(Sydney: Angus & Robertson [An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers], 1996), 266 pages. ISBN 0-207-19041-0. A$16.95.

Did the use of monkeys for medicine cause AIDS? A chilling exposé of a theory that has international scientists running for cover.

Earliest AIDS Case Is Called Into Doubt

© New York Times 1995

WHAT was believed to be the earliest known case of AIDS, dating to 1959, may not have been AIDS after all, new scientific evidence shows.

The case of David Carr, a 25-year-old man who died in 1959 in Manchester, England, has taken another perplexing twist.

In our March 19, 1992, issue (RS 626), Rolling Stone published an article by Tom Curtis entitled "The Origin of AIDS: A Startling New Theory Attempts to Answer the Question 'Was It an Act of God or an Act of Man?'" In a nutshell, the article raised the theoretical question of whether the AIDS virus or precursor virus might have been transmitted inadvertently from monkeys to humans during a mass-polio-vaccination campaign that was conducted in the Belgian Congo in 1957 through 1960 using a vaccine developed by Dr. Hilary Koprowski. The article did not state that this in fact occurred but only that the possibility that one of his vaccines might have been contaminated with such a virus was one of several disputed and unproven theories.

Preliminary Notes Concerning Shortcomings of a Correspondence by Y. Ohta, et al., Entitled "No Evidence for the Contamination of Live Oral Poliomyelitis Vaccines with Simian Immunodeficiency Virus," Published in AIDS, 3: 183-4, 1989

Introduction: This piece is to be read in conjunction with L Pascal, What Happens When Science Goes Bad, Science and Technology Analysis Working Paper #9, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia, Dec 1991. It should also be read in conjunction with the report of the Wistar Committee (C Basilico, C Buck, R Desrosiers, D Ho, F Lilly, E Wimmer, "Report from the AIDS/Poliovirus Advisory Committee," Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 3601 Spruce St., Philadelphia, PA 19104, 18 Sep 1992). The Ohta paper is discussed at some length in the appendix to What Happens When Science Goes Bad, but its errors greatly exceeded the space available to point them out. In addition, both the Wistar Committee and Koprowski have continued to make important use of the Ohta piece in their arguments; hence this more detailed treatment.

B. F. Elswood (1) and R. B. Stricker (2)(*)

(1) University of California, San Francisco, CA 94143, and
(2) California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco, CA 94120

(*) Corresponding author

Submitted January 3, 1992, accepted February 2, 1993.

Reprinted from Research in Virology, vol. 144, 1993, pp. 175-177.

B. F. ELSWOOD and R. B. STRICKER*

Reprinted from Medical Hypotheses, vol. 42, 1994, pp. 347-354, with permission of the publisher.

Tom Curtis, 1992 letter to Science (not published)

[This letter was later published as an appendix in Julian Cribb, The White Death (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1996), pp. 258-262.]

We have been asked by the Wistar Institute to evaluate the probability that the hypothesis raised by Tom Curtis in an article published in the Rolling Stone magazine of March 19, 1992 under the heading, "The origin of AIDS" may be correct.

Letter to Science by Hilary Koprowski

Adapted from Science, vol. 257, 21 August 1992, pp. 1024, 1026-1027; corrections, 11 September 1992, p. 1463. In this version, the errors in footnoting have been rectified so that the footnotes read as they were intended.

A Startling New Theory Attempts To Answer The Question 'Was It An Act Of God Or An Act Of Man?'

by Tom Curtis

A startling 19,000-word thesis on the origin of AIDS: should the JME have published it?

Editorial

Raanan Gillon, Imperial College Health Service and St Mary's Hospital Medical School, London University

Journal of Medical Ethics, 1992, Volume 18, pages 3-4
[This editorial is reproduced with permission of the publishers. To subscribe to the Journal of Medical Ethics, contact BMJ Publishing Group, Journals Marketing Dept, PO Box 299, London WC1H 9TD, UK or BMJ Publishing Group, Box No 408, Franklin, MA 02038, USA.]

The Corruption of Science and the Origin of AIDS: A Study in Spontaneous Generation

Louis Pascal

with an introduction by Brian Martin