That Peter Duesberg book changed a lot for me. Excellent book. I remember back in 2004 the ER MD I was working with told me to never mention Duesberg's name in front of him (like it was a dirty word or something). They considered him that toxic a threat to the mainstream story about AIDS--it was almost religious.
Indeed, Duesberg was then and still is toxic to the medical-research establishment—and not merely with regards to the AIDS orthodoxy. You might recall that almost as an aside, Duesberg managed to debunk a core component of their mythic edifice: the idea that peer review is essential to scientific knowledge. Duesberg pointed out that, on the contrary, peer review was nothing more than a process by which your competitors get to decide what you can sell. This is the sort of thing that, once seen, can't be forgotten. The notion that an advanced degree in one of the hard sciences magically makes its possessor less venal than a guy who has cornered the widget market and wants things to stay as they are has been sold to a gullible public for nigh on to two hundred years. Undermining the peer-review scam is a surefire way to gore the ox of virtually everyone in the biomedical establishment.
From the perspective of the establishment, especially the ever-expanding part of it linked to the government, worse still was Duesberg's very well founded explanation of why privately funded research was inherently better than "publicly" funded (i.e., government-funded) research. Privately funded research is goal oriented, and everyone hired to do it knows from the start what they have been hired for and what the consequences of success and failure are—viz., for the former, perhaps more research for more money; for the latter, nothing at all except a return to the status quo ante. Publicly funded research, however, is almost invariably open ended. It thus attracts people who seek a permanent sinecure, people who quickly see that the worst thing that can happen to a research project is to make a breakthrough of some sort. Duesberg's prime example was cancer research, a field in which he himself was a star of the first magnitude. He noted that a seemingly endless supply of public cash had been invested in pursuing a viral basis for cancer despite the fact that, already in the late 1980s, the result had been thirty-plus years of failure. He revealed that continued failure was to be expected in this and similar areas of research because, if the research ever came up with real answers,
the scientists involved would lose their extremely lucrative grants! So much for the establishment's high-mindedness.
The bottom line is that Duesberg revealed that the American medical-research establishment is a dogmatic secular religion and a false religion to boot. Small wonder, then, that its grand inquisitors wanted to stretch Duesberg on the rack and expunge his very name from human awareness.