[Letter to Colleagues from Peter Duesberg]

October 30, 1992

Dr. Lawrence Bogorad
Department of Cellular &
Developmental Biology
The Biological Laboratories
Harvard University
16 Divinity Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Dear Dr. Bogorad,
I apologize for having misquoted you in my letter of Sept. 14. You said in a letter
to Harry Rubin from Dec. 4, 1991 about my paper "The role of drugs in the origin of
AIDS", 1) "the problem does not appear to be the presence of a few correctable errors,
misquotes, etc. nor the lack of a few specific items of information" and then censored my
paper for "basic and pervasive problems" that you never identified. In a second letter to
Rubin of March 31, 1992 you referred to a "discussion of difference in point of view" as
reasons for rejection of my ms. I have paraphrased these quotes in my letter of August 14
and September 4th as "profound and pervasive difference in opinion".
You promised in your letter to me of September 28th that any paper from me to the
Proceedings would be handled in "an orderly and regular manner". If that is so, why were
all four reviews solicited by Dr. Rubin, that unanimously recommended publication of my
paper, as well as Rubin's written recommendation all suppressed by you? Rubin followed
exactly the "orderly and regular" procedures of the Proceedings in his attempt to
communicate my paper to' the Proceedings. Your response-perhaps executive editorial
privilege-was to ignore Rubin and his 4 reviewers and call on another 3 anonymous
reviewers of your choice. The censorship of the Rubin review looks like an arbitrary and
opinionated, rather than an orderly and regular decision to me.
Can you assure me that this would not happen again?
Sincerely yours,
Peter Duesberg
PD:jb
cc: Francis Zwanzig, PNAS
Frank Press, President of NAS
Gunther Stent, UC-Berkeley
Jim Watson, Cold Spring Harbor
Harry Rubin, UC-Berkeley
Walter Gilbert - Harvard