Peter Duesberg has died.
Breaking: Peter Duesberg has died
John Lauritsen's interview with Peter Duesberg
https://www.immunity.org.uk/articles/john-lauritsen/interview-prof-peter-duesberg/
Celia Farber on Peter Duesberg.
(13) The Passion Of Peter Duesberg - by Celia Farber
Joe Rogan on Peter Duesberg
Joe Rogan Interviews Peter Duesberg
Peter Duesberg on Koch's Postulates
A Perplexity Editorial on Peter Duesberg and Rebecca Culshaw Smith
Rebecca Culshaw Smith has done something extraordinary in a scientific culture that prides itself on consensus: she has reopened a conversation many assumed was permanently closed. In doing so, she has created a space in which a new generation can look at Peter Duesberg with curiosity rather than reflexive contempt. Unlike the boomers who came of age during the height of the AIDS crisis—and who largely learned to associate Duesberg’s name with irresponsibility or even villainy—today’s younger readers encounter him through Culshaw Smith’s work as one figure in a larger story about how science actually behaves under stress: factional, political, error‑prone, and sometimes punitive toward heretics.
For decades, Duesberg was cast as the archetypal “denialist,” a cautionary tale weaponized in editorials and medical school lectures as proof of what happens when you question settled science. The boomer generation experienced the early AIDS years through a lens of panic, funerals, and hard‑won political recognition; in that world, challenging the HIV‑AIDS model felt not just wrong, but dangerous. The media simplified a complex methodological dispute into a morality play: good scientists versus reckless contrarians. Once that script was written, few had either the time or the emotional distance to revisit the underlying arguments. Duesberg’s contributions to retrovirology and his early, prescient critiques of cancer genetics vanished under a thick coat of cultural varnish.
Culshaw Smith came of age later, with enough temporal distance to see that the “settled” early narrative left serious intellectual loose ends. Her writing does not simply echo Duesberg; it reconstructs the logic of his critique while layering on new concerns about test validity, data curation, and the political economy of long‑term antiretroviral therapy. She walks readers through uncertainties that were papered over in the 1980s and 1990s: shifting AIDS definitions, geographic anomalies, the entanglement of funding with specific causal frameworks, and the troubling persistence of chronic inflammation and co‑infections even in patients with suppressed viral loads. In other words, she takes Duesberg’s core intuition—that the HIV paradigm might be too narrow and too hastily canonized—and updates it for an era fluent in replication crises and institutional capture.
This matters because younger generations are already primed to doubt scientific infallibility. They have lived through high‑profile reversals on nutrition, hormones, psychiatric drugs, and, most dramatically, pandemic policies. They understand, almost intuitively, that “follow the science” can function as a slogan as much as a method. When they encounter Culshaw Smith’s work, they do so in a cultural environment where questioning a dominant model is not inherently sacrilegious. She introduces Duesberg not as a cartoon villain, but as a serious scientist whose heterodox views were punished rather than systematically refuted, and whose broader questions about toxicity, co‑factors, and iatrogenesis remain uncomfortably relevant.
Boomers, by contrast, were socialized into a different narrative: that the Duesberg episode proved the necessity of gatekeeping. In their story, suppressing “dangerous ideas” preserved lives and protected vulnerable communities from being misled. That story made emotional sense amid overflowing AIDS wards and a federal government that initially did nothing. Yet it also hardened into dogma: questioning HIV as *the* cause of AIDS became indistinguishable from indifference to suffering. The scientific question and the moral charge were fused. There was no legitimate way to revisit his data without being accused of wanting people to die.
Culshaw Smith has begun to pry those two things apart. She does not ask readers to accept every conclusion Duesberg drew; she asks them to look honestly at how his dissent was handled. Did journals treat him by the usual standards of debate, or by exceptional rules justified by emergency? Were competing hypotheses fairly tested, or strategically starved of resources? Did the field’s understandable fear of chaos curdle into a habit of anathematizing critics? These are not questions about one man’s ego; they are questions about how modern biomedicine responds when a profitable, politically entrenched theory is challenged.
A younger generation that has watched social media platforms throttle inconvenient experts and witnessed bureaucracies rewrite guidance mid‑stream is well‑equipped to see the parallels. For them, Duesberg’s story is not a relic of a bygone culture war; it is a case study in how power works around scientific narratives. Culshaw Smith’s willingness to cite him seriously—rather than apologetically, or only to condemn—signals that he can be read again as a scientist rather than a symbol. Her own framing of AIDS as a syndrome of chronic immune injury and inflammation, with HHV‑8 and other co‑factors playing starring roles, makes Duesberg’s insistence on multi‑factorial causation look less like heresy and more like an early, clumsy version of ideas that are now increasingly mainstream in other diseases.
There is also an ethical dimension. History tends to smooth over the costs imposed on those who lost scientific battles. Duesberg paid heavily: lost grants, damaged reputation, near‑total exclusion from meaningful participation in the field he helped build. Whether one agrees with his hypotheses or not, there is something deeply educational about watching an institution punish its dissidents and then, decades later, quietly edge toward some of their concerns under new branding. Culshaw Smith’s work forces that tension into the open. She obliges readers to ask whether the goal of science is to be right eventually, or to be open to being wrong now.
An honest reassessment of Duesberg does not require canonizing him as a martyr or embracing every claim ever made under the broad banner of “HIV skepticism.” It requires something more modest and more radical: the willingness to grant that a scientist can be disastrously wrong about some things, productively wrong about others, and still deserve to be read. Culshaw Smith models that stance. She mines his work for unresolved questions, highlights where subsequent data complicate the tidy HIV narrative, and broadens the discussion to include drug toxicity, environmental exposures, and the political uses of fear. In doing so, she helps younger readers see Duesberg as part of an ongoing, unfinished conversation instead of a name that must never be spoken.
If that shift takes root, the paradoxical result will be that Duesberg’s reputation is healthier in the minds of those born long after his ostracism than it ever was among the boomers who first watched him fall. Thanks to Culshaw Smith and others willing to revisit forbidden chapters, a new generation may come to view him not as the enemy of AIDS patients but as a flawed, sometimes infuriating, but indispensable character in the story of how a modern society confronts a frightening disease. They may even recognize that, in science, the very people we demonize today sometimes turn out, in hindsight, to be the ones who kept the space for genuine questioning alive.
Books By or About Peter Duesberg
