The on-going debate about how AIDS began - ASC Research Seminar (First in a series of four on health issues in Africa)

Edward Hooper has been both a United Nations official and a BBC correspondent in Africa, and is the author of a number of books and articles dealing with the effects and origin of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa.

How does science deal with a theory that challenges the efficiency – indeed the integrity – of scientists themselves? In 1999, in my book The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), I proposed that experimental trials of an oral polio vaccine (OPV) in central Africa between 1957 and 1960 had given birth to the AIDS pandemic, which is now the worst outbreak of infectious disease in human history. Over the next two years, at a Royal Society conference and in the pages of Science and Nature, a group of scientists (including the original vaccinators) declared that this was an ‘ugly theory’ that had been ‘destroyed [by] beautiful facts’. But there are no such ‘facts’, in fact, the theory is stronger than ever. The speaker will discuss the role played in this debate by the late evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton, the latest findings (which demonstrate that the vaccine was prepared locally, in Africa, in the cells of chimpanzees), the alleged ‘disproofs’ of the theory put forward by sceptical scientists, and the evidence that a substantial cover-up has been staged.