Isolation after defunding - government attacks on dissident scientists

Eliyahu Tulshinski

May 5, 2022

Professors receive their salaries from their employers, of course. Right?

Universities as pass-throughs

While the Department of Defense and many other federal agencies fund scientific research, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) alone is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, doling out $46 billion to over 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions.

This research support goes beyond just paying for laboratory expenses and equipment purchases, which can be quite expensive. The NIH pays professors up to $203,700 in salary and an additional $50,925 in fringe benefits, plus travel expenses, on behalf of their universities. The universities are then free to supplement those salaries with additional funds.

Neutral government funding?

Unlike the funding of research by pharmaceutical companies, these funds are supposed to be distributed purely on the basis of the good of the populace, meaning that a researcher should be free to investigate an illness even if the research is not designed to lead to a profitable medication.

Thus, a virologist should be on equal footing with his competitors for grant funds even if he requests funding to research a non-contagious source of disease, such as recreational drug use.

As detailed by Frontline News in Destroying science by funding it, this is not the case. What's worse, defunding a professor’s salary and laboratory is far from the end of the story for dissident scientists.

Isolation

Discover Magazine describes the extent to which top virologist Peter Duesberg was “all but banished from science” for not toeing the government line.

Since the 1987 article on HIV, Duesberg has become a pariah among scientists. More than 20 of his grant proposals for government funding have been turned down. AIDS activists have denounced him in public protests and media campaigns. Friends, Gallo among them, have abandoned him.

His laboratory, once staffed by two secretaries and numerous graduate students and postdocs, is now occupied by only Duesberg himself and one graduate student — although undergraduates do circulate in and out. He has no secretary. His wife, who pinch-hits as an assistant, talks in a whisper about the pain of his exclusion from the rest of academia, social events, and a normal life. [Emphasis added].

Former outstanding reputation doesn’t help

One might expect a newcomer to the research world to fall victim to the establishment’s intimidation tactics, but not a world renowned scientist who served as a scholar-in-residence at the NIH laboratories and was one of the youngest scientists ever elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. The Duesberg case speaks otherwise, as Discover Magazine recounts:

On March 1, 1987, he published a paper in Cancer Research questioning the role of HIV in causing AIDS. The paper became the line in the sand, the demarcation between Duesberg the golden boy of biology — part of the team that first mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses, codiscoverer of the first viral cancer gene in 1970, clever critic — and Duesberg the demon.

For 23 years before the publication of that paper, Duesberg says, he never had an application for public funding of his research turned down. In 1986 … he was given a National Institutes of Health Outstanding Investigator Award, one of the most prestigious and coveted grants. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of HIV and a former friend of Duesberg’s, praised him in 1985 as a “man of extraordinary energy, unusual honesty, enormous sense of humor, and a rare critical sense.” He added, “This critical sense often makes us look twice, then a third time, at a conclusion many of us believed to be foregone.” [Emphases added].

Beyond silencing

Otherwise mild-mannered scientists known for choosing their words carefully, who might once have called Duesberg the Einstein of biology, now spew vitriol at him, making hurtful comments that he claims roll right off him. In a pointed reference to those who say the Holocaust never occurred, he and others who challenge the prevailing understanding that HIV is the cause of AIDS have been labeled “denialists” …

For the stances he has taken, Duesberg has faced such ferocious personal and professional attacks that in 1996 Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet and himself a critic of Duesberg, broke ranks and wrote in The New York Review of Books: “Duesberg deserves to be heard, and the ideological assassination that he has undergone will remain an embarrassing testament to the reactionary tendencies of modern science. Irrespective of one’s views about the validity of some of Duesberg’s arguments, one is forced to ask: At a time when fresh ideas and new paths of investigation are so desperately being sought, how can the AIDS community afford not to fund Duesberg’s research?” [Emphases added].

Cover up

How did public health officials keep Duesberg's findings from the public? Please visit for the continuation of our AIDS series as we explore the cover up as well as:

What do coronavirus and HIV have in common?
What do the COVID vaccines and the HIV treatment have in common?
How many times have public health officials mistakenly blamed a virus or bacteria for a disease?
Who’s censoring Kennedy’s expose The Real Anthony Fauci?
Was AIDS a trial run for COVID?

Previous articles from our AIDS series: