Harvey Bialy



Harvey Bialy (born 1945, New York City) is an American molecular biologist and AIDS dissident. He was one of the original signatories to the letter establishing the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis, the editor of its first newsletter, and was a member of the controversial South African Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel convened by Thabo Mbeki in 2000.

Bialy was a resident scholar of the Institute of Biotechnology (IBT) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Cuernavaca between 1996 and 2006, where he also founded and directed the Virtual Library of Biotechnology for the Americas. At the beginning of 2007, he left both positions.

Bialy graduated first in his class from Bard College in 1966, and was awarded a Ph.D. in molecular biology in 1970 by the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the journal Nature Biotechnology (part of the Nature family of publications) as its scientific editor in 1984, and edited its peer-reviewed content from 1984–1996. He has coauthored significant papers in molecular genetics - among them the first to show that phage genes can subvert host functions.

Bialy was the co-recipient (with Prof. Stanley Falkow, Stanford University) of a grant from the Charles Merill Trust to study antibiotic resistant pathogens in Nigeria in 1978. He received a World Health Organization grant to study the epidemiology and genetics of antibiotic resistant enteric pathogens in Nigeria in 1982. He worked as a visiting researcher or research fellow at several universities in the United States, and Africa throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He was advisor to the Center for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering in Havana, Cuba from 1986–1996.

Bialy authored Oncogenes, Aneuploidy, and AIDS (ISBN 1556435312), a book about the scientific life of fellow molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, with special emphasis on Duesberg's aneuploidy theory of cancer and on the politics of modern science. A Spanish-language translation by Roberto P. Stock, a senior investigator at the IBT, was published by the UNAM Press in 2005 (ISBN 9703225993), and contains an introduction by the IBT's previous director.

He is also an artist and poet. Since May 2007, he has devoted his time to his art, of which an exposition "Telestics...The Art of the Ordinary" was presented 23-31 August 2007 at the Catedral de Cuernavaca. The painter Rafael Cauduro admired Bialy's work and spoke in its praise for several minutes at the inauguration ceremony, which was also attended by the Minister of Culture of the State of Morelos (see his website at bialystocker.net).