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Forensic Epidemiology

Vaccine Theory of AIDS Origins Disputed at Royal Society

Jon Cohen

Science, Vol. 289, 15 September 2000, pp. 1850-1851.

LONDON, ENGLAND–For 2 days this week, the staid Royal Society hosted a spirited, sometimes raucous, meeting on the origin of the AIDS epidemic, the first such gathering ever held. At center stage was a controversial theory that a contaminated polio vaccine tested in Africa more than 40 years ago sparked the epidemic. The theory took a hit when researchers revealed that tests of old samples of the vaccine provided no supporting evidence, and the main proponent of the theory, British writer Edward Hooper, endured a verbal battering himself from several prominent scientists. But Hooper, unbowed, got in plenty of jabs of his own.

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Of Chimps and Men

Letter to the editor about The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Science, 14 January 2000, Volume 287, p. 233

Stanley A. Plotkin and Hilary Koprowski say in their letter (Science’s Compass, 24 Dec., p. 2450) that in my book, The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS (Little, Brown, 1999), I suggest that they “covertly used chimpanzee cells to produce the live oral polio vaccine (OPV) that was used in the first mass campaign with OPV in the former Belgian Congo.”

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Letter to Science

Letter to the editor about The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

Science, 24 December 1999, Volume 286, page 2449

Responding to The River

In the book The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS (Little, Brown, 1999), author Edward Hooper suggests that we covertly used chimpanzee cells to produce the live oral polio vaccine (OPV) that was used in the first mass campaign with OPV in the former Belgian Congo. Hooper postulated that the cells contained a simian immunodeficiency virus that later mutated to human immunodeficiency virus.

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