“HIV denialist Peter Duesberg is dead. Good,” screams the headline of a Bay Area newspaper article by “longtime health journalist” Bruce Mirken. “With influential lies about the cause of AIDS,” the subhead explains, “the quack left a trail of death and doubt that continues to this day.” So “goodbye, Peter Duesberg and good riddance. Rot in hell.” Readers might wonder what this supposed “quack” and “HIV denialist” was all about.

Peter Duesberg, who passed away last month at 89, was professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley. His most significant scientific contributions were the discovery of retroviral transforming genes or “viral oncogenes,” which are widespread in cancer. As Jeanne Lenzer explained in Discover Magazine, there’s more about the professor people should know.

In 1963, Duesberg earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Frankfurt and the next year arrived at UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow “hoping to unlock the secrets of cancer” and joined the hunt for retroviruses. In 1986, at age 49, Duesberg was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and given a National Institutes of Health Outstanding Investigator Award, “one of the most prestigious and coveted grants.” The man colleagues might have regarded as the “Einstein of biology,” would cross paths with Dr. Anthony Fauci, a government bureaucrat much in the news in recent years.

Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 and in 1968 took a cushy “yellow beret” job with the NIH. Fauci’s bio showed no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry but in 1984 the NIH made him head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, contended that Fauci “doesn’t understand electronic microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in,” and it showed.

Fauci then went on to contend that the sole cause of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) was HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus first discovered by Luc Montagnier. Duesberg knew that retroviruses don’t kill the host cells they infect, so he wondered, “what kind of virus, one day, out of nowhere, springs into action to destroy a person’s immune system with no provocation?”

Never had a retrovirus been shown to cause a human disease, or even a disease in animals. Nobel laureate Walter Gilbert found “no animal model for AIDS,” and Dr. Harvey Bialy, scientific editor of Biotechnology, could locate “no pathogenic relative” for the virus.

In March of 1987, Duesberg published a paper in Cancer Research questioning the role of HIV as the cause of AIDS. Instead of debating Duesberg, Fauci smeared the Berkeley scientist as an AIDS “denier,” and he soon gained company.

The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis included Kary Mullis and Harvard molecular biologist Charles Thomas. He noted Fauci’s claim that HIV could “infiltrate and kill” T-cells and “stimulate the response of other immune cells so that they eventually collapse from “overwork or confusion.” As Thomas explained, “no other virus is credited with such a dazzling repertoire of destructive skills.” HIV was “a simple retrovirus with a very simple genetic organization.”

Fauci’s cure for AIDS was AZT (azidothymidine), marketed as Zidovudine, a DNA chain terminator rejected for cancer treatment because of excessive cytotoxicity. Duesberg warned of the dangers in a foreword to John Lauritsen’s Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story. As Michaeal Fumento showed in The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, Fauci’s prediction that AIDS would ravage the general population was hopelessly wrong, but he remained at the helm of NIAID.

In 1996, Duesberg authored Inventing the AIDS Virus, a virtual post-grad course on virology, an investigation of AIDS controversy, and a meditation on the state of scientific research:

The modern biomedical research establishment differs radically from any previous scientific program in history. Driven by vast infusions of federal and commercial money, it has grown into an enormous and powerful bureaucracy that greatly amplifies its successes and mistakes all the while stifling dissent. Such a process can no longer be called science, which by definition depends on self-correction by internal challenge and debate.

As Lenzer noted, Duesberg’s funding began to disappear under Fauci, who controlled both AIDS policy and spending on medical research. Fauci also contrived to cancel Duesberg’s media appearances, and tailored policy to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), whose activists also harassed Duesberg. His laboratory once boasted two secretaries and jostled with postdocs, but by 2008 the only occupants were Duesberg and one graduate student. Jump ahead to 2020 and the COVID era.

Fauci funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. The NIAID boss contended that the COVID virus arose naturally in the wild—a matter of speculation, not science—and branded those who saw evidence of a lab origin “conspiracy theorists.” Instead of debating Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, Fauci branded him a “fringe epidemiologist,” and tried to ruin his career, as he had done to Duesberg.

Fauci pushed lockdowns, social distancing and recommended ineffective vaccines for children, the least vulnerable group. The NIAID boss claimed “I represent science,” confirming Mullis’s judgment that he never should have had the job in the first place.

Kary Mullis passed away in 2019 and his PCR test is now a staple of scientific research and criminal justice. Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier died in 2022, but not before blasting Fauci’s “decades of lies,” as exposed in The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Fauci stepped down in 2023 and in November 2024 authored “HIV and COVID-19: Shared Lessons From Two Pandemics.”

The man who claimed to represent science contended, “it has been firmly established that the origin of HIV is zoonotic,” but there’s room for reasonable doubt. Luc Montagnier never flagged in attributing a zoonotic origin to HIV that nobody could find. For all but the willfully blind, Fauci is working backwards, applying to AIDS the same bogus claim he made for COVID.

In his last day in office, Joe Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci without indicating any crime he committed. Now 85, Fauci has never been held accountable. Peter Duesberg, the man called an AIDS “denier” is now gone, but what about the “longtime health journalist” who cheered his death and told him to “rot in hell?”

In 1978 Bruce Mirken graduated from Pomona College with a degree in theatre, not exactly a background that makes him specially qualified to assess Duesberg’s discovery of viral oncogenes, a milestone in cancer research. Had professor Duesberg received the funding his work deserved, a cure for cancer might be closer at hand.

With the Trump administration now in charge at the NIH, it will be pushing replication even harder, “essentially democratization of who gets to decide what’s true and false in science” and as such “a second scientific revolution.” In those conditions, someone may step up to fill Peter Duesberg’s shoes.