When sperm are made in men's testes and eggs are produced in the ovaries of women the number of chromosomes per cell is halved such that the sex cells have only a single set. They are haploid, also normal. Fertilization (23+23=46) restores the number to the fertile egg that becomes the embryo. Aneuploidy refers to abnormalities, excursions from either haploidy or diploidy: 47 chromosomes, broken small extra chromosomes, etc. Cancer cells are aneuploid. Tumors form in the body at sites of chemical (nicotine, lungs) or mechanical (metal plates) irritation. The cells in those tumors tend to aneuploidy, all different kinds of aneuploidy that become more extreme as the tumor cells proliferate. Duesberg begins with these observations in his recent cancer research and ignores the kind of nonsense that Bialy exposes.

In Bialy's "Hoofbeats on the road to the prize" (chapter 2) Bialy quotes an article by R.A. Weinberg, "The action of oncogenes in the cytoplasm and nucleus that summarized years of work and cost enormous amounts of money:

"This review attempts to synthesize much of the currently available data on these issues. It is written with the belief that much of the information about oncogenes will eventually be understandable in terms of a small number of mechanisms and that the outlines of some of these are gradually becoming apparent." Science 230:770-776 (1985)

And Bialy, who supports Duesberg's contention that there is as little evidence for oncogenes as there is that HIV causes AIDS, comments: "Even for those who have raised equivocal language to new standards, the escape clause in this [Weinberg's] last sentence is truly extraordinary. With promises like these it is not surprising that twenty years later we are still waiting for the first biochemical pathway whose disruption by ...a [point or otherwise] mutated oncogene or genes is necessary, let alone sufficient, "for the crud to get its start"(Bialy, p. 47).

As both Bialy and Duesberg emphasize, let us see the research results of those who show that cancer is "caused by an oncogene"and that "AIDS is caused by the rapidly mutating HIV virus". Please point us to the published evidence.

Lynn Margulis and James MacAllister, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

After a glowing review full of praise in the pages of Nature/Biotechnology, this wonderful book has been shooting up the sales charts. Having read this book myself about three times, I can't say I recommend it for the casual reader, but anyone with a reasonbly good background in biology should have little trouble following it--and then wondering how the twin boondoggles of the oncogene hypothesis of carcinogenesis, or the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, came to be so lavishly funded without anyone stopping and asking hard questions like, "have we gone off in the wrong direction?"

What is most telling about books like this is the response of establishment "scientists" who choose name-calling (like "AIDS Denialist," a clearly anti-semitic reference to the Holocaust) and bluster as a response to cogent arguments and well-referenced criticism. One may see that in action in many reviews: never do they attack the substance, apparently because they cannot. And so they attack the messenger, and anyone who would dare associate with the messenger. Which is almost as informative as this book itself is.

Two Nobel laureate biologists, and quite a few other world-famous scientists, have endorsed this book. That's all you should need to know to realize that strange things are afoot, and that Peter Duesberg is a man whose name more people should know and respect.

With wit, grace, and a mastery of the literature, Bialy has penned what will no doubt serve as a model for future scientific biographies. It is to be hoped that his courage will also serve as a model, inspiring others to seek out and chronicle today's Galileos, the genuine scientists whose insights America's Corporate-Scientific Complex is so ruthless in suppressing. In challenging any reigning scientific dogma, the first question is always: "How could so many smart people be so wrong?" Both Bialy and his subject are rare examples of thinkers who can not only answer such questions but do so with exuberant and cheerful ease.

One thing this remarkable book makes clear is that AIDS is a scientific mess. There is no good science behind the "HIV is the cause of AIDS" ideology that now drives billions in spending around the world to combat illnesses of all kinds which are now labeled AIDS. And whether the medications prescribed are appropriate or whether they cause liver disease and death in themselves is a life or death matter for millions. Yet the scientific objections to HIV of the impeccably rigorous Peter Duesberg, repeated with ever greater force in peer reviewed journals over the years, have made no political headway. There have been twelve serious books, including Duesberg's, pointing to this vast scandal, and all have been blithely ignored by the establishment. Also ignored is his skewering of the fundamentals of oncogene research, the richly fashionable field Duesberg himself pioneered, then renounced.

If anything makes a difference in AIDS politics, though, this revelatory scientific biography of Duesberg will. Bialy is the founding scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology and he lays out the uncompromising scientific argument blow by blow as it was conducted in the journals. He also shows the reader what happened behind the scenes - how many extra fences Duesberg was forced to jump over to get his views reluctantly validated and published. Lethal political pressures were brought to bear. Bialy records that at his low point Duesberg, member of the National Academy, talked of as a Nobel candidate for his work in oncogenes, and recipient of the $350,000, 7 year, Outstanding Investigator Grant of the NIH to do whatever research he wished, was reduced at Berkeley to chairperson of the annual departmental picnic, sans NIH grant, sans graduate students, sans invitations, almost sans lab but for the intervention of a private donor.

This carpet bombing of Duesberg's career is the shocking underlying theme of this biography, but there is also major good news. Duesberg's reputation is rising from the ashes like a phoenix with his promising line of cancer research (aneuploidy) attracting the interest of distinguished colleagues from top institutes around the world including the NIH. Maybe this new respect will tip the balance in AIDS, too, and AIDS science will finally get the honest arbitration it deserves.

Any graduate student should rush to read this and see with newly opened, shocked eyes what is really going on in science politics, where even the editors of major journals shamefully join in allowing questionable science to make reputations and win huge government and commercial support. Permitting himself only rarely a little ironic wit, Bialy steadily raises outrage in the reader by precisely recording the politics and the science, both of them with an authority that few other commentators in this field can muster, since as editor of Nature Biotechnology he knows whereof he speaks.

But the potential of this rare record of pure science and backstage politics is far greater than a free education for innocents. If only Clinton, Gates, Holbrooke, Carter and Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia would read this powerful work before rushing to raise more hundreds of millions of dollars to grease the standard AIDS bandwagon that is rolling over the bodies of AIDS patients worldwide. Perhaps they might then stop arrogantly steamrollering and rejecting out of hand the advice of Thabo Mbeki, the South African president who demanded just such a review of the science, as Bialy reports, only to meet with political attacks as overwhelming as those that have stymied Duesberg.

Perhaps they might even stop the AIDS generals from continuing to mislead the world by insisting the science makes sense, as they evidently have for nearly twenty years. The truth about both AIDS and cancer research is quite different from the prevailing paradigms, Bialy's precise account makes clear, in what I am sure will become a science classic.

Bialy does for Duesberg what T.H. Huxley did for Darwin, by taking up the cudgels for a fellow scientist and his thinking. Employing deft characterizations and a mordant wit (to which he occasionally gives free rein with delightful effect), he provides an incisive understanding of the scientific and social issues behind cancer genetics and AIDS research. Written from the unique vantages of a longtime friend and colleague, and from within the hallowed precincts of the world's oldest continually published scientific periodical, Nature, the book gives a real "inside analysis" of biomedical science since the advent of the modern biotechnologies. The book is elegantly composed and has an overall sonata allegro form, with the first and last chapters developing the various themes of cancer genetics and the middle three featuring the story of HIV and its relationship to AIDS. The first person style, and the clear but rigorous scientific history that it relates, make it both accessible and enjoyable to the general reader. It is guaranteed to provoke a few smiles and many grimaces from the stalwarts of HIV and oncogene (cancer gene) theory.

Bialy is a molecular biologist who was involved in the genesis of biotechnology as the founding scientific editor of the most prominent journal in the field (Nature Biotechnology). His literary talent allows him to guide the reader through a gradual exposition of the scientific issues while telling the cautionary tale of Duesberg's courageous struggle to restore objectivity, fairness and intellectual integrity to cancer and AIDS research. It shows just how vulnerable the great tradition of hypothesis, experiment, proof, peer review and publication can be to manipulation by vested interests, media, and government institutions with public health party lines. When these close ranks they wield a formidable, monolithic power that can dictate the way science is allowed to proceed. Pit against this a scientist at the top of his field who commits the unforgivable 'sin' of challenging an orthodoxy he himself was critical in establishing, and the predictable outcome is marginalization, ridicule and out-of-hand dismissal. Duesberg suffered all of this. Yet he continued, in an amazingly dogged way as the reader learns, to apply the high standards of scientific proof that had made him so famous, feared and respected in the intellectual salad days of molecular biology. These are the elements of a classic heroic tale, but rather than portray Duesberg as a white knight, Bialy more interestingly and accurately doesn't portray him at all. Instead he presents the unadulterated thinking of this immensely reasonable, patient and persistent scientist, who is if anything an anti-hero. The plot, accordingly, is not that of an epic but of a dark mystery -- the central one, left unsolved and for the astonished reader to ponder, being "why?" The book reveals "how," "what" and "who" in a way that I found irresistible.

Whilst Peter Duesberg's rethinking of AIDS dogma has not as yet become even semi-respectable (although this book could help change that if enough people actually read it), the book's final chapters show how his two decades of criticism of qualitative oncogene theory led him to his now well-recognized quantitative aneuploidy (numerical chromosomal abnormalities) theory of cancer causation.

Every day I read the Times,

For news of AIDS and other crimes

But now I see that what I read

Is not the sparkling truth I need.

I'm stunned to learn the news they gather

May be, in part or whole, just blather.

Not the crystal spring I trusted,

My faith in Pulitzer's quite busted

Before this book I'd peace of mind

Now I know not where to find

The facts secure I seek to base

My love of God and human race

I must doubt the word of man

And find my moorings where I can

Oh dreaded task - give me a drink,

Clearly I must learn to think.

But having read this book I know

Where for better facts to go

Beware of reading Bialy through,

It will flip your whole world view.

Rule of thumb for the laymen out there of which I am one: always read the book you are told not to read. The first part of the book is indeed difficult to read as it is very technical and for the rest, well, I had to interupt my reading several times in order to collect my eye balls from the floor; the world of science will never look as mythical to me again. It is a world, exactly as the world I inhabit, within which a few censored uncorruptibles endlessly battle the very human politics of deciet, greed and fame. Thanks for the tip!

Dr. Bialy has written a cogent, easy-to-follow expose of the flaws, erroneous predictions, squashing of dissent, and endless fear-mongering that characterize what many now call the Church of AIDS Establishment.

Bialy shows why the dogmatists who cling to the infectious virus hypothesis go ballistic whenever their cherished religious beliefs are challenged or rebuked. There never has been and never will be an "AIDS" epidemic among heterosexuals in the USA, something that was accurately predicted 12 years by many researchers. Bialy's book make it easy to see why.

Beware the AIDS researchers and orthodox reviewers whose entire careers and academic standing are put to the test in Bialy's meticulous and compelling study.

I rate it one of the finest books on the scientific method, because it shows clearly how the defenders and true believers in the AIDS dogma must constantly deny their own history of mistakes, anti-science hysteria, embrace of toxic drugs, appallingly comical advice, and outright deceptions.