[opprobium]

You can read a lot about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duesberg_hypothesis

The mainstream consensus is the he was wildly wrong about HIV specifically, that HIV causes AIDS, and that his influence in South Africa to not deploy anti-viral medications killed hundreds of thousands of people before the policy was reversed.

Part of his hypothesis was that viruses in general, not just retroviruses, were not connected to cancers, the consensus view is that this is completely wrong. We have a very large body of evidence on many virus caused cancers now.

Even at the time he was arguing this, it was clear that the retrovirus HTLV was disease causing in humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_T-lymphotropic_virus

So, the two known human retroviruses both cause disease and retroviruses cause diseases in animals. Duesberg held on to and promoted this concept long after it should have been clear to him that there was zero empirical support for his idea.

[dekhn]

To me the most convincing bit that weakens his "hypothesis" is that people who received blood transfusions from HIV-contaminated blood. Many of those people showed none of the risk factors.

See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/world/europe/britain-cont... for some recent discussion of the scope and scale of HIV contamination.

[WhitneyLand]

Influenced the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?

Yet apparently to this day he draws over 200k/yr in salary from Berkeley. I believe they are not entirely funded by tuition/endowments which means California tax payers support him at least in part.

[dekhn]

He has tenure and hasn't done anything that would force the dean to fire him. He hasn't published in ~7 years.

IIUC he's been isolated- doesn't get any real funding from NIH, or from the university (beyond the standard salary), and doesn't have an active lab.

It would likely cost the university more in legal fees to get rid of him than keep him until he goes away.

[opprobium]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg#Consequences_of...

He was investigated but it was dropped as being protected by his academic freedom: https://www.science.org/content/article/berkeley-drops-probe...

He also, that I know of, still supports this position. To this day, you will find people getting into this particular conspiracy and rejecting treatment. It doesn't go well for them.

I do think that freedom of speech is important, and that many attempts to squash "misinformation" are misguided, but some speech has consequences. Personally I find Duesberg utterly reprehensible and morally culpable.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Cheers, I read the wikipedia article. It mentions Duesberg's claims without going into details about why it is wrong, or right.

[opprobium]

Perhaps I found the article clearer because of familiarity with the subject.

On the "retroviruses must be harmless" virology: He's a denier of viral involvement in cancers in general, not just that HIV must be harmless. He is way outside mainstream consensus on all kinds of things.

For instance, he argues that Kaposi sarcoma, a very common AIDS related cancer was caused by drug use and not opportunistic infection. It is now very well established that all KS, which also affects (typically older) HIV- people, is caused by HHV-8 infection.

He claims that Hep-B/C can't cause liver cancer.

He claims that HPV doesn't cause cervical cancer (https://www.academia.edu/31617237/What_if_HPV_does_NOT_cause...)

The core thing he does on all of these topics is just to ignore or deny anything that doesn't agree with him, eg: Hemophiliacs treated with tainted blood get AIDS, HIV viral load directly corresponds to disease progression which is clearly halted by dropping HIV load with treatment, the HPV vaccine demonstrably prevents cervical cancer, etc. He is far off in quack territory.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I think I understand that retroviruses can cause disease, contrary to what Peter Duesberg seems to be claiming. What I'm wondering about is his claim that they should be harmless in order to survive. Is that something commonly accepted? If so, should it cause surprise that they aren't harmless, and still surviving? Is there an interesting scientific question somewhere in there?

That's the question I couldn't answer by reading the wikipedia article. But I think thanks to some of the comments here my question is at least partly answered: at least some retroviruses -including HIV- seem to not kill off their host immediately, which I guess gives them time to reproduce and infect more hosts.