Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The Chicago Tribune - February 2, 2000
Jeremy Manier, Tribune Staff Writer
Most HIV experts at the Seventh Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections praised the meticulous work that went into the new date-origin estimate, calculated by running a massive database of HIV genetic sequences through one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Researchers from Northwestern University contributed to the study, which is summarized in the current issue of Science magazine and was reported by the Tribune on Monday. Such work may give crucial insights into HIV's long-term evolution and future vaccines for the virus.
Yet some of the world's top AIDS authorities at the conference were just as interested that the new date of 1930 seemed to weaken the controversial thesis, advanced in a book last year by British science writer Edward Hooper, that the virus spread to humans through accidental contamination of an oral polio vaccine tested in central Africa during the late 1950s.
Many researchers doubt Hooper's argument, saying it is more plausible that HIV spread from chimpanzees to people who hunted the animals for food. Moreover, they say, the polio vaccine theory could have a harmful effect, especially in Africa, where some people distrust Western researchers and may draw the incorrect conclusion that polio vaccines are dangerous.
One conference attendee with a personal stake in the debate is Dr. Stanley Plotkin, a professor emeritus of immunology at the University of Pennsylvania. In the 1950s Plotkin was a research fellow at the Philadelphia-based Wistar Institute, which conducted the African polio vaccine tests.
Plotkin said Tuesday that he believes the new estimate gives fresh evidence that HIV entered people decades before the vaccine tests took place.
"I am more than ever convinced that the book is completely wrong," Plotkin said, referring to Hooper's book, "The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS."
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Tuesday that the new estimate of HIV's origins damages the argument that HIV came from a polio vaccine. "It's important because of all the publicity `The River' is getting," Fauci said.
The lead author of Tuesday's study, Bette Korber of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said her work "doesn't disprove Hooper.It just makes (his thesis) less likely."
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