Commentary: Farewell to Peter Duesberg, a godfather of scientific disinformation
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It can hardly be disputed that science and medicine today are awash in disinformation.It’s why respected scientists get physically assaulted and hauled before partisan committees in Congress to be smeared.
It’s why childhood vaccine rates in some places are plummeting and measles is on the rampage across the country.Therefore, it behooves us to look at the origins of this outbreak of politically manipulated pseudoscience.Nature has given us a peg, with the death Jan.
13 of former UC Berkeley scientist Peter Duesberg, at 89.Peter Duesberg was an AIDS denialist.
He is the precursor to contemporary denialists like RFK Jr., who brought AIDS denialism into the 21st century.— Yale epidemiologist Gregg GonsalvesAt the dawn of research into what is now known as HIV/AIDS, Duesberg took the heterodox view that HIV was a harmless virus that had nothing to do with AIDS.“That virus is a pussycat,” he said.
He maintained that the cause of AIDS had to be found elsewhere, notably the lifestyles and drug habits of gay men.His claim motivated a phalanx of AIDS deniers, the forebears of the anti-vaccine militants today.“Duesberg was a pioneer of disinformation on infectious disease,” says John P.
Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College and the author of a devastating 1996 takedown in Nature of Duesberg’s claims.Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy.Duesberg’s embrace of a dangerously wrong hypothesis to the point that it destroyed his career is almost a Shakespearean narrative.
The German native built a career in the U.S.as a brilliant virologist with significant discoveries to his credit and long had been revered among his colleagues.
But that ended when he entered the HIV wars.By 1996, Richard Horton, then the editor of the Lancet, the...