Farewell to Peter Duesberg, a godfather of scientific disinformation

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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,” says Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist who was active in the AIDS research community starting in the 1990s. Because AIDS isn’t caused by a virus, Duesberg maintained, the antiviral drugs used as therapies were worse than the disease. The article was filled with with so many assertions about virus science that experienced virologists knew to be false that it “closed the book on him,” Moore told me. Duesberg kept making his argument well after evidence that the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, causes AIDS became incontestable.