prompted several complaints to Duesberg's institution, the University of California, Berkeley, which began a misconduct investigation of Duesberg in 2009. The investigation was dropped in 2010, with university officials finding "insufficient evidence ... to support a recommendation for disciplinary action." Early life Duesberg grew up during World War II, raised as a Catholic in Germany. He moved to the US in 1964 to work at the University of California, Berkeley, following completion of a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Frankfurt. Work Cancer In the 1970s, Duesberg won international acclaim for his groundbreaking work on cancer. Duesberg's early work on cancer included being the first to identify the oncogene v-src from the genome of Rous sarcoma virus, a chicken virus believed to trigger tumor growth. Duesberg disputes the importance of oncogenes and retroviruses in cancer. He supports the aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer that was first proposed in 1914 by Theodor Heinrich Boveri. Duesberg rejects the importance of mutations, oncogenes, and anti-oncogenes entirely. Duesberg along with other researchers, in a 1998 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported a mathematical correlation between chromosome number and the genetic instability of cancer cells, which they dubbed "the ploidy factor," confirming earlier research by other groups that demonstrated an association between degree of aneuploidy and metastasis. Although unwilling to concur with Duesberg in throwing out a role for cancer genes, many researchers do support exploration of alternative hypotheses. Research and debate on this subject is ongoing. In 2007, Scientific American published an article by Duesberg on his aneuploidy cancer theory. In an editorial explaining their decision to publish this article, the editors of Scientific American stated: "Thus, as wrong as Duesberg surely is about HIV, there is at least a chance that he is significantly right about cancer." AIDS In his 1996 book, Inventing the AIDS Virus, published by Regnery Publishing, a politically conservative book publisher based in Washington, D.C., and in numerous journal articles and letters to the editor, Duesberg asserts that HIV is harmless and that recreational and pharmaceutical drug use, especially of zidovudine (AZT, a drug used in the treatment of AIDS) are the causes of AIDS outside Africa (the so-called Duesberg hypothesis). He considers AIDS diseases as markers for drug use, e.g., use of poppers (alkyl nitrites) among some homosexuals, asserting a correlation between AIDS and recreational drug use. This correlation hypothesis has been disproven