Peter Duesberg has grown accustomed to all of the slights that come with a life in intellectual exile. The 72-year-old molecular biologist no longer expects an invitation to present his research at the big conferences or to meet any of the scientists who visit the University of California, Berkeley, where he works. But in an open lecture this past May, when a visiting scientist claimed that practically no one had investigated the role chromosome damage plays in cancer, it was a step too far. Duesberg himself has been hammering away at that very question for years. He’s published peer-reviewed papers on the topic, given a recent talk at the National Cancer Institute (his first there in 15 years), even hosted two small conferences of his own. So when the speaker solicited audience feedback, he jumped up immediately. “Excuse me,” he said into the microphone. “But I am nobody.”

He wasn’t always. In the past three decades, Duesberg has been described as a genius, a martyr, and a genocidal lunatic. In 1971, at the age of 33, he became the first scientist to identify a cancer-causing gene—a biological holy grail that secured his place among an elite group of the country’s top researchers. Tenure at Berkeley and a coveted spot in the National Academy of Sciences followed. So did rumours of a Nobel and millions in grant money from the National Cancer Institute.

Then in 1988, Duesberg broke ranks with his colleagues and postulated that the newly discovered human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was not the cause of AIDS. Rather, he declared, it was a harmless passenger virus, found by coincidence in patients whose illnesses stemmed from a constellation of other factors including malnutrition and substance abuse. For this, he was summarily cast out of Eden: Grant money evaporated. Graduate students disappeared. Nobel laureates stopped inviting him to dinner. Of course, he might have been forgiven, were it not for his consultation with Thabo Mbeki in 2000. When Duesberg advised the South African president not to bother with antiretroviral medication programmes (he still believes the drugs are more toxic than the virus), his adversaries say he condemned hundreds of thousands of the world’s most vulnerable people to death.

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