Qualified outsiders and maverick insiders are very often right about the need to replace received wisdom in science and society. This site exists to back the best of them in their uphill assault on the massively entrenched edifice of resistance to and prejudice against reviewing, let alone revising, ruling ideas. 
In defense of Duesberg – scientist who adheres to classic standards
Disparaging Duesberg won’t get DAIDS defenders very far this time, we predict
The comment of Ed Tramont to the inclusion of Peter Duesberg ’s name and views in the Harpers article – “As soon as I saw it I knew it wouldn’t be taken seriously” or the equivalent – is widely shared by poorly informed blog commenters.
Since we know from experience that, on the contrary, anything Duesberg writes is always impeccably precise, factually accurate, and finely argued, we believe we should contradict this politically aimed, scientifically unjustifiable remark.
The kind of response to Duesberg’s critique he has gotten in the past and is getting now is worth noting because it is not only inappropriate to Duesberg but because it indicates the very weakness of the HIV case.
Rated by some as one of the finest intellects at work in science today, on the basis of his remarkably precise and comprehensive papers damning the selection of HIV as the cause of AIDS, and his recent work in cancer, Duesberg nonetheless has been successfully smeared by the political defenses mounted by those of his peers who are seriously invested in HIV, having based their entire career on it for twenty years.
Having dealt with Duesberg as a reporter for those two decades, having read all his papers, and having never found him anything but precisely accurate in his observations on HIV?AIDS or any other scientific topic, including especially cancer, and corrected only in very minor ways by peer reviewers in areas outside his core expertise, we have to agree with those who give him a top rating, and say his treatment has been shameful.
We’ve interviewed scores of other scientists at the top of their field over the years, and we can assure these Duesberg denialists, that is, those who deny Duesberg’s stature, that they are scorning an unusually powerful scientific intellect and analyst, clearly superior to his opponents in the HIV?AIDS matter.
This is easily evidenced by the quality of his papers eviscerating the rationale for HIV?AIDS from the Cancer Research and the Proceedings articles right up to the Journal of Biosciences paper in 2003. We are certain that no one of any intelligence can read these papers without appreciating that they are written by a major scientific mind. (A researcher of our acquaintance who has read Duesberg’s papers very closely says he is convinced that Dueberg is a “scientific genius.”)
But of course, the foot soldiers of HIV?AIDS will never read them. So let’s note that of all the graduate students at Harvard that Walter Gilbert made read these papers as examples of high grade paradigm challenge, not one decided to make a name for him or herself by writing a rebuttal.
This salient point is made by Harvey Bialy, in his book of 2004, “Aneuploidy, Oncogenes and AIDS: The Scientific Life and Times of Peter Duesberg”, a highly revealing account of the specious and egregious manoevering over the years by scientists, bureaucrats and editors in HIV?AIDS to evade the impact of Duesberg’s challenge as a professional threat by castrating him financially and in terms of platform.
Bialy, writing from the safe distance of a university appointment in Mexico, spares none of them in reporting such incidents as the notorious invitation to the opera, where a scientific player flew into San Francisco and invited Duesberg to the opera and drinks afterwards.
There he produced from his jacket pocket a document Duesberg was to sign repenting of his sins and renouncing his objections to HIV, whereupon he would be accepted back into the fold, and invitations extended once again, funding approved and publication of his papers accepted. Duesberg, though facing professional ruin, declined.
His recent progress in understanding cancer is also recognized as extremely important and promising by many senior scientists in that field, in spite of the fact that he demolished the intellectual foundation of their current fashion in cancer research in Cancer Research in 1987. (See his website Peter Duesberg on Cancer for the article in Scientific American which published a timeline of cancer research recognizing Duesberg’s contribution as seminal).
The essential theme of the Harpers piece by Celia Farber is the abandonment of scientific standards. Duesberg has never shown any sign of this weakness in anything he has written. He remains a classic scientist of the old school, subscribing without reserve to the very highest standards of logic and evidence.
It is a sad commentary on the general abandonment of those standards in the HIV?AIDS debate that he has to be defended against such politics.