ScienceNOW Daily News

DENVER, COLORADO–Clarifying the origin of AIDS won’t prevent or cure any HIV infections, but the mystery has long gripped the field. Two groups studying wild chimpanzees in Cameroon reported progress on that front here this week at the 13th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections.
Continue reading “Tracing HIV’s Steps”

It is with great sadness that I have to report the death, in Torino, Italy on May 11th, 2004, of Bill Hamilton’s partner of his last six years, Maria Luisa Bozzi.

Following an operation on her lungs some twenty years ago, Luisa (as she was known to her friends) had suffered from asthma, and it is believed that she may have suffered a massive asthma attack in the moments before she died. An autopsy was conducted, and the results will be announced in due course.

Luisa Bozzi was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, just after the outbreak of the Second World War. She graduated in biology from Torino University in the early sixties, and conducted research in several different countries around the world during the next three decades. In her later years, she also became a science journalist, and a writer of scientific text books.

Luisa met Bill Hamilton during one of his many research trips to the Amazon in 1994 (some months after Bill and his wife Christine had separated), and they immediately became close. (This in itself was unusual, for Bill did not normally encourage the presence of women on his expeditions and safaris.) Almost immediately, Luisa became involved with Bill’s other scientific work, most particularly in the over-riding preoccupation of his final years: the origins of HIV and the AIDS pandemic.

At the start of the year 2000, Luisa and Bill were preparing to set up house together in the New Forest, and so it came as an overwhelming shock to Luisa when, in late January, Bill suddenly collapsed. This happened the day after he returned from his second expedition to the Democratic Republic of Congo, in which he had tried to obtain faecal and urine samples from wild chimpanzees, to test for the presence of simian immunodeficiency virus. Bill spent six weeks in a coma and died in early March.

Although Luisa took a long time to come to terms with Bill’s tragic and unexpected death, it was only a few weeks after his demise that she felt she needed to become more actively involved in the origins of AIDS debate. At Bill’s memorial service, it became clear that some of his former Oxford colleagues were trying to reinvent his role in that debate, presenting him as a concerned neutral who merely felt that all hypotheses deserved to be tested. As the months passed, Luisa took it upon herself to read all of Bill’s documents and correspondence on the subject, which helped confirm her own belief that, at the time of his death, he had been “95% persuaded” that the OPV/AIDS hypothesis had merit.

In September 2001, she gave a moving speech entitled “Truth and science: Bill Hamilton’s legacy” at the Lincei conference on “Origin of HIV and Emerging Persistent Viruses”. [Atti dei Convegni Lincei; 2003; 187; 21-26; see this web-site.] The speech emphasised Bill’s support of the OPV theory, and the importance that he had always placed on openness and integrity in science. It was a quiet yet powerful warning to those who had attempted to misrepresent his position on this issue.

Following the Lincei conference Luisa continued to defend both Bill’s and my work on the origins debate. I spoke with her twice on the phone during her final few days, and she was unusually forthright about some of the alleged “refutations” of the OPV/AIDS theory which had appeared in major scientific journals. She was particularly disappointed that some of those scientists who had offered to collaborate with Bill on his final research in the Congo had either failed to test the resulting samples, or had failed to honour promises to share those samples with labs from both sides of the increasingly heated debate. There may be a time when it is appropriate for me to quote some of Luisa’s final thoughts on this subject, but it is not now.

Luisa Bozzi had many hidden strengths, not least her quiet wisdom. Though her manner was unassuming, she was in fact fiercely honest and loyal, and – like Bill – found spin, misrepresentation and “economies with the truth” almost impossible to tolerate. With regard to the origins debate, she had a very firm grasp of the issues, and was a particular source of strength to me personally, for her willingness to analyse not only the latest scientific developments, but also the political and emotional undercurrents that so often swirled beneath.

Luisa was also an enormously warm, kind and generous person, and it is for these reasons, above all others, that she will be profoundly missed by those who knew and loved her.

She leaves one son, Marco, a trainee architect.

Edward Hooper. May 17th, 2004.

The supplementary information and map that Nature has just posted are rather interesting.

Worobey et al. observe that the RNA-later they used to preserve most of the year 2000 urine samples (from the Wanie-Rukula region) doesn’t normally allow immunoblot analysis, but they managed to get past that by special procedures, and repeatedly detected p24 (a core protein of immunodeficiency viruses) in two of the ten samples. Does this perhaps suggest that if ideal procedures had been used, they would have detected p24 in more than 20% of the animals? I don’t know. However, Worobey et al.’s comment about urine antibody profiles and PCR confirmation of infection in Gombe Stream, Tanzania, implies (at the least) that many of the chimps showing the p24 profile on immunoblot analysis of urine are genuinely SIV-infected.

Interestingly, neither in the main paper, nor in the supplementary information, do Worobey et al. report on the immunoblot results on the 36 urine samples collected from further south-east (Obiatuku and Parisi) in 2003.

Note that Worobey et al. detected only one PCR-positive animal out of a total of 34+97 = 131 chimp faecal samples tested in 2000 and 2003. This is a much lower rate of detection, even when (as in 2000), samples appear to have been taken from the same (presumably infected) troupe. This suggests that either their preserving methods for faeal samples, or their methods of extracting SIV from faeces collected in the field, may have been less than ideal.

It’s worth remembering that Santiago and Sharp, using PCR amplification at Gombe Stream in Tanzania, detected SIV in 13% of faecal samples obtained from three wild troupes of Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii (Pts). Because they were at Jane Goodall’s camp, rather than truly “in the bush”, it may be that their preservation methods were more effective.

One of the arguments which people like Beatrice Hahn and Bette Korber have used to try to disprove the OPV theory has been to claim that not only is Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii (Pts) the “wrong subspecies” of chimp [this argument is addressed elsewhere], but that the rate of SIV infection in wild Pts chimps is low. This claim would appear to be incorrect. In reality, it would appear that in those chimp troupes which are infected, SIV infection rates are fairly high. Although none of the Ugandan chimps sampled in the Budongo Forest was found to be SIV-infected, Santiago and Sharp’s figure of 13% SIV infection in the wild Gombe chimps should probably be used as the benchmark for Pts infection in infected troupes, at least for the time being. With regard to Worobey et al.’s results, all one can say is that their results on the year 2000 urine samples imply (but of course do not confirm) a similar infection rate in the DRC.

It needs to be pointed out that the Parisi forest, where Worobey et al. sampled the infected chimp that gave the partial SIV sequence, is about 130 kilometres south-east of Kisangani (as the crow flies), and is not known to be one of the areas where they collected chimps for Lindi camp in the 1950s. However, the Lindi chimp-catcher Gilbert Rollais was based for several months at Wanie-Rukula, 50 kms SE of Kisangani. This means that the chimps sampled during the Bill Hamilton expedition of January 2000 (which came from the forest to the immediate north and east of Wanie Rukula) are more relevant to the events at Lindi.