Duesberg wins award

See Duesberg's presentation in PDF format above. His theories on AIDS in a nutshell in this good, easy to understand presentation.

Talk by Berkeley scientist, public spirited conqueror of doubt and confusion in HIV∫AIDS madness

Peter Duesberg wins first annual NAR "Hero of AIDS"award

The Duesberg presentation on World AIDS Day coincides happily with the decision of the editors, writers and researchers of New AIDS Review to award its first annual Hero of AIDS medal to the distinguished pioneering scientist.

Other scientists in the running for the award included Robert Gallo, the first man to entirely disprove his own fervent hope that HIV was the "probable cause of AIDS", as he and Margaret Heckler announced in 1994 at a press conference faithfully transmitted to the front page of the New York Times and thence worldwide by Lawrence K. Altman, the MD and CDC trainee on whom the Times has since depended for its unvarying support of this notion of HIV as "the virus that causes AIDS", even though as it turned out a week later Gallo's heralded papers in Science revealed that HIV was not the cause of AIDS after all, since he had been able to find it in only 26 out of 72 patients' blood samples.

Also considered was Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID at the NIH, who was the first to bring the attention of scientists to the fact that HIV not only did not kill T cells in a provable manner that anyone understood, either directly or indirectly, but actually provoked the proliferation of CD4 T cells, the very cells it was meant to kill directly or indirectly or by supernatural means, and this cause AIDS through immune dysfunction. The implication that the answer to AIDS might be infecting patients with more HIV, normally absent from their bodies in any detectable amount, which like any good leukemia virus (human T cell leukemia virus was Gallo's first name for it) would not only help to augment the CD4 count of patients, but also act as a vaccine to ensure that they were better defended against HIV by multiplying antibodies to it, so there will be even less HIV in patients than the normal vanishing amount.

However, neither of these scientists have had the courage of Peter Duesberg in bringing their conclusions to the attention of the public as well as of scientists, so we unanimously decided that Duesberg was the first and only choice for the first award of Hero of AIDS for his work over two decades demonstrating that Gallo was correct, and there is no chance in Hades that HIV is the cause of anything, let alone AIDS.

The following is the full rationale attached to the award, which will be presented to Duesberg in person when he is next in New York:
This Hero of AIDS Medal is hereby awarded to Peter Duesberg, Professor of Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, member of the National Academy, and pioneering researcher in cancer and in AIDS, who is undoubtedly one of the most stable and smart minds in the world, as the style and substance of his papers testify. There are very few men if any in science who could have taken on such a monster of misinformation and misapprehension as the HIV∫AIDS boondoggle and relentlessly exposed its lack of scientific and common sense across its whole range, which is exceptionally wide and diverse compared with any normal theoretical topic. We salute him for that in particular.

For this he sacrificed immense amounts of time, having to repeat again and again for the benefit of even willing listeners, truths which really should be obvious to most smart people, if they weren't crippled by the pressure exerted by the idea that virtually all the world's scientists and the entire host of humans that occupy this planet are united in an army that marches under this flag and will actively battle anyone who stands in their way.

This great scientist sacrificed work on cancer which might well have led by now to better palliatives if not a cure for that monstrous way of dying, which takes so many more human beings off this planet than the ills of AIDS. He did this in a spirit of service in the public good which is now largely anachronistic.

In return American science and American society have trounced him unmercifully in a manner which is shameful and should disgust everyone who bothers to find out what happened - not a penny from the NIH since, not a single grad student in his lab, where he is now alone except for undergraduate help. Significantly, the undergraduates rose and applauded his course this year, except for one or some who immediately sent round an anonymous email letter before the final exam warning against taking up his view on how genes and retroviruses work, evidently sponsored by other senior academics in terror of his debunking of the theory of oncogenes, which has been profitable in attracting funds for twenty or thirty years but not at all in results.

There is no more self demeaning stupidity in this affair than the urge so many smaller people to withhold from Duesberg his due, calling it hero worship from his fans etc instead of acknowledging greatness where it occurs without the approval (yet) of the Nobel committee, advised as they are by David Baltimore, Harold Varmus and other rip off artists of science who have finagled theirs for relatively doubtful if not useless work based on the death of one chicken a hundred years ago.

The correct course of action in an ideal world would be to simply give Duesberg his own research department at the NIH with $1 billion to spend on pursuing real science, with a large administrative staff to run his errands perhaps including Anthony Fauci to look up things on Pub Med for him, if someone could teach that stalwart spokesman of HIV∫AIDS lore how to do that, in which process he might stumble across the papers we have referred him to a year ago that reveal that a tad of Vitamin A will do the trick as far as Bird Flu is concerned, since that is what provably defeats the production of TNF, the lung suffocating killer in that case.

Yes, we at NAR admire and thoroughly approve of Duesberg's decency and scientific spirit in not selling out or giving in to maximum pressure against him and his family, and we have found his science and logic to be impeccable across a breathtakingly wide range of false claims forced on his attention by the miserable pack of self serving or dimwitted scientists, irresponsible officials, unprofessional reporters, robotic doctors, unaware health workers, and foolish patients who ignore or deride his advice.

We also admire Duesberg's cheerful and witty public persona and we admire him for remaining unaffected by all the disgraceful exhibitions of personal animosity and idiocy he has aroused by just doing his job as a thinking member of the scientific elite.

We at NAR say he is a heroic figure who will be a name noted in the history books of science and his critical work objecting to the grand pile of absurd science that is HIV∫AIDS will be studied at Harvard as exemplary (as it has been already in Walter Gilbert's graduate seminars) far into the future, unless independent scholarship in science goes down down the YouTubes along with traditional quality in other spheres.

Let's hope not, and it is in that hope that we hereby present Duesberg with The NAR Medal to a Hero of AIDS, Peter Duesberg.
This tribute as written above is a first draft and will be willingly edited if anyone writes in to NAR directly or in comments and objects to anything offensive, for which we apologise in advance.