I want to tell you about a man named Dr. Peter Duesberg. Dr. Peter Duesberg was an extraordinarily accomplished molecular biologist and part of the extended team that discovered the impact of oncogenes (genetic material that causes cancer) and retroviruses. He was elected into the National Academy of Sciences and was a tenured professor at UC Berkeley. His work on retroviruses and cancer was extended into research on HPV and cervical cancer, leading to some of his colleagues receiving Nobel prizes in chemistry.¹ 

And then something weird happened. For seemingly no reason at all, in the face of no new evidence or research, Dr. Duesberg did a complete 180 on his own research and began declaring that retroviruses could not cause cancer. He published long articles articulating that actually, all the work he had spent his career doing wasn’t true and that there was no relationship between these viruses, the oncogenes he discovered, and cancer. He threw in, near the end of one of the articles, that HIV was also a harmless carrier virus and was not the cause of AIDS. People in the scientific community were understandably alarmed and went and double and triple checked, looked at every inconsistency or gap he pointed out, and found that according to all available evidence, he was actually just right the first time, that retroviruses lead to the creation of oncogenes that lead to cancer, and that HIV worked in a similar way to lead to the on-set of AIDS.² 

The even more solid evidence was in the treatment, particularly in AIDS and HPV prevention. if AIDS wasn’t caused by a virus, or the HIV virus in particular, then the antivirals wouldn’t work. But they did, and once they were more finely honed in the early 21st century, they worked extremely well. People can be born with HIV and go on to live relatively normal lives with average lifespans, an unthinkable level of progress from the devastation wrought by AIDS just 40 years ago. 

So why, why, did Dr. Duesberg say all of this?

The hint comes from this introduction given by his then-friend Nobel laureate Dr. Richard Gallo, where Gallo described him as  “a man of extraordinary energy, unusual honesty, enormous sense of humor, and a rare critical sense.” Gallo continued, “This critical sense often makes us look twice than a third time at a conclusion and many of us believe to be foregone. However, his critiques are sometimes a major problem for the casual observer. When is he truly debating? When is he only being the devil’s advocate? When is he being the devil himself? Peter, it is hard for us to tell when you are using your machine gun or your slingshot or simply exercising your vocal cords.”³

Peter Duesberg was famously contrarian, with everyone and everything. There is a serious line of belief in the scientific community that Duesberg’s rejection of his own work came not from a beleif that he had actually been wrong, but from being too right. Before any of this happened, he was known to be a person that challenged every belief, every assumption, and poked holes in every set answer. In general, this is a great attribute in a scientist, and if he had continued working in almost any other field of science, he might have had a great full career. But some have postulated that it was precisely because he came up with a solution that no one would fight him on, that he turned his own “machine gun” on it, and ruined his legacy in the process. ⁴

I have spent a lot of time writing about contrarians in this blog because I think they matter, and also because sometimes I work with them. I think most of us in ministry spend some portion of our work haunted by people who seem just determined to not approve of anything we do. I think often about how contrarians can be useful to a leader, or to a project if deployed properly, but this week was the first time I thought about how a contrarian can be useful (or destructive) to themselves. 

Duesberg may have no clearer idea why he torpedoed his career than we do. He may wish he could have just been happy, could have just accepted things as good enough because they were good enough. He might have been as frustrated as everyone else was as he set fire to bridge after bridge in his own world. I have friends who have lost jobs due to their contrarianness, and I’ll be honest that I have set fire to more than one bridge under my own feet, that anger and disillusionment and a profound sense that things are not as they should be has led me to push too hard, too far, too fast and cause damage in my wake. 

So what can we learn? The story of Duesberg is one that is profoundly tragic. We can’t prove why Duesberg changed his mind. His argument that everything he had proven was actually wrong (with no evidence to suggest that was true) remained stalwart and unchanged until the day he died. This isn’t just the tragedy of one scientist ruining their legacy, Duesberg was an evangelist about his beliefs around AIDS, and told people to stop taking their antivirals, leading to the documented deaths of people who trusted him. 

But I wonder if we can have a different ending. If, when we find in our inboxes, or in ourselves, a compulsive no, a desire to fight before we even have an opponent, we can respond with more grace. I wonder what Peter Duesberg would have needed to accept that he had done something profoundly good for the world. I wonder what self-rejection, or inner critic stopped him from doing that. 

Of course his name was Peter. Peter who pulled a sword on the guards, who denied Jesus, who fought and struggled and climbed out of the boat and never managed to settle into the background of the story, who always had something to say. It is Peter who Jesus calls the rock, it is Peter who Jesus calls to feed his sheep. Jesus meets Peter’s rage with gentleness, his shame with grace, his self-destruction with love. 

We aren’t Jesus, but we can try. If God can love those Peters, if God can love the parts in all of us that carry around lit matches, just looking for something to burn, then hopefully we can learn to love them a little more too. 

1. Most of this is pulled from this podcast, but I fact-checked it, and added some links below. ↩︎
2. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7992043 ↩︎
3. https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/public/book/impure-science-aids-activism-and-the-politics-of-knowledge.html ↩︎
4. https://books.google.com/books?id=_mtDBCDwxugC&pg=PA25#v=onepage&q&f=false ↩︎