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I HAVE LEFT THE MOST DRAMATIC PART to the end. The man who rediscovered the old work on chromosomes and cancer and has drawn attention to it ever since, supported by investigations of his own, is none other than Peter Duesberg of U.C. Berkeley. He was already in the dog house at NIH for saying that AIDS is not an infectious disease and that HIV is harmless. All his grants were cut off in retribution. But as a member of the National Academy of Sciences he could still publish in respectable journals. So for the last seven years he has been drawing attention to the cancer matter. The NIH is pursuing the wrong theory, he says. Talk about persona non grata! No more grants for him! (And he has not received any.)

A researcher at the University of Washington who became controversial at NIH in an unrelated field warned Duesberg that "in the present system of NIH grants, there is no way to succeed." No matter how much they prate in public about thinking outside the box and rewarding "high-risk" proposals, "the reviewers are the same and their self-interest is the same." In the cancer field, grant proposals are reviewed by, and won by, proponents of the gene mutation theory.

Wayt Gibbs published a good article about Duesberg's cancer findings in the Scientific American (July 2003). And this response is beginning to emerge in journals like Science: Er, well, there's nothing new here.… We have always known that aneuploidy is important in cancer. (Yes, but it was forgotten and then buried beneath the paper mountains of new research.) There is a quiet search for a "political" compromise: Can't we say that both gene mutation and aneuploidy "play a role" in the genetics of cancer?

A leading cancer researcher, Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins, told me some time back that "at least 90 percent of human cancers are aneuploid." More recently, his lab reported that aneuploidy "is consistently shown in virtually all cancers." A few years ago, Varmus from Sloan-Kettering did answer my e-mail query, writing: "Aneuploidy, and other manifestations of chromosomal instability are major manifestations of many cancers and many labs have been working on them." But, he added: "Any role they play will not diminish the crucial roles of mutant proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes."

But why not? Maybe aneuploidy is sufficient.

At the end of May, Duesberg was invited to speak at NIH. His topic: "Aneuploidy and Cancer: From Correlation to Causation." About 100 people showed up at Building 10. The Genetics branch of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is interested in aneuploidy, and well aware of the political sensitivities. But I am told that the director of the NCI, Andrew von Eschenbach, a political appointee, is not particularly interested in aneuploidy. He should be, though, because he is a cancer survivor himself and in speeches calls for "eliminating the suffering and death from cancer by 2015."

Duesberg challenged the audience to prove him wrong. He is looking for diploid cancer: a solid tumor with the correct complement of chromosomes. He is not much interested in the compromise solutions -- "a bit of both theories." Prove me wrong, he says. A woman in the audience did suggest cases of tumors that looked diploid, but Duesberg knew the literature here and immediately referred her to a more recent study showing that these tumors, on closer microscopic inspection, proved to be aneuploid.

Maybe in the end he will show that in order to achieve a real breakthrough, it's important not to be funded by the NIH. If so, we will all have learned a very expensive lesson.

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