Cancer Wars: An Outcast Researcher’s New Theory
Compact and white-haired at 75, Peter Duesberg has wide-set blue eyes magnified by corrective lenses as thick as his German accent. He is the picture of a courtly Old World scientist. But Duesberg is given to through-the-looking-glass scientific theories, the most recent of which, about the origins of cancer, could turn an accepted truth of molecular biology on its head. Viruses like hepatitis C don’t cause cancer, he says, and neither do collections of mutated genes — as nearly every other scientist believes. Instead, he argues, cancer arises when the number and appearance of a cell’s chromosomes become disrupted, leading to a tumor that has, in effect, evolved into a parasitic new species.
Some scientists think he could have a point. “There is something to what Peter Duesberg says,” says Mark David Vincent, a Canadian researcher and oncologist whose own unconventional theories about cancer overlap with Duesberg’s. But most others are skeptical. One reason may be that Duesberg is a pariah for his tenaciously held theory that HIV does not cause AIDS.
Duesberg works in a shabby laboratory on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. He runs his experiments virtually alone. He has no graduate students and little staff support, and virtually no research budget, apart from some limited private funding. Duesberg acknowledges that if he weren’t a tenured full professor, he probably would have been gone long ago.
Duesberg once was highly respected by his peers. After arriving at Berkeley in 1964 with a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Frankfurt, he, in short order, extracted the RNA of the Rous sarcoma virus, shown to cause tumors in chickens, and in 1970 co-discovered a viral gene that seemed to promote cancer. He also helped plot the retroviral genome and won election to the National Academy of Sciences. “For a while I was the blue-eyed boy,” he says. “Now I’m the traitor from within.”