Heart of darkness

A team of Los Alamos researchers traces AIDS back to the 1930s, blowing a hole in the most recent theory about its origin.

By Arthur Allen

Jun 9, 2000 | The world lost one of its great biologists in March when William Hamilton, who inspired a school of evolutionary thinkers, suffered a hemorrhage and died after returning to England from a trip to Africa. Tragic as it was, Hamilton's death could end up a footnote in a far more awful tale, one that may explain the origins of AIDS.

Hamilton, 63, devised the theory of kin selection, which explains altruistic behavior in nature. But what had brought him to the Congo, in Africa's war-ravaged, malarial heart, was something more prosaic and immediate: He was collecting chimpanzee shit around the city of Kisangani.

For if the chimpanzees around Kisangani carry a virus that is genetically related to the strain of HIV currently afflicting 50 million people, it will bolster the hypothesis that the global AIDS epidemic is a manmade curse, created by the mass administration of a polio vaccine that was tainted with a simian immunodeficiency virus in central Africa in the late 1950s. That would make it by far the greatest medical disaster of all time.

AIDS has spawned some weird theories with some surprising supporters -- South African President Thabo Mbeki, for one, has shown interest in the school of thought that AIDS isn't caused by the HIV virus. Hamilton, for his part, was sympathetic to the polio vaccine theory, although it has been rejected by most mainstream AIDS researchers, including a group that published results of its study in the journal Science on Thursday.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory used the supercomputer Nirvana, created to model nuclear explosions, to date the ancestry of the HIV bomb. Using a "molecular clock" calculation that estimates mutation rates of viruses, they found that the vaccine theory did not appear to fit with the dates. By comparing the similarity of gene sequences in HIV viruses, the Los Alamos team came up with 1930, give or take 15 years, as the year the original virus began mutating into the current killer strains -- not the late 1950s, the time the vaccine was supposedly administered.

The polio hypothesis, first presented in a 1992 Rolling Stone article, was explored in exhaustive detail by the English writer Edward Hooper in "The River: a Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS." Since the book appeared last fall, it has generated some angry opposition from scientists who think it needlessly adds to African mistrust of Western medicine.

Next Page: Did chimpanzees spread the virus by biting hunters?

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