Author: Edward Hooper

Review of The Origins of AIDS by Jacques Pepin [C.U.P. 2011]

“The Origins of AIDS” by Jacques Pepin [Cambridge University Press], which came out in October 2011, has received a fair amount of attention in the press, almost all of which has been complimentary. I have a rather different take on the book.

I believe that the book is pleasantly and fluently written and is mostly well-researched. It contains a wealth of valuable information about how unsterilised needles and syringes may have helped spread HIV in Africa in the latter half of the twentieth century, in the early days after the origin of the pandemic, in other words after the ancestral simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) crossed from chimpanzees to humans.

Continue reading “Review of The Origins of AIDS by Jacques Pepin”

Review of Tinderbox by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin [Penguin USA; 2012]

This is powder puff reporting, as a ten-minute glance at the forward matter and the origins chapters (the Prologue and chapters 2 to 8 inclusive) quickly reveals. In the Acknowledgements, the authors thank several of the usual suspects, notably Beatrice Hahn and Michael Worobey, for “historical, cultural and epidemiological information” and “vital perspectives”. Perhaps it is not surprising that these are the very same scientists who are most feted (embarrassingly so, in the view of many) in the text of the
book.

This is the book that Worobey and Hahn themselves might have produced, were they writers.

Tinderbox doesn’t even bother with the OPV theory, other than to claim that it has been disproved. And even then they get it wrong. On page 66 it is stated that “Edward Hooper and others seeking to explain the growth of HIV after independence have pointed to the proliferation of mass inoculation campaigns in the final years of colonial rule”. But what I point to is a unique oral polio vaccination campaign that started the epidemic, not to colonial inoculation campaigns that boosted an already existing epidemic. As the authors of Tinderbox should know, oral vaccines are given by mouth and do not involve “inoculation”. It is others, such as Preston Marx, who favour the theory of contaminated needles providing a boost to the spread of HIV. By conflating these two theories, they show that they are either ignorant on a very basic level about what people like Marx and I are saying, or else that they are deliberately attempting to spread misinformation. Let us take the first, less sinister option. In that case this is a sloppy mistake,
of a type that typifies a sloppy book.

No arguments that challenge the bushmeat theory are examined. (This is in contrast to my own book, “The River”, in which I devoted an early chapter to examining different theories of origin, and explaining in some detail why most of them didn’t work.)

When it comes to dating the epidemic, the problem of recombination is not even mentioned, other than a strange reference to “what even scientists call, with a smirk, ‘virus sex’.” (Actually, I think that scientists sometimes refer to ‘viral sex’, but the sentence that follows suggests that the authors actually don’t realise that viral sex, or recombination, is different from mutation.)

Timberg and Halperin baldly state that the first chimp-to-human transfer of SIV occurred “two decades either side of 1900”, with the best bet being 1908. Note that 1908 is 13 years earlier than Pepin’s account, which (based on the same sources) proposes 1921 as the date of transfer. What is really striking is that the transfer date actually doesn’t seem to matter that much, as long as it’s before the OPV trials in the late 1950s.

As for the place: the authors swallow the Hahn and Worobey origins story whole, and baldly state that the first transfer of chimp SIV to humans took place in southern Cameroon. Our fearless reporters don’t actually twig that there is no hard evidence to support this.

They say that Bill Hamilton “gushed” praise for my work in his foreword to The River. They don’t point out that this very private man supported my work whole-heartedly from the first day we met (in 1993) to the last time we spoke (in January 2000, just before his second departure for the Congo, this time with Michael Worobey). By contrast, Worobey knew Bill Hamilton for less than six months, and spent just over 3 weeks with him in the Congo. During that time Worobey scratched his thumb in the jungle, but didn’t return to Kisangani to get it treated until the last moment. Worobey once told me in interview (slightly proudly, I thought) that the Kisangani doctors had informed him that he had been hours away from losing his whole hand (and perhaps his life) to gangrene. And shortly after that Bill caught cerebral malaria, an attack that must surely have weakened him substantially, and perhaps contributed to his final demise from a duodenal haemorrhage shortly after his return to the UK. If we are talking about “gushing”, then it is fair to point out that Timberg and Halperin describe this trip to the Congo in unmistakably gushing and heroic terms. In my opinion it sounds like a lousy expedition, one that demonstrated a lack of sound leadership and consistently poor judgement that endangered lives.

The first time I met Michael Worobey was while Bill was lying in a coma in University College Hospital in London, and within seconds his coolness made it quite clear that although Bill was dying, Worobey saw me as a rival for the great man’s affections. Two years later, although I found it hard to like Worobey, I did my level best to trust him. On three occasions I drove the 200 miles to and from Oxford to discuss the possibility of collaborating with him on a study of ancient tissue samples. That idea fell though because in order to facilitate his writing of a grant proposal, he wanted me to provide specific details that (as I had already warned him) I was not prepared to divulge at that stage. After that he failed to answer a series of several emails I sent him over a five-month period, and it became apparent that we would not be able to work together. For two years he had assured me that he had doubts about how AIDS had started, and that he could see clearly that the factor of recombination meant that attempts to date HIV phylogenetically ended up in chaos, as a “dog’s dinner” as he used to put it. But it was all just a front. In the end, Worobey turned out just as I had always feared he would. Shortly before Bill’s partner, the Italian science writer Luisa Bozzi, died in 2004, she told me that Worobey had been opposed to me and to the OPV theory “from the start”. Apparently he had told her quite early on that he was “not going to ruin [his] career for the OPV theory”.

Worobey finally revealed himself in his true colours when he went back to the DRC in 2003 and managed to obtain what the two previous expeditions had not: an actual sample of viable SIV, from a chimp living in the Parisi Forest, some 110 kilometres from Stanleyville/Kisangani. This was great work, but what he did next was emphatically not. In the brief communication that he and Beatrice Hahn and Paul Sharp wrote for Nature, it was claimed that the chimps used in the OPV experiments had all come from “the vicinity of Stanleyville”, and so (they claimed) the fact that this one SIV sequence was slightly more genetically distant from HIV-1 than were the existing SIV sequences from Ptt chimps, “refuted” the OPV theory. He went on to assert that this finding “should finally lay the OPV/AIDS theory to rest.” As I immediately wrote to Nature, this claim was false, not least because the Lindi chimps had been captured from a huge area of rain forest and savannah encompassing the entire northern section of the Belgian Congo, and because Lindi had housed at least one chimp that appeared likely to have been a Ptt. (At that stage I had not yet discovered the documentary evidence that at least one of the Lindi chimps had been a Ptt.) Nature ignored my letter (as well, I believe, as others submitted on the subject), and ever since then Nature and Science (and Wikipedia!) have celebrated Worobey’s erroneous paper as the alleged disproof of the OPV theory.

In Tinderbox, Worobey gives a bit of background to this supposedly crucial study. On page 26 the authors state that “Hamilton and Worobey figured that the chimps who had lived at the Kisangani lab were captured nearby”. (This is both clumsy and inaccurate, but what Timberg is trying to say is that Hamilton and Worobey calculated that the chimps housed at Lindi camp and allegedly used to prepare the vaccines in the Stanleyville lab must all have come from nearby areas.) The only possible source for this claim is Worobey. However, it is patently untrue.

Bill Hamilton was well aware from frequent discussions with me including those in Kisangani, formerly Stanleyville, in July 1999) that there was considerable evidence showing that the chimps had come from a huge section of the Belgian Congo that lay to the north and east of the Congo River. Some of this evidence was in the public domain; some was not. But I had shown Bill the specific places I knew about where Lindi chimps had been captured; I had actually marked these places on a 1986 edition of the Michelin map of southern Africa that I used to bring to our meetings. Moreover this fact was made clear in The River which (according to Timberg) Worobey had read, as indeed had Bill (at least twice, both in proof and its final version). On pages 581-2 and 716 I had reported that the Lindi chimps had come from several different regions spread across a 120,000 square mile swathe of northern Belgian Congo. Although I had not specified the exact capture places in the text (in a perhaps misguided attempt to safeguard chimps living in those areas), I had given full citations for the articles supporting these claims, which were available in medical libraries.

So for Worobey to claim (as this book makes clear that he has done) that the error that lies at the core of his 2004 Nature article was as much Bill Hamilton’s fault as his own is not only an attempt to shift responsibility for a piece of rotten science on his part. It is also a slander against a true scientist, now no longer able to defend himself.

Perhaps the worst bit of Tinderbox features in two paragraphs right at the beginning (on pages 2-3). It includes the following passage. “We now know where the epidemic began: a small patch of remote southeastern Cameroon. We know when: within a couple decades either side of 1900. We have a good idea of how: someone caught an infected chimpanzee for food, allowing the virus to pass from the chimp’s blood into the hunter’s body, probably through a cut during the butchering…..It was here, in a single moment of transmission from chimp to human that a strain of virus called HIV-1 group M first appeared.” So, four statements in a single page, three of which are presented as known facts and the fourth as a probable fact. But in reality, all four of these claims are hypothetical – and in my opinion (based on facts, probability and logic) each one is false. (See “Quick Guide”.) Nice start, gentlemen!

After the rather sycophantic chapter about Worobey’s experiences on safari with Hamilton, the narrative does improve somewhat, but because the authors are basically fleshing out a story sketched out by the bushmeat activists, some bits read much less convincingly than others. It is when in Chapter 7 the story arrives in Leopoldville at Independence in 1960, that Worobey’s views once again enter the fray. HIV-1 is said to have travelled 600-odd miles from Cameroon to Leo by river-boat, and once in Leo, it has apparently spent decades spreading, and differentiating into different strains that would very soon become established as the different subtypes of the pandemic virus. Worobey is reported to have calculated that “maybe a few thousand” persons were infected with HIV by 1960. The authors state that: “Given that the symptoms of AIDS, including wasting, fevers and diarrhea, can be caused by many other tropical diseases, it’s hardly surprising that nobody appeared to have noticed a new epidemic emerging in their midst.” The narrative goes on to inform us that “the Belgians built – using Congolese muscle and sweat – one of the most modern and extensive transport systems in Africa.” But HIV could not escape from the capital, it is claimed, until colonial travel restrictions for Africans disappeared on June 30th, 1960.

This account is breathtakingly naive, and could only have been written by people without very much knowledge of Africa, or of colonial medicine. At this point let me swiftly admit that of course I am not a doctor either. However, I have studied this subject for 25 years, and have interviewed as many witnesses to these events as I could find. I started doing this 20 years before Timberg arrived in Africa, when (to be fair) many more of these witnesses were still alive. Altogether I have interviewed more than 25 colonial doctors, including many of those who worked in internal medicine in Leopoldville in the years before and after Independence. The best-known of these, Jean Sonnet and Jean-Louis Michaux, were meticulously careful doctors who wrote very full case notes. And they (and their successors when they left around 1968) retrospectively recognised that whereas collections of AIDS-like diseases in individual patients were indeed identified after Independence in one or two scattered cases in the 60s, and a growing number in the 1970s, they were not seen before Independence in 1960. Other doctors from Leo (and indeed from other parts of Africa) agree. These were medical people who knew the syndrome well, because they were among the first to encounter it (once it had been named as AIDS) in African patients in Belgian, French and British hospitals in the early 1980s. They all agreed that AIDS simply wasn’t seen before 1960.

Worobey’s estimate of a “few thousand HIV-infected” in Leo by Independence isn’t anything approaching a realistic figure, for if there had been that number in 1960 there would also have been a few hundred AIDS cases during the last years of the colonial era. That in turn means that AIDS (a) would surely have been recognised as an unusual new disease syndrome in the 1950s by physicians such as Jean Sonnet, and (b) would almost certainly have already begun its epidemic spread outside Leo. To suggest that HIV and AIDS for some reason holed up in Kinshasa for 30 to 70 years, spread and diversified, and then suddenly escaped after Independence, allowing the ten different subtypes to become established in different venues, is not only extremely far-fetched. It is absurd. Worobey’s estimates are driven not by sound epidemiological arguments, but by the necessity of trying to propose a history to support his preconceptions of how the epidemic must have happened.

I would be surprised if in reality there were more than 100 HIV infections in Leo by 1960. And in my opinion these 100 or fewer infections existed because that number of OPV vaccinees (both Leopoldville vaccinees, and vaccinees who had migrated to Leo from other vaccinated towns) had become infected in the three previous years with differing strains of SIVs that had been recombining in the caged chimps of Lindi Camp, and in the chimpanzee tissue cultures used to prepare the locally-made batches of OPV. It is these differing SIV strains that were the true source of the various pandemic HIV-1 subtypes recognised today. It is this that explains the sudden characteristic “sun-burst” of pandemic HIV-1 subtypes that the geneticists recognise must have happened in roughly 1960.

The insistence by geneticists that they are the only ones who can properly interpret the epidemic leads straight to a Catch 22. The geneticists who write about the origin of AIDS rely on the model of the molecular clock, and base their analysis on the principle that there must have been a single index case for each epidemic. They believe that there have been four separate primate-to-human transfers to produce the four different outbreaks of HIV-1 (M, N, O and P). But the idea of a “synchronised event” (to use the phrase of Gerry Myers), a multiple transfer of, say 10 different viral strains from SIV-infected polio vaccines to a total of perhaps 50 unfortunate vaccinees, is automatically excluded by the molecular clock model.

The HIV geneticist refer led to several times above has acknowledged the truth of the claim (first made by Mikkel Schierup and Raoul Forsberg in their paper presented at the meeting on “Origin of HIV” at the Lincei Academy in Rome in 2001) that recombination affects the dating of the most recent common ancestor (MRCA), and that ignoring recombination leads one to think that the MRCA lies further back in time than it actually does. I want to state formally that I respect the integrity that this man has shown during our email dialogue, and the fact that he has been willing to accept several specific points that I have put to him (such as the one outlined above) that impact negatively on the phylogenetic/bushmeat argument. However, he still maintains that geneticists could identify such recombination, had it occurred, either in the phylogenetic trees or in the similarity plots (Simplots) that compare different viruses. But as Schierup and Forsberg argue, recombination that occurs early in the history of a virus cannot be identified retrospectively. This is especially true when one considers that the OPV theory proposes that recombination (which may have involved the SIVs of both Pts and Ptt chimps) would have first occurred in vivo, due to the co-caging and group caging at Lindi camp, then again in vitro as chimpanzee kidneys and sera were used to make tissue cultures for the vaccine batches prepared at the Stanleyville lab, and all this before the viruses in different vaccine batches were passed to human vaccinees in more than 30 different trials staged in geographically isolated sites across central Africa. This is what Gerry Myers referred to as “a synchronised event”.

It would be heartening if some of the more outspoken geneticists had the courage to admit that they might not possess the right scientific tools to analyse other possibilities regarding the early days of this epidemic. But what chance is there of that? Does anyone seriously believe that people like Hahn, Sharp and Worobey, who have invested perhaps 10 to 15 years of research time (and an awful lot of other people’s money) in their theory are likely at this stage to admit that they might be wrong, and that their research methods might not be up to the task? No, these people are too far in to withdraw. Better to argue even past the point of reasonable argument that their unnaturally forced and stressed (or is it over-relaxed?) version of events has to be correct.

As for Tinderbox, there is little else that needs to be said about it. The title comes from what sounds very much like a carefully-planted quote from Worobey, in which he compares a tinderbox to wet moss: one promotes the spread of fire (or in this case viruses), the other retards it. The opening eight chapters of the book are all rather like this. They appear to have been hurriedly written and not very well researched. They read rather like a child’s adventure story, and demonstrate a striking lack of investigative intent. This is a shame, because parts of the rest of the book are actually rather good.

On page 9, Timberg celebrates the fact that he (who arrived in Johannesburg as bureau chief of The Washington Post in 2004) and Halperin (a former San Francisco cab driver turned USAID epidemiologist) are “relative latecomers” to the study of AIDS. In an author’s note at the front, Timberg writes that what has bonded the two men together has been ” a fascination with human experience [and] a refusal to accept easy answers”. Not everyone would agree with that analysis, especially the latter phrase. In my opinion, what breathes from the pages of their text is that however long these two might have lived in Africa, the views of both men are those of Americans who have been living an essentially westernised existence there. There is sympathy and goodwill by the bucket-load, but no real empathy or understanding – either for Africans or for AIDS.

Tinderbox is clearly little more than a puff (and a powder puff at that) for the bushmeat fantasists. “A naked emperor?” one can imagine Timberg asking. “Actually I never saw one. Did you see one, Daniel?”

April 25th, 2012

I would like to thank the many readers of this site who have contacted me in the last six or seven months about the two new books purporting to explain how the AIDS pandemic began: The Origins of AIDS by Jacques Pepin, and Tinderbox by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin.

I have been enormously encouraged by the dozens of requests for me to make a response, and by the fact that whenever readers have added their own comments about these books, they have been sceptical ones.

With good reason, as it turns out. Read on.

Included in this posting:

1) The Air-Brushing of History. Two new books about the origins of AIDS tell it like it wasn’t.

2) Review of The Origins of AIDS by Jacques Pepin. [C.U.P. 2011]

3) Review of Tinderbox by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin. [Penguin USA; 2012]

4) The Origins of the AIDS Pandemic. A Quick Guide to The Principal Theories and the Alleged Refutations.

Ed Hooper; 25^th April, 2012

[This is a response to Worobey et al.: “Island Biogeography Reveals the Deep History of SIV” (Science; 2010; 329; 1487), and to the related article by Donald G. McNeil Jr. in the New York Times, “Precursor to HIV was in Monkeys for Milenniums” (NY Times; September 16, 2010).]

The Donald McNeil article in the New York Times invited comments from the public, and in the following 24 hours 101 comments were logged before the Comments section on this topic on the Times web-site was closed.

As author of “The River: A Journey To The Source of HIV and AIDS” (Little, Brown; 2000), a book that strongly favours the hypothesis that AIDS is iatrogenic [and the oral polio vaccine OPV) theory of origin of AIDS], I was immensely pleased to realise that 20 of these 101 comments alluded directly or indirectly to “The River”, to myself as author, to the OPV theory, to the film made about that theory (“The Origins of AIDS”), or to some combination of the above. Continue reading “The Bushmeat Gang (The Gang That Couldn’t Tell The Time!)”

A link to an online version of this article: How to attack a scientific theory and get away with it (usually): the attempt to destroy an origin-of-AIDS hypothesis

I have long admired Brian Martin, who is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is an advocate of free speech (especially in the scientific arena) and down the years has specialised in championing scientific whistle blowing, and fighting the suppression of dissent in science.

Perhaps the most celebrated case on which he has focussed concerns the heated debate about how AIDS started. He first became involved in 1991, when he was the one academic with the courage to publish Louis Pascal’s seminal work, “What Happens When Science Goes Bad: The Corruption of Science and the Origin of AIDS: A Study in Spontaneous Generation”, as a working paper of what was then the Science and Technology Analysis Research Programme at the University of Wollongong. Although only a few hundred of these extraordinary (and extraordinarily angry) essays were ever distributed, they were sent to influential people, and so logical and powerful were the arguments within that the paper (plus the almost contemporaneous “Origin of AIDS” article by Tom Curtis in Rolling Stone magazine), started a considerable stir in favour of the hitherto disregarded theory that the AIDS epidemic might have been iatrogenic, or caused by the medical profession.

Brian’s first-hand involvement in publishing this paper meant that from then on he was able to witness at first hand some of the attempts to suppress what is now generally known as the oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory of origin. He made a memorable appearance at the Royal Society conference on “Origins of HIV and the AIDS Epidemic” in 2000, where his simply argued analysis of the shortcomings (and sometimes lack of principle) of those who were most vigorously arguing against the OPV theory of origin (and for the bushmeat theory) led to squeals of angry protest from some of the latter scientists. Particularly memorable was the indignation of one of the organisers, Robin Weiss, who had written a letter to Brian before the conference which had frankly (and disgracefully) attempted to channel his input to the meeting along lines that Weiss himself approved.

Brian and I have kept in contact since 1999, and especially since the death of Bill Hamilton in March 2000, I find that he is a man on whose judgment and integrity I can rely, especially when confronted with a particularly knotty ethical problem.

In June 2010, after long delays, his latest paper on the origins debate was published in Science as Culture; 2010; 19 (2); 215-239. Entitled: “How to attack a scientific theory and get away with it (usually): the attempt to destroy an origin-of-AIDS hypothesis”, it is a classic Brian Martin piece, but unusually hard-hitting (perhaps not surprising, given the many false claims and disinformation to which many of the opponents of the OPV theory have resorted in recent years). I commend it to readers of this web-site.

Ed Hooper 17/06/10

Walter A. Nelson-Rees, 1929-2009

Once again I have the sad task of having to report the death of a fine scientist, and a good man. Below I include a link to the excellent obituary notice that was sent me by Walter’s partner of the last fifty years, Jim Coran, which reveals many unexpected and little-known details about Walter’s life and scientific career.

Continue reading “The Death of an American Hero”

Walter Anthony Rees y Nelson, (Niki) the second of two boys, was born in Havana, Cuba on January 11, 1929. His father was German, his mother a native Cuban of Danish and English origin was a U.S. citizen. He attended primary school in Havana until the age of nine. In 1938 he, together with his brother and mother, were sent to Karlsruhe, Germany to live on his father’s income there. He attended two boarding schools in Baden from 1939 until 1944 and three schools in and near Karlsruhe from 1944 to 1945, the years coinciding with World War II. On numerous occasions during the war, Walter would work on farms or barter for agricultural products to supplement the otherwise limited food supply controlled by ration cards and allotments. During the last years of the war, Karlsruhe was heavily bombed and largely destroyed. As the son of a German, he was considered a German and obliged to be a member of the Hitler Youth. Among Walter’s most memorable experiences in the service as a youth was being forced to gather with hundreds of other youth on S. A. Platz in Karlsruhe in late 1944. From here, they were transported by train to Alsace and a village near Belfort to dig tank traps to slow the progress of the Allies in their northward conquest. They were delayed for some time due to the theft of the first locomotive by French partisans. During the delay, unbeknownst to them, they were housed in the barracks in the concentration camp at Schirmeck overnight. (This detail was revealed to Walter fifty years later.) Following the war from 1945 until 1947, he worked in various capacities at first with the French and thereafter with the American occupation forces (medical stations, P.X., interpreter). Returning to Cuba on a Cuban passport, he joined his father in Havana, attended Candler College High School and graduated in June 1948 (part-time salesman).

Continue reading “Walter A. Nelson-Rees Obituary”

Early in October 2008 an article proposing a new, earlier year of origin for HIV-1, the pandemic AIDS virus, was published in Nature. For several reasons I, and scientists whom I know, considered this article a travesty, and one that spoke volumes about the conduct of Science in the 21st Century.

The principal author of the article, “Direct evidence of extensive diversity of HIV-1 in Kinshasa by 1960”, was Michael Worobey, an ambitious young Canadian scientist who had recently been appointed – while still in his early thirties – to head the laboratory of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.

Worobey’s article dealt with huge mathematical calculations done on “super-computers”. In reality, however, it was a mish-mash of arguments about the likely date of the beginnings of the AIDS pandemic, which concluded that the first example of HIV-1 must have existed in humans in or around 1908. Unfortunately, Worobey’s calculations were based on a scientific model (the “phylogenetic clock”, or “molecular clock”) that is entirely bogus when applied to a lentiretrovirus such as HIV-1. The results he came up with are therefore equally spurious.

Within days of the article’s publication, I posted a detailed riposte to his work on this web-site. Entitled “HIV-1 in 1908? Another sad comedy of errors from Michael Worobey “, this essay cited scientific and historical evidence that demonstrated that several of Worobey’s assertions and assumptions were incorrect. It also demonstrated that he has played a dubious and covert role in this controversy for at least the last seven years.

Shortly after this, I was approached by an eminent molecular biologist who suggested that we submit a letter of response to Nature. (Most scientists who oppose the bushmeat theory of origin are forthright in private, but afraid to put their heads above the parapet publicly, lest they suddenly lose their funding. This man was an exception.) We immediately agreed to collaborate. The letter we wrote was just 400 words long, and I think constituted a pithy and apposite response to Worobey’s piece, but within days it had been rejected. However, the editor concerned did suggest that we could perhaps instead submit another form of response to Nature, called a “Brief Communication Arising”, which we duly proceeded to do. Nature’s rules for such submissions require that a copy be sent to the author of the initial article, and we therefore e-mailed a copy of our new 650-word submission to Worobey, inviting his comments. Nature allows 2 weeks for authors to respond to such approaches, but Michael Worobey did not send any form of reply. A further 10 days elapsed before Ursula Weiss, one of the senior editors at Nature, sent a brief e-mail to state that our submission had been rejected. The reasons she gave were as follows: “This section of Nature is extremely oversubscribed, so we can consider only a very few of the critical comments we receive. We mainly consider those contributions that challenge key conclusions of the published paper in question. In the present case, while we appreciate the interest of your comments, we do feel that this is the case, and therefore cannot offer to consider your paper for publication in our Brief Communications Arising section.” This is basically a pro forma response with (I suspect) a little bit added on. I found it an unconvincing and inadequate explanation (even allowing for the fact that she appears to have omitted the word “not” from “we do feel that this is the case”), but since it was sent from a web address that did not accept incoming mail, it did not allow opportunity for either reply or comment.

We then sent a slightly adapted version of our submission first to The Lancet, and then to the British Medical Journal (which had published not only Koprowski’s original “preliminary report” of his African vaccination trials in July 1958, but also a series of letters and articles expressing frank criticism of several aspects of his polio vaccine research). Both journals replied courteously, but later declined to publish on the basis that the most relevant journal to publish our submission would clearly be Nature. This may have been correct, but it was also Catch-22, in that it is now clear that Nature has little if any intention of publishing anything that ran counter to the scientifically flawed, but politically sustainable, bushmeat theory advocated by Worobey and his allies.

I have no problems with The Lancet or the British Medical Journal, with whose views on this I feel some sympathy, even if it would have been refreshing had one of them shown the courage to publish and be damned on such a key topic.

I do, however, have a considerable beef with Nature, to which journal I have, down the years, submitted at least four carefully-worded letters of response on the subject of AIDS origins, all of which have been rejected.

I think it is now high time for me to make a frank public statement about Nature and its nefarious role in this debate. The fact that Nature regularly publishes alleged “refutations” of the OPV theory and that it does so to enormous fanfare, the fact that it has competed vigorously with its rival Science in order to publish such “refutations”, and the fact that it has never published an exposition of the OPV theory, or allowed a single paragraph of space to any proponent of the OPV theory, reveal that the rejection slips from Nature have nothing whatsoever to do with the volume of correspondence that that journal receives. Instead, they are reflections ofNature‘s determination to promote an explanation for how AIDS began that is supported only by certain powerful governments, and by a perversion of sound scientific method.

To those with some experience of molecular biology, the limitations and flaws in the work of Michael Worobey and his fellow-bushmeat proponents, such as Beatrice Hahn, Paul Sharp and Bette Korber, are readily evident. Many scientists with whom I speak on this topic respond with rueful laughs. Some of them, the more forthright, go on to define the work of the aforementioned scientists on this topic as occupying a range falling between “bullshit” and “complete bullshit”.

The version of events that Nature promotes as “truth” is that the AIDS pandemic began when a hunter was accidentally exposed to the ancestral virus when he was capturing or butchering a chimpanzee; that this happened in or or near south-eastern Cameroon, and that it happened in or around 1908. There is powerful scientific and historical evidence to counter every one of these assertions, and yet Nature has negated good scientific practice by promoting this deeply flawed version of events whilst continually ignoring and suppressing alternative views. The major alternative hypothesis of origin of AIDS is the oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory which (as I can prove by historical documents and eye-witness testomonies) is considerably more plausible than the bushmeat theory. Yet it provides a version of events that might well cause political embarrassment (and even class action law suits) in certain countries, notably in the USA and to Belgium, the former colonial master of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, where these trials were staged. Nature has published one deeply biased book review about “The River”, but otherwise has never published a single paragraph attempting to explain the arguments and evidence supporting the OPV hypothesis of origin.

In short, on this particular topic, Nature has abandoned the most basic principles of scientific enquiry. Instead the journal has consistently acted as if it is a stooge of certain powerful governments and interst groups.

It is clear that some, if not all, of Nature’s editors are bright enough to realise that they are promoting poor (or perhaps I should write “controversial”) science as if it were proven fact. That they continue to actively promote such flawed arguments demonstrates that on this topic at least, Nature has betrayed its own declared principles as an organ that seeks to promote scientific knowledge and impartiality.

In making this accusation, I would especially single out three individuals: the editor-in-chief of Nature, Philip Campbell, who bears overall responsibility for the publication; one of the senior editors, Ursula Weiss, who seems to preside over the journal’s virology coverage; and the retrovirologist who (according to an ex-employee of Nature) exerts an inordinate degree of control over HIV/AIDS coverage in the journal, Robin Weiss.

After the publication of “The River” and the subsequent death of Bill Hamilton, Professor Weiss (one of the surviving co-organisers of the Royal Society meeting) encouraged me to submit my hypothesis to the cold harsh glare of Science, so that honest and impartial scientists could determine whether or not it had merit. A few months later I visited him in London; he confirmed my invitation to speak at the Royal Society meeting, but then warned me that I had “better behave myself”. As it turned out, I behaved pretty well, whereas he behaved like a scoundrel, inviting an altered and clearly one-sided set of speakers and then giving a hopelessly biased closing speech. One year later, he gave another grossly partisan closing speech at the Accademia Nazionale dei Linceiin Rome, the other venerable institution which, at the prompting of Bill Hamilton, had decided to stage a conference about the origins of HIV and AIDS. This time I was so disgusted that I got up and walked out, shouting that Weiss’s speech was “a disgrace”. I know that Weiss is also a powerful influence on the AIDS coverage in Nature’s main rival, Science (even if Science is actually more of a sister publication than a rival).

[I have never been able to find out whether Ursula Weiss and Robin Weiss are in any way related, and would welcome any input from readers on this point. I suspect that they are not, and that they merely speak with a common voice on this topic.]

Here let me add a word of perspective. In 2000, just after the publication of the paperback version of The River, I was invited to speak at Hay-on -Wye, and also invited to dinner by the family that organises the Festival. There I met the (I believe) recently-retired editor-in-chief of Nature, John Maddox. I asked him if he’d read the book, and he said that he had. What did he think?, I asked. “You’ve proposed a plausible hypothesis, and it would cost 300 million to put it to the test”, he answered. If he meant pounds, or even dollars, then I think his estimates were about a thousand times too high. But the point is that when it’s not a public performance, some people atNature sing a very different song.

My gut feeling about the current situation is that intelligent people like these do not make mistakes of this type by accident. They do so because they decide that it would be in their material or political interests to do so. I hereby accuse the three individuals mentioned above of betraying the very principles of science by publishing and promoting shoddy and misleading closed-shop articles about the origins of AIDS. I challenge them to allow me similar space in their journal to publish an alternative view, a view which I believe would be more scientifically sustainable. If they fail to allow me this, then I will have no alternative but to conclude that by their consistent ignoring of the evidence on such a crucially important subject, and by their consistently counter-intuitive promotion of anti-science, they are guilty not just of opportunism and a lack of integrity, but also of a moral and intellectual crime that is equivalent to the most serious of legal crimes. And I shall continue to accuse them accordingly.

If they fail to meet my challenge, then I will have no alternative but to conclude that the roles that they have played in this debate are every bit as reprehensible and odious as the roles played by those who are getting huge grant funding in order to create the flawed (but politically expedient) origins-of-AIDS science that Naturepublishes, and also by those who developed and administered that experimental polio vaccine in Africa 50 years ago, individuals who since that time have consistently lied about what they actually did out there. Over the years I have gradually collected the evidence that proves the claim made at the end of that last sentence, and I have put copies of that evidence in several places.

I should perhaps add that I am writing all this in the full knowledge of the laws of libel. If the aforesaid individuals don’t like my claims, then they can take me up on my challenge and invite me to write an article for publication inNature….or if they prefer they can take me to court, and we can argue our respective positions there, under the watchful eye of the public.

I copy below the text of the response of the “Brief Communication Arising” that my co-author and I submitted toNature, so that those who visit this site can make up their own minds about the pros and cons. (I have, however, omitted the name of my co-author, who agrees with me that there is little to be gained by publicly revealing his identity at this particular moment, now that our letter has been rejected.)

Ed Hooper, December 1st, 2008.

(This posting is made on World AIDS Day 2008, more than 50 years after the first arrival of HIV-1 in humans, and more than 27 years after the first official recognition of AIDS as a new disease entity. It is written in respectful memory of all those who have suffered through the emergence of this dreadful condition.)

---

How AIDS began: an alternative explanation.

Michael Worobey’s finding of new fragments of HIV-1 originating from Leopoldville/Kinshasa in 1960[1] is important, especially when the two previous earliest samples, globally, of pandemic HIV-1 Group M (dating from 1959 and 1976) came from inhabitants of the same Congolese city. It is therefore regrettable that the analysis, both in Worobey’s letter and in the commentary by his supporters and fellow “bushmeat origin” proponents, Sharp and Hahn[2], ignores the synchronicity of time and place of these earliest HIV-1(M) viruses, and instead focuses on the entirely theoretical estimate of 1908 for the first HIV-1(M) infection in a human.

This hypothetical start-date depends on three assumptions: (a) that the mutation of HIV-1 occurs at a constant rate, which can be measured by a “relaxed molecular clock”; (b) that any recombinant viruses can be identified and excluded from the HIV-1 dataset studied; and (c) that all the HIV-1(M) viruses seen today result from one original transfer of the M group’s ancestral virus, SIVcpz, from common chimpanzee to human. However, all three assumptions are controversial. Phylogenetic dating is valid for organisms that evolve through mutation, like DNA-based viruses, but HIV-1 is the most recombinogenic virus known and some 90% of its evolution occurs through recombination.[3] Worobey addresses this briefly, stating “Despite initial indications that recombination might seriously confound phylogenetic dating estimates, subsequent work has suggested that recombination is not likely to systematically bias HIV-1 dates in one direction or the other”. His supporting reference, however, is far more cautious, and assumes that most recombination will occur among the “terminal branches”, the most recent HIV-1 sequences in the dataset.[4]

He ignores the alternative scenario, the oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory of origin, which proposes that different strains of chimpanzee SIV that had recombined in culture were transferred to man via an experimental OPV made locally in Africa, and administered to almost 1,000,000 vaccinees of all ages in the Belgian territories of Africa (including Leopoldville) in 1957-60[5]. Such recombined SIVs would feature at the very heart of the phylogenetic tree, not on the terminal branches; furthermore, not being recognisable as recombinants, they could not be excluded from the geneticists’ datasets. Under such circumstances, as Schierup has observed, “it is not valid to use a phylogenetic method to obtain the time estimate.”[6]

And even if HIV-1 phylogenetic dating were legitimate, how could geneticists distinguish a single introduction in 1908 of the progenitor of HIV-1 Group M from, say, 8 – 12 introductions in the late 1950s of various SIVcpz recombinant strains that fall at the basal node of each known subtype of HIV-1(M)?

Worobey has previously declared the OPV theory of AIDS origin “refuted”. He claimed that the chimpanzees involved in the 1950s OPV experiments in the Belgian Congo were Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii from “the vicinity of Stanleyville” [now Kisangani], where, he asserted, a form of SIVcpz genetically more distant from HIV-1(M) than the SIVcpz from Pan troglodytes troglodytes (Ptt) chimps from Congo Brazzaville and Cameroon was found.[7] But he is incorrect. More than 400 common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) of largely unrecorded subspecies and over 80 pygmy chimpanzees (Pan paniscus) were co-caged and group-caged at Lindi Camp, just outside Stanleyville. They were captured from 200,000 square miles of rain forest, extending as far west as Coquilhatville (now Mbandaka)[8], then a major chimpanzee collecting centre. Indeed, in 1955 two Ptt apes were purchased here by the same team that later supplied Lindi Camp.[9] Chimps from Coquilhatville/Mbandaka have routinely been brought to Stanleyville/Kisangani on the Congo ferries and sold[10] – and the presence of at least one Ptt among Stanleyville’s chimpanzee experimentees is confirmed.[11] Only 60 of these 500-odd chimpanzees survived the 1956-60 experiments.[12] Congolese and Belgian technicians confirm that in the Laboratoire Médical de Stanleyville tissue cultures were being made from chimpanzee cells, and OPV batches were being prepared.[13] We contend that the bushmeat theory is not the only, or indeed the strongest, explanation for how AIDS began.

[650 words]

References:

1] M. Worobey et al., “Direct evidence of extensive diversity of HIV-1 in Kinshasa by 1960”. Nature; 2008; 455; 661-664.

2] P. Sharp and B. Hahn, “Prehistory of HIV-1” [News and Views]. Nature; 2008; 455; 605-6.

3] S. Wain-Hobson, A. Meyerhans et al., “Network analysis of human and simian immunodeficiency virus sequence sets reveals massive recombination resulting in shorter pathways”; J. Gen Virol.; 2003; 84; 885-895. A. Jung, S. Wain-Hobson et al., “Multiply infected spleen cells in HIV patients”, Nature; 2002; 418; 144.

4] P. Lemey, O.G. Pybus, M. Worobey et al., “The molecular population genetics of HIV-1 Group O”;Genetics; 2004; 167; 1059-1068.

5] O. Bagasra, “HIV and Molecular Immunity: Prospects for the AIDS Vaccine”, [Natic, MA: Eaton, 1999]. E. Hooper, “The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS” [Boston: Little Brown; London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1999].

6] M.H. Schierup and R. Forsberg, “Recombination and phylogenetic analysis of HIV-1”, Atti dei Convegni Lincei; 2003; 187; 231-245. [Available from the www.aidsorigins.com web-site.]

7] M. Worobey, P.M. Sharp, B.H. Hahn et al., “Origin of AIDS: contaminated polio vaccine theory refuted”. Nature. 2004; 428(6985); 820.

8] F. Deinhardt, Lindi databook (covering 53 of the Lindi chimps); 1959.

9] Databook of chimpanzee materials stored at Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Tervuren, Belgium, 1998 edition.

10] Personal communications, 2004 and 2005, from G. Hensenne (regarding the 1950s) and K. Ammann (regarding the 1980s).

11] M.M. Vastesaeger, R. Delcourt, “L’atherosclerose experimentale du chimpanzé. Recherches preliminaires.” Acta Cardiol. 1965, 20 (Suppl 11), 283-297.

12] E. Hooper, “Dephlogistication. New developments in the origins of AIDS controversy”; Atti dei Convegni Lincei; 2003; 187; 27-230. E. Hooper, “The
latest scientific evidence strongly supports the OPV theory”, 2005. [Both these papers, and others, are available from www.aidsorigins.com

13] “The Origins of AIDS”, Galafilm/MFP television documentary (91 minute version), 2003.

Authors:

Edward Hooper and one other, whose name is here omitted.

It is with sadness that I have to report the death of Pierre Doupagne, the former technical assistant at the Laboratoire Medical de Stanleyville, (LMS) in the Belgian Congo. He died peacefully in hospital in Liege, Belgium, on October 24th, 2008. He was 85 years old.

Although he was not one of the four doctors based at the LMS in the latter half of the 1950s, Pierre Doupagne was the man whose skills underpinned their work – and in the end he played a significant part in the origins of AIDS debate that began some 40 years later.

Pierre began working at the LMS in 1949, the same year that Ghislain Courtois took over as director. Both men spent the next decade in that laboratory; Courtois leaving in order to take over the main Leopoldville lab in late 1959, and Doupagne staying on until May 1960, after which he worked at the lab in Elisabethville, Katanga; (Katanga province had seceded from the newly-independent Congo in July 1960). Pierre left Elisabethville after a year, and from 1961 to 1985 worked for CIBA Geigy, first in Africa, then in Turkey and finally in France and Switzerland, where he was apparently in charge of the Africa desk.

Despite his lack of a medical degree, Pierre was in many ways the backbone of the LMS, the man on whose careful work all the other research and medical procedures depended. He was well-liked by his colleagues, and well-respected for the care and precision of his laboratory technique. As the years went by the director, Courtois, used to spend less and less time in the lab, but he would find new procedures described in articles and books, and then ask Pierre to reproduce them in the laboratory. Pierre normally succeeded.

From 1956 onwards, Pierre worked especially closely with Paul Osterrieth, who had been appointed to head the new LMS department of virology. The official opening of the virology department occurred when the new LMS buildings were inaugurated at the beginning of the Symposium on Viral Diseases in Central Africa, which was staged in September-October 1957, but in reality some of the labs in the new building had been in use since around July 1956, when Osterrieth first arrived at the lab. There was then something of a hiatus, for Doupagne was on leave from January to August 1957, and Osterrieth then set off on leave from July 1957 to February 1958. The Virus Department moved back into top gear upon the arrival of the German/American hepatitis (and tissue culture) specialist, Fritz Deinhardt, and the return of Paul Osterrieth, both of which occurred at the start of February 1958.

During the initial hour or so of our first interview in 1993, Pierre Doupagne was helpful and forthcoming. Then came a phone call from Andre Courtois, son of the late Dr Courtois, after which Pierre was suddenly loath to speak further. Shortly after this Pierre was involved in organising a meeting of the former workers of the LMS (the first such meeting in nearly 35 years) which took place in Liege. Years afterwards, Pierre told me that one of the main reasons for that meeting (instigated by Jozef Vandepitte, who was interim director during Courtois’ leave in March to September 1958) was to discuss the “Hooper problem”, and the fact that I was interviewing the surviving members of the LMS to ask about the polio work that had been conducted there, and especially about the experimental procedures that had been carried out with CHAT, an experimental oral polio vaccine (OPV) developed by the Polish-American scientist, Hilary Koprowski. The Liege meeting had been attended by Vandepitte, Doupagne, Andre Courtois, Paul Osterrieth, Dr Van Oye (a former inspector of hygiene for the Belgian Congo), and reportedly one other. I have been told that the former histopathologist, Gaston Ninane (who took over Osterrieth’s job during his 1957-8 leave) was the only significant non-attendee, apart from the LMS pharmacist, Paulette Dherte, who was then living in Brazil.

Despite the collapse of the 1993 interview, I always felt that Pierre Doupagne was an honest man. I sent him a copy of The River when it came out in 1999, and when I next went to see him in 2002, he was full of praise for the book. Our interview lasted almost the entire day, and about half-way through it Pierre suddenly confirmed what I had already heard from his one-time assistant, Philippe Elebe, in Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville). He admitted that at least some of the tissue cultures that had been prepared at the LMS had been made from chimpanzees. Pierre told me that on perhaps 2 or 3 occasions he had made chimpanzee tissue culture and had given it to Osterrieth and Ninane, “to do what with, I do not know”. At the end of the day I pressed him about how often this procedure had happened, and he whispered that it had gone on “for a long time”. But when I asked Doupagne for what purposes Osterrieth had used the tissue culture, he clammed up. “It is difficult”, he told me. “Paul Osterrieth is my friend.”

(The use of chimpanzee tissue culture for making CHAT polio vaccine had been admitted three times in a minute by Gaston Ninane during our first interview in 1992. But then Ninane suddenly realised the import of what he was saying with respect to my questions about the origins of AIDS and he backtracked, claiming that they had actually used tissue culture from singes, or monkeys, of which species he was unsure. In French, singes means primates: that is monkeys and apes alike.)

I saw Pierre Doupagne again in 2004, shortly after The Origins of AIDS documentary film came out, but on that occasion he was unwell, and I left after speaking with him for just a few minutes. During the next 4 years, my main contact with him was through a mutual friend, Georges Hensenne, the former editor of the main Stanleyville newspaper, Le Stanleyvillois. (Georges had written to me after seeing the film in 2003, and over the next 5 years we met several times, and he proved to be a kind and enormously helpful source of information.) Significantly, Georges told me that during their conversations together Pierre had never wavered about the fact that he had made chimpanzee tissue culture at the LMS, but equally he would never say what Osterrieth had used the tissue culture for. On the latter subject, he would effectively decline to answer.

In January 2007 Paul Osterrieth died, and Pierre attended the funeral. The reports that I later received about this significant occasion indicate that it was attended by Koprowski’s deputy, Stanley Plotkin (who had by then taken charge of the attempt to disprove the link between pandemic AIDS and LMS-made CHAT), by at least one other of Plotkin’s collaborators (perhaps Dirk Teuwen; see below), and by a large number of Belgian academics and freemasons.

It seems that Stanley Plotkin (who was reportedly quite condescending to some of the Belgian doctors during the 1950s) is nowadays keen to attend their funerals, and then to celebrate them as “public health heroes”. What he may actually be celebrating is that there is now one fewer witness for him and his former boss, Hilary Koprowski, to worry about. Unfortunately for him, I have re-interviewed most of these crucial witnesses during their final years, and have done so on film.

It was due to George Hensenne’s good offices that I learnt in July 2008 that Pierre would be happy to see me once more. About a week later, Georges and I visited Pierre at his apartment, together with a friend of mine who recorded the brief meeting on video. During this meeting, Pierre (who was now extremely frail, but whose mind was still alert) clarified and expanded upon what he had told me previously about the tissue culture he had made at the LMS. Pierre appeared to have made a decision that he could now be more forthright with me, and he said what he wanted to say clearly and without hesitation.

A few days after this Pierre fell and broke a hip, and was admitted to hospital. I kept in contact, and learned that he would welcome another visit from me. With a different friend, I flew back to Belgium in September 2008, sadly on the very same morning that Georges Hensenne died. We waited two days for a suitable moment to talk with Pierre, and when we spoke it was for just ten or fifteen minutes. But now Pierre made a significant additional statement about what had happened at the LMS, a statement that once again was filmed. I shall reveal more about this when the time is right.

Pierre Doupagne’s death marks the end of an era. He was both a kind and a shrewd man, but more importantly, he was a man of integrity….a man who revealed the truth about the events at the Stanleyville lab, even while his medical colleagues were afraid to do so. (During our later interviews, Gaston Ninane always began giggling nervously when the subject of the origin of AIDS came up. By contrast, during my second and last interview with Paul Osterrieth, he became hostile, and began denying key aspects of what he had told me previously, a course that he would continue to pursue for the following 12 years.)

I know for a fact that Pierre Doupagne was in a moral dilemma about these matters during the final years of his life. I believe that his natural instinct was to tell the truth about what had happened, but he was also well aware of the huge impact that telling the truth would make. He understood, for instance that this information could have a huge political and financial impact in certain quarters.

When the rest of this story is told, Pierre will be recognised and celebrated for what he was – a man who was a witness to (and sometimes a participant in) crucially important events, but also a man who was, at the end of the day, courageous and honest.

Pierre Doupagne is survived by one son and four grandchildren.

Postscript.

I was not the only visitor to Pierre Doupagne who was interested in what had happened at the LMS back in the 1950s. In late 1999 or early 2000 Dr Dirk Teuwen, a Belgian scientist who was then based at the main lab of that huge pharmaceutical house, Aventis Pasteur, in Lyons, was hired by Stanley Plotkin (then the managing director of Aventis Pasteur) to help him counteract the OPV/AIDS theory and the impact of The River. Dr Teuwen has continued working for Plotkin ever since, and his main job seems to be to track down and make contact with as many as possible of those witnesses to the 1950s events in Stanleyville, notably those whom I have previously interviewed. It now seems clear that Dirk Teuwen’s role in the Plotkin group’s plans is to be kindly and concerned and talkative with these witnesses, and to try to win their trust.

Teuwen has also played an active role in the attempts by the Plotkin group and Michael Worobey to obtain a group of ancient tissue samples from the 1950s that were found in the basement of the old LMS building. Intriguingly, he is cited as co-author on Worobey’s latest phylogenetic dating paper, in which Worobey claims that the finding of HIV-1 in a 1960 tissue sample allegedly taken from the Belgian Congo capital of Leopoldville (which was also vaccinated with CHAT) means that the AIDS epidemic actually began in or around 1908. See the accompanying essay, HIV-1 in 1908? Another sad comedy of errors from Michael Worobey , for my comments on Worobey’s latest paper. Since Teuwen’s only known role of relevance to Worobey’s paper has been facilitating access to the Stanleyville samples, one wonders why he has been cited as a co-author in this paper about an ancient sample from Leopoldville.

Despite his apparent kindliness, Dr Teuwen is not universally liked or respected. I know this because some of those whom he has approached have later reported back to me about their meetings. He has shown an especially strong interest in trying to persaude these witnesses to modify or change key aspects of the accounts that they have previously given me. In the past, the Plotkin group has claimed, without supporting evidence, that certain doctors and other witnesses from Belgium, and from the Congo, have later denied saying what they had previously told me on tape, and it is believed that Dirk Teuwen is the source of most of these unsupported claims. [*See also the asterisked section below.]

I discovered in July 2008 that Dirk Teuwen had been in contact with Pierre Doupagne for at least four years, although Teuwen did not visit Pierre during the final months of his life. Before he died I spoke with Pierre about Dr Teuwen, so it will be interesting to see if Teuwen (or anyone else from the Plotkin group) makes any retrospective claims about Pierre Doupagne now that he is no longer with us.

What I have learnt in the past few days is that Pierre Doupagne’s funeral was attended both by Dr Teuwen and by Dr Andre Courtois, and that at least one person came under pressure from those doctors to cooperate with them. It seems that the pattern continues.

Ed Hooper. 7th November 2008.

*An aside. One good example of such alleged but dubious denials, which may or may not have involved Dirk Teuwen, was the statement that Dr Gaston Ninane of the LMS allegedly made to members of the Plotkin group in February 2000, three months before his death, at a time when he was apparently in hospital following a fall caused by his Parkinson’s disease. In his Invited Article in “Clinical Infectious Diseases” (2001; 32; 1068-1084), Plotkin claimed that Ninane had signed a statement stating that “I never tried to make cell cultures in Stanleyville….The statements that are attributed to me on this subject are false and are lies (author [ie Plotkin’s] translation)”. This is an interesting claim, given that Ninane told me several times (recorded on tape) that he had tried to make cell cultures in Stanleyville. It is worth noting that even the Royal Society (which otherwise proved to be fairly craven in bowing to Plotkin’s and Koprowski’s demands by adding an extra “Postscript” by Plotkin, Teuwen, Prinzie and Desmyter to the published proceedings of the Royal Society meeting – a postscript which promoted Plotkin’s heavily accented and, in many proven instances, false version of events) baulked at publishing the final sentence of this claimed statement by Ninane as part of Plotkin’s article in the Royal Society proceedings, on the grounds that it was potentially libellous. I am reliably informed that doctors Plotkin and Koprowski had never seen or contacted Gaston Ninane between the time that he helped them with their polio experiments in the 1950s and the time that they flew across from the US to see him in his hospital bed in Belgium in February 2000. This did not prevent Plotkin from co-dedicating his Royal Society article to Ninane, whom he described as an “old [warrior] in the fight against polio”. It is also worth noting that the original letters which Plotkin promised in his Royal Society “Postscript” in 2001 to deposit at one of two libraries in Leuven and Philadelphia had, at the last time of enquiry, still not been deposited there, even though Plotkin has twice been reminded of this promise by Brian Martin, a fellow speaker at the Royal Society meeting. Other requests for copies of Plotkin’s and Koprowski’s documents have simply gone unanswered. Taken together, this information raises questions about whether all the documents and letters that are claimed by these two men and their collaborators actually exist.