Peter H. Duesberg, PhD

In Celia Farber’s 2023 re-release of her book Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS, originally published (and immediately sabotaged) in 2006, she gave pride of place—Chapter One—to her essay about her friend, Professor Peter Duesberg. The brilliant German-born molecular biologist passed away in California on January 13, about five weeks after his 89th birthday.

Farber and Duesberg became unexpected allies in the trenches of the ferocious and far-reaching informational war subtitled the “AIDS wars.” Duesberg, by dint of his incorruptible scientific integrity, became one of the war’s most egregious professional casualties. Farber tells the story of his merciless scientific persecution in the book chapter, fittingly titled “The Passion of Peter Duesberg.” (The chapter had its genesis in a landmark article she wrote in 2006 for Harper’s; she later republished her Duesberg essay in its original, expanded form at her Truth Barrier blog and in her book.)

The chapter recounts how Tony Fauci and his cronies issued a “Fatwah” against Duesberg—a tenured professor at UC Berkeley, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an NIH Outstanding Investigator—that “obliterated his scientific life,” including cutting off all federal funding overnight.

Duesberg’s “crimes” were his integrity and rigor, which threatened to derail the narratives supporting lucrative funding streams for AIDS and cancer research and deadly drugs. With respect to AIDS, Duesberg insisted—standing on firm scientific ground—that AIDS was a behavioral and not a contagious disease. As for cancer, as Nobel Prize-winner Kary Mullis pointed out, cancer researchers found it intolerable to be told they were “on the wrong track” and should be advancing the now-accepted aneuploidy hypothesis instead.

Duesberg himself did not hesitate to point out the hypocrisy of his “trust the science” critics and the fact that medical science had become a “totalitarian field”:

“They use all the power they have to eliminate all dissenting voices. And that is totally unscientific—totally.”

Farber, with the help of other longtime Duesberg friends and fans, has written and directed a short but moving video dedicated to Duesberg’s memory. It starts and ends with Duesberg’s delightful smile—but also manages to convey in a brief nine minutes why the scientist consistently inspired descriptors like “experimental genius,” “scholarly,” “classical,” “pure like gold,” and “a revelation.”

As Farber observes,

“None of the injustices or perversions of scientific conduct described in the [2006] article were ever set right in Peter Duesberg’s lifetime. But in the end, he won. It’s his name that glows, singularly.”

Mullis summed up matters even more succinctly: “We need a lot more Peters.”