What is the research of Peter Duesberg in regard to cancer?

-Peter H. Duesberg, Ph.D. is a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He isolated the first cancer gene through his work on retroviruses in 1970, and mapped the genetic structure of these viruses. This, and his subsequent work in the same field, resulted in his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. He was also the recipient of a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institute of Health. In 1987 he claimed that HIV is not the cause of AIDS....

http://mcb.berkeley.edu/labs/duesberg/



Peter H. Duesberg (born December 2, 1936 in M眉nster, Germany) is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1970, Duesberg and Peter Vogt reported that a cancer-causing virus of birds had extra genetic material compared with non-cancer-causing viruses. At the age of 36, Duesberg was awarded tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, and at 49 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He received an Outstanding Investigator Grant (OIG) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1986, and from 1986 to 1987 was a Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the NIH laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland.



In the 1970s Duesberg won international acclaim for his groundbreaking work on cancer. Duesberg's early work on cancer included being the first to identify the oncogene v-src from the genome of Rous sarcoma virus, a chicken virus believed to trigger tumor growth. Duesberg disputes the importance of oncogenes and retroviruses in cancer. He supports the aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer that was first proposed in 1914 by Theodor Heinrich Boveri.



Duesberg rejects the importance of mutations, oncogenes, and anti-oncogenes entirely. Duesberg along with other researchers, in a 1998 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported a mathematical correlation between chromosome number and the genetic instability of cancer cells, which they dubbed "the ploidy factor," confirming earlier research by other groups that demonstrated an association between degree of aneuploidy and metastasis. Although unwilling to concur with Duesberg in throwing out a role for cancer genes, many researchers do support exploration of alternative hypotheses. Research and debate on this subject is ongoing. In 2007, Scientific American published an article by Duesberg on his aneuploidy cancer theory. In an editorial explaining their decision to publish this article, the editors of Scientific American stated: "Thus, as wrong as Duesberg surely is about HIV, there is at least a chance that he is significantly right about cancer."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesb鈥?/a>Peter H. Duesberg, Ph.D. is a professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He isolated the first cancer gene through his work on retroviruses in 1970, and mapped the genetic structure of these viruses. This, and his subsequent work in the same field, resulted in his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. He was also the recipient of a seven-year Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institute of Health. In 1987 he claimed that HIV is not the cause of AIDS....

http://mcb.berkeley.edu/labs/duesberg/



Peter H. Duesberg (born December 2, 1936 in M眉nster, Germany) is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1970, Duesberg and Peter Vogt reported that a cancer-causing virus of birds had extra genetic material compared with non-cancer-causing viruses. At the age of 36, Duesberg was awarded tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, and at 49 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He received an Outstanding Investigator Grant (OIG) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1986, and from 1986 to 1987 was a Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the NIH laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland.



In the 1970s Duesberg won international acclaim for his groundbreaking work on cancer. Duesberg's early work on cancer included being the first to identify the oncogene v-src from the genome of Rous sarcoma virus, a chicken virus believed to trigger tumor growth. Duesberg disputes the importance of oncogenes and retroviruses in cancer. He supports the aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer that was first proposed in 1914 by Theodor Heinrich Boveri.



Duesberg rejects the importance of mutations, oncogenes, and anti-oncogenes entirely. Duesberg along with other researchers, in a 1998 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported a mathematical correlation between chromosome number and the genetic instability of cancer cells, which they dubbed "the ploidy factor," confirming earlier research by other groups that demonstrated an association between degree of aneuploidy and metastasis. Although unwilling to concur with Duesberg in throwing out a role for cancer genes, many researchers do support exploration of alternative hypotheses. Research and debate on this subject is ongoing. In 2007, Scientific American published an article by Duesberg on his aneuploidy cancer theory. In an editorial explaining their decision to publish this article, the editors of Scientific American stated: "Thus, as wrong as Duesberg surely is about HIV, there is at least a chance that he is significantly right about cancer."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesb鈥?/a>This is what the old man is good for: niversity of California, Berkeley, professor of molecular and cell biology Peter Duesberg tells ScienceInsider that he is the subject of a misconduct investigation launched by the university. Duesberg has been a controversial figure for decades because of his vocal skepticism that HIV is the cause of AIDS. But he says this is the first time he has ever been investigated for misconduct, and ScienceInsider has learned that an AIDS activist may have helped initiate the investigation.



The charges apparently stem from a paper Duesberg and four colleagues published last summer in Medical Hypotheses that challenged the assertion that HIV has caused massive loss of life due to AIDS, and more specifically, disputed a 2008 study arguing that hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost in South Africa because of delays in distributing antiretroviral drugs (ARVs).





I certainly wouldn't use the words "significantly right" when it comes to his theory on cancer...



An extension on the aneuploidy....A century ago Boveri proposed cancer is caused by aneuploidy, because aneuploidy correlates with cancer and because it generates "pathological" phenotypes in sea urchins. But half a century later, when cancers were found to be non-clonal for aneuploidy, but clonal for somatic gene mutations, this hypothesis was abandoned. As a result aneuploidy is now generally viewed as a consequence, and mutated genes as a cause of cancer.