A new drama documentary about the origins of AIDS.
The Seeds of Doom
Story of a controversial theory about the origin of AIDS
The author and performer of this one-man play, Christian Biasco, is a 33-year-old Italian-speaking Swiss man who is taking a DEA (which falls somewhere between a Masters and a PhD) in the History of Medicine at the University of Geneva. After first coming across the origins-of-AIDS controversy in 2001, he decided to choose this as his specialist topic, and as the subject of his dissertation.
He also decided to write a play on the subject, “The Seeds of Doom”, which he has performed in over 30 venues in Switzerland and northern Italy in the last three years, eliciting warm praise and considerable interest among those who have seen it. Christian refers to it as a “drama-documentary”, and whenever possible he takes questions from the audience after the performance.
The play has also been broadcast on Italian Internet TV, and a hybrid show (featuring parts of Christian’s play and parts of the MFP/Galafilm documentary, “The Origins of AIDS”) has been broadcast on TSE, the Swiss Italian national TV channel.
In the last few days, I have met Christian Biasco for the first time, and I am impressed by him. I think “The Seeds of Doom” is a skilful and well-researched exposition of the topic. It uses wit and intelligence to make its points, and takes a rather clever route through the protracted history of the debate. Although Christian does not come to any conclusions about which theory (bushmeat or OPV) is right, his play does highlight some of the absurdities of the former theory, and strengths of the latter.
Christian has very kindly made the English text of the play available to this web-site. A PDF version (which includes footnotes) can be accessed and downloaded using this link.
Also available on the same web-site are the Italian version of the script, and the video version, again in Italian. I strongly recommend that interested parties take the time to view at least part of the play. Even if you don’t understand Italian, you get a clear sense of the style of the production, and it’s possible to follow what is going on surprisingly well if you also use the English transcript.
To view the Italian version of the show in streaming, go to this page and click on the large black image of “L’Origine del Male” to download the appropriate file. The video is 430 MB, so it takes some time…
All this material is free with the Creative Commons license: “Attribution – Non Commercial – Share Alike”.
Christian Biasco can be contacted via his web-site.
Ed Hooper. October 9th, 2006.