Product Description

The author is an unabashed friend of Peter Duesberg and makes no bones about it in this personalized account of some of what the transformation of classical molecular biology into biotechnology has wrought. Most people, even many molecular biologists, will either not know or remember that two of the great themes of modern medicine, AIDS and cancer genes, both directly derive from the pioneering work on retroviruses of Peter Duesberg and a handful of others in the 1970s. Thus Duesberg's more than two decade, ongoing theoretical and experimental critiques of the dominant etiological explanations in each of these fields comes from substantial scientific contributions over a highly distinguished professional career that not only placed him in the US National Academy of Sciences at the young age of 50 in 1986, but gave him his own archive at the U.C. Berkeley Bancroft library--an archive that provided much of the documentation for revelations about the extremely unscientific behavior of several of Duesberg's powerful scientific adversaries. In tracing Duesberg's academic trials, tribulations and recent emerging triumphs, the author, an early PhD from the first department of molecular biology in the country at Berkeley, and the founding scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology, uses as guide posts the published papers of Duesberg from the earliest critical analysis of oncogenes in the pages of Nature in 1983 to very recent experimental demonstrations in the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) of quantitative, aneuploidy-based explanations of cancer's genetic roots. In between, the book follows the interruption of this classical scientific arc--in which one dominant paradigm begins to transform into a more useful and correct one--with the story of the iconoclastic professor's professionally self-destructive questioning of the other pillar of today's biotech driven molecular medicine that he unwittingly midwived--HIV and its relationship to AIDS etiology. The author interweaves fully documented and serious scientific history with often quite funny personal accounts to demonstrate how scientific theories develop and are shaped by historical circumstances.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #842541 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-01
• Released on: 2004-07-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 328 pages

Review
A well-told tale with the incorruptible humor of its protagonist - head and shoulders above the competition. -- Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1993

Bialy weaves the science with personal and historical reflections to produce an appealing text comprehensible to even a nonspecialist reader. -- Nature Biotechnology, July, 2004

Review
"Bialy weaves the science with personal and historical reflections to produce an appealing text comprehensible to even a nonspecialist reader."
-Nature Biotechnology, July 2004

"A well-told tale with the incorruptible humor of its protagonist - head and shoulders above the competition."
Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1993

"...one of my favorite books...Though centered on one man, it speaks to issues of power in the scientific establishment that will outlive Bialy and his hero. ...Bialy fills his book with direct quotes, allowing a number of the unsavory characters in this story to hoist themselves by their own inelegant petards. In the courage of both scientist and author, I see greatness."
—Kary B. Mullis, Nobel laureate, in Discover Magazine, November 2006

About the Author
Harvey Bialy is a resident scholar at the Insitute of Biotechnology of the Autonomous National University of Mexico and formerly a postdoctoral-fellow of the Damon Runyon Foundation for Cancer Research. He is also the founding scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology and a member of South Africa's Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel.

Customer Reviews

A well-told tale with the humor of his protagonist
Oncogenes, Aneuploidy and AIDS, A Scientific Life and Times of Peter H. Duesberg

by Harvey Bialy

reviewed by Kary Mullis

Why has Peter Duesberg, one of the smartest, imaginative, hard working, and honest biological scientists of the last fifty years, had such a rough time convincing other people and spreading his irrefutably superior ideas in the areas of cancer and AIDS? Why is Peter not incredibly successful and loved as an indefatigable thinker and keeper of the scientific faith? It is a mystery why this man is not a famous and well-funded director of an influential institute leading our young scientists.

Harvey Bialy has been around Peter and molecular biology for forty odd years, observing and collecting notes, and now he tells the intriguing story. I think it is important, because Peter is one in a million never to be repeated again.

His story, predicted by Jean-Paul Sartre when he pronounced somewhere that we all make our own hell out of the people around us, is told up-close and brilliantly by Bialy.
It is about humans taking on a vast responsibility, with the usual suspects - money, glory, and stubbornness. Unfortunately only an insignificant fraction of them seem concerned with the mission of saving lives. Bialy tries to remember it all, with some of the raw edges chewed back by time as he wisely allows the unsavory characters to hoist on their own inelegant petards.

It is a well-told tale with the humor of a sympathetic observer, a humor that reminds me not a little of the same incorruptible humor of his protagonist, Peter Duesberg - head and shoulders above the competition in so many ways, but unable to pull it off. He seems to know that something has damned him to that space, but maintains nevertheless a vital resignation in that razor sharp cortex, which misrepresents nothing and would never in a fair hearing be called on to answer for misdeeds. We meet a lot of the contenders in this well researched and deeply considered book, their powers and their fallibilities - their own statements a most readable report.

I recommend it to anyone who cares to be entertained or educated in the details of how the science of cancer or AIDS has been done in this last half century. But it is far more than that. It is a window cracked not just on Peter's travails but on all of the science and sorcery since the invention of money. A long winter's tale.

More to Duesberg than AIDS
Many of the recent reviews posted on this page have been criticisms written by people who show no evidence of actually having read this book, but rather feel compelled to attack the book for the mere fact that it reports Duesberg's controversial (but compelling) views on HIV and AIDS.

Although some of the book's devastating - and fascinating - moments do indeed come when Bialy is exposing some of the more distasteful tactics behind what is surely the most politicized medical issue in history, by focusing on AIDS, many reviews will likely draw attention to a book that is equally important for what it reveals regarding the politics, and the science, of cancer research.

Beginning with Peter Duesberg's unwelcome criticisms of the single gene mutation theory of carcinogenesis and leaving the reader with an introduction to the current theory of aneuploidy on which Duesberg now focuses his attention, Bialy weaves a tale of the man and his mission, which is simply to find out truth. Would that so many scientists have similar motives.

Bialy does his readers the service of never insulting their intelligence, so be warned that this book does get technical at times, but it's worth the effort. Unexpectedly, it's also quite funny and had me laughing aloud at times.

Riveting narrative documents the troubling censorship and punishment of a tenacious scientist seeking answers

The embroilment of Harvey Bialy and Peter Duesberg in controversy came to our attention when we read George Miklos' glowing review of Bialy's book. Mentally meticulous Miklos, a colleague and a hard-nosed critic (even of our own scientific work) is a focused, profoundly educated cell biologist. We read Bialy with scepticism but with the open-mindedness mandated by the severity of criticism both Bialy's book and Miklos' review provoked. Demand for evidence and criticism are intrinsic to the scientific enterprise.

Bialy's message in his hotly contested book Oncogenes, aneuploidy, and AIDS. A scientific life & times of Peter H. Duesberg is of crucial importance to everyone with an interest in the science that should underlie the practice of medicine. "Oncogenes" are defined as "cancer-causing genes", "aneuploidy" refers to any anomalous number and arrangement of chromosomes in a nucleated (plant, animal, protist or fungal) cell. AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) refers to an illness, a constellation of opportunistic infections and pathologies in a patient with diminished capacity for production of the repertoire of antibodies typical of healthy people. In 1984 a virus now named the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was announced to be the cause of AIDS. Duesberg disagrees. Duesberg's accessible, comprehensive and scientific book, Inventing the AIDS Virus that explains why is more an epiphenomenon of the controversy than its cause. Bialy defends Peter Duesberg.

Duesberg's real sin, as Bialy reports, was his review paper in the most prestigious scientific journal in the United States, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) that questioned the data and interpretations claimed to prove that. Duesberg found a troubling lack of evidence and a number of glaring anomalies in the body of literature.

Duesberg's paper caused such an uproar in the medical research community that it led to rewriting of the rules for submission by members of their own scientific articles for the PNAS. His questions are still valid. Lives are at stake. We find the paucity of evidence published in standard peer-reviewed primary scientific journals that leads to the conclusion that "HIV causes AIDS" appalling. No amount of moralizing censorship, rhetorical tricks, consensus of opinion, pulling rank, obfuscation, ad hominem attacks or blustering newspaper editorials changes this fact. The conflation "HIV-AIDS" may be good marketing but is it science? No. Yet certainly the political and economic implications of the term "HIV-AIDS" are staggering. (See Harper's March 2006 article "Out of Control" by Celia Farber).

Peter Duesberg continues his splendid 35-year research career at the University of California at Berkeley where, since 1986 he has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences and hence, eligible to publish any of his own scientific work. Although his government research funds (like ours, on a far smaller scale) were cut from $350,000 per year to zero, he continues investigations into the cause of cancer with work on aneuploidy.

Harvey Bialy's book may be hard at times for readers with little or no background in this arcane science, but its riveting narrative documents the troubling censorship and punishment of a tenacious scientist seeking answers. Unjustifiably labelled "denialists",
"homophobes", "charlatans", or "Nazis", Bialy and Duesberg are foremost excellent scientists who follow David Bohm's adage "Science is the search for truth, whether we like it or not". It strains credulity to ascribe any other motivation to their stance.

"Cancer keeps more people alive than it kills" claimed a colleague who compared the ample federal budget for cancer research to that for "exobiology" i.e., all NASA's life sciences investigation except manned spaceflight. Bialy's "aneuploidy" in the title of his superb account of the state of life science funding refers to Duesberg's turn of attention to the concept that "genes cause cancer". Peculiar genes, touted to be responsive to other genes that reverse their action are called "oncogenes". (As "onco.." refers to tumors, oncology is the study of cancer.) The other genes, to which oncogenes are responsive are called tumor-suppressor genes. Voilá, the onco.. gene causes the tumor, add the suppressor gene and the tumor disappears. This sort of facile equivocal language added to the universally agreed upon fact: tumor cells are aneuploid with high frequency, led Duesberg to pursue not prizes, just scientific truths.

Cells, in their nuclei, in the bodies of animals and plants are "diploid". Nearly all of the billions of cells contain two sets of chromosomes. In humans the distinctive staining bodies, the chromosomes (made of protein and DNA) are present in pairs: 23 pairs to a total of 46 where one member of a pair is inherited from the mother and the other member from the father. Diploid here means "normal". When sperm are made in men's testes and eggs are produced in the ovaries of women the number of chromosomes per cell is halved such that the sex cells have only a single set. They are haploid, also normal. Fertilization (23+23=46) restores the number to the fertile egg that becomes the embryo. Aneuploidy refers to abnormalities, excursions from either haploidy or diploidy: 47 chromosomes, broken small extra chromosomes, etc. Cancer cells are aneuploid. Tumors form in the body at sites of chemical (nicotine, lungs) or mechanical (metal plates) irritation. The cells in those tumors tend to aneuploidy, all different kinds of aneuploidy that become more extreme as the tumor cells proliferate. Duesberg begins with these observations in his recent cancer research and ignores the kind of nonsense that Bialy exposes.

In Bialy's "Hoofbeats on the road to the prize" (chapter 2) Bialy quotes an article by R.A. Weinberg, "The action of oncogenes in the cytoplasm and nucleus that summarized years of work and cost enormous amounts of money:

"This review attempts to synthesize much of the currently available data on these issues. It is written with the belief that much of the information about oncogenes will eventually be understandable in terms of a small number of mechanisms and that the outlines of some of these are gradually becoming apparent." Science 230:770-776 (1985)

And Bialy, who supports Duesberg's contention that there is as little evidence for oncogenes as there is that HIV causes AIDS, comments: "Even for those who have raised equivocal language to new standards, the escape clause in this [Weinberg's] last sentence is truly extraordinary. With promises like these it is not surprising that twenty years later we are still waiting for the first biochemical pathway whose disruption by ...a [point or otherwise] mutated oncogene or genes is necessary, let alone sufficient, "for the crud to get its start"(Bialy, p. 47).

As both Bialy and Duesberg emphasize, let us see the research results of those who show that cancer is "caused by an oncogene"and that "AIDS is caused by the rapidly mutating HIV virus". Please point us to the published evidence.

Lynn Margulis and James MacAllister, University of Massachusetts-Amherst