Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and Aids: A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg Book

The author is an unabashed friend of Peter Duesberg and makes no bones about it in this personalized account of some of what the transformation of classical molecular biology into biotechnology has wrought. Most people, even many molecular biologists, will either not know or remember that two of the great themes of modern medicine, AIDS and cancer genes, both directly derive from the pioneering work on retroviruses of Peter Duesberg and a handful of others in the 1970s. Thus Duesberg's more than two decade, ongoing theoretical and experimental critiques of the dominant etiological explanations in each of these fields comes from substantial scientific contributions over a highly distinguished professional career that not only placed him in the US National Academy of Sciences at the young age of 50 in 1986, but gave him his own archive at the U.C. Berkeley Bancroft library--an archive that provided much of the documentation for revelations about the extremely unscientific behavior of several of Duesberg's powerful scientific adversaries.

In tracing Duesberg's academic trials, tribulations and recent emerging triumphs, the author, an early PhD from the first department of molecular biology in the country at Berkeley, and the founding scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology, uses as guide posts the published papers of Duesberg from the earliest critical analysis of oncogenes in the pages of Nature in 1983 to very recent experimental demonstrations in the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) of quantitative, aneuploidy-based explanations of cancer's genetic roots. In between, the book follows the interruption of this classical scientific arc--in which one dominant paradigm begins to transform into a more useful and correct one--with the story of the iconoclastic professor's professionally self-destructive questioning of the other pillar of today's biotech driven molecular medicine that he unwittingly midwived--HIV and its relationship to AIDS etiology. The author interweaves fully documented and serious scientific history with often quite funny personal accounts to demonstrate how scientific theories develop and are shaped by historical circumstances.

Professor, Dept. of Bioengineering, University of Washington, Seattle - Gerald H. Pollack

"Bialy's book is not one you can easily put down. I found myself thoroughly engaged and deeply moved by the saga of Peter Duesberg - evolving from a founder of cancer molecular biology to a pariah reviled by his peers. It reminded me of Ignasz Semmelweis, the Hungarian physician working in a leading Viennese hospital, who had suggested before Pasteur that there might be a simple expedient to reducing mothers' post-childbirth mortality rate: doctors' hand washing. A curious observation was that the mortality rate was far higher in those wards directed by physicians compared to the wards directed by midwives. Semmelweis noted a clue: doctors began their morning rounds with autopsies on patients who had died the day prior; only after completion of the autopsies did the physicians examine the women in labor. Midwives were free of any such contaminating burden. Even after Semmelweis demonstrated that the mortality rate plummeted if the physicians washed and disinfected their hands before physically examining their patients, his colleagues were reluctant to accept his thesis, and the dead multiplied unnecessarily....

I invite you to read this fascinating book and decide for yourself whether Duesberg has a point. I took time from a busy schedule to see quickly how the saga would end, and came away enlightened by a rich body of information about issues of profound significance that cry out for resolution. The message is quite serious, but the presentation is buoyed by abundant humor and wit - a pleasure to read. This is one of those books that will inspire unending conversations with friends and colleagues. Rarely have I been as moved by a book as by this very scientific biography."