[Letter to Colleagues from Peter Duesberg]

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April 22, 1992
Dr. Peter Duesberg
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
c/o Stanley/Donner Administrative Services Unit
229 Stanley Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720
Dear Dr. Duesberg:
Following our discussion on the telephone, I went through your letter to Dr.
Harry Rubin again, looked at the manuscript itself again, etc.
We discussed the possibility of asking. my advisors to look at your manuscript
again together with your comments in the letter to Harry Rubin. I regret that
it is not feasible to ask them to look at your manuscript on an 'as if' basis.
That is, as if you had changed the paper. We can only respond to manuscripts as
submitted. In addition, I note that each of the seven points in your letter of
December 24-.addresses an action of mine. It does not seem useful to consult my
advisors about complaints you have against me.
None of the ten comments I have seen from advisors to Igor Dawid or to me over
a period of more than a year recommends publication of this paper in any of its
forms we have seen to date. Many of the commentators give examples of problems
that they see and often conclude, to quote only two, that "there are numerous
other examples of misinterpretation of data, selective use of information,
failure to quote data that doesn't fit the hypothesis etc." or "the present paper
is, I believe, totally lacking in cogency and contains a number of errors of fact
and of logic." Scientists who are experts in different aspects of AIDS have
found versions of your paper wanting, on one hand, for absence of information of
which you may be unaware of or which you have chosen to omit and, on the other
hand, "errors of fact and logic" etc. This was pointed out in my Dec. 4 letter
to Harry Rubin.
I thought that you would see from set after set of comments that we have
provided verbatim that there are serious objections to the unbalanced nature of
the work. It is for this reason that there seems to be little value in arguing
line-by-line and statement-by-statement through each version of your paper. I
must repeat the statement made in my letter to Harry Rubin that there are "basic