Document:Mullis reviews Bialy
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Amazon.com
26 August 2004
Why has Peter Duesberg, one of the smartest, imaginative, hard working, and honest biological scientists of the last fifty years, had such a rough time convincing other people and spreading his irrefutably superior ideas in the areas of cancer and AIDS? Why is Peter not incredibly successful and loved as an indefatigable thinker and keeper of the scientific faith? It is a mystery why this man is not a famous and well-funded director of an influential institute leading our young scientists.
Harvey Bialy has been around Peter and molecular biology for forty odd years, observing and collecting notes, and now he tells the intriguing story. I think it is important, because Peter is one in a million never to be repeated again.
His story, predicted by Jean-Paul Sartre when he pronounced somewhere that we all make our own hell out of the people around us, is told up-close and brilliantly by Bialy. It is about humans taking on a vast responsibility, with the usual suspects – money, glory, and stubbornness. Unfortunately only an insignificant fraction of them seem concerned with the mission of saving lives. Bialy tries to remember it all, with some of the raw edges chewed back by time as he wisely allows the unsavory characters to hoist on their own inelegant petards.
It is a well-told tale with the humor of a sympathetic observer, a humor that reminds me not a little of the same incorruptible humor of his protagonist, Peter Duesberg – head and shoulders above the competition in so many ways, but unable to pull it off. He seems to know that something has damned him to that space, but maintains nevertheless a vital resignation in that razor sharp cortex, which misrepresents nothing and would never in a fair hearing be called on to answer for misdeeds. We meet a lot of the contenders in this well researched and deeply considered book, their powers and their fallibilities – their own statements a most readable report.
I recommend it to anyone who cares to be entertained or educated in the details of how the science of cancer or AIDS has been done in this last half century. But it is far more than that. It is a window cracked not just on Peter's travails but on all of the science and sorcery since the invention of money. A long winter's tale.
© 2004 Amazon.com
