Controversial researcher Peter Duesberg has reportly become the subject of a misconduct investigation stemming from a paper that ignited a furious row over the future of the journal Medical Hypothesis.

Duesberg, a biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley who denies the link between HIV and AIDS, told ScienceInsider (the policy blog of Science magazine) that, “There is clearly some movement to get rid of any dissent against the HIV–AIDS hypothesis.”

Last July, Duesberg — characterised by Newsweek as the ‘World’s Most Reviled Genius’ — authored a paper arguing that “there is as yet no proof that HIV causes AIDS”. In it, he and four other researchers also disputed claims made by a 2008 study which argued that more than 330,000 South African AIDS-deaths were a result of not implementing a timely antiretroviral treatment program.

Duesberg’s paper was published in and subsequently withdrawn from Medical Hypotheses, a non-peer-reviewed journal that aims to be “a bridge between cutting-edge theory and the mainstream of medical and scientific communication”. The paper triggered a wider row over the journal, leading to an ongoing row between its editor and its publisher.

Duesberg’s university would neither confirm nor deny any investigation to Nature or ScienceInsider, but ScienceInsider says a letter to him signed by university vice provost Sheldon Zedeck dated 18 November says:

The specific allegations are that an article you submitted to Medical Hypotheses was investigated and then withdrawn by the publisher based on issues of credibility and false claims. The allegations also state that you failed to declare a relevant conflict of interest with regard to the commercial interests of your co-authors.

Bruce Charlton, the editor of Medical Hypotheses previously told Nature: “It has now been shown that no editor, no journal, is any longer free to publish dissenting views such as those of Duesberg. This is something new to science, indeed it is not science at all — as science was done in its golden age.” Read the full interview here.