[This is a response to Worobey et al.: "Island Biogeography Reveals the Deep History of SIV" (Science; 2010; 329; 1487), and to the related article by Donald G. McNeil Jr. in the New York Times, "Precursor to HIV was in Monkeys for Milenniums" (NY Times; September 16, 2010).]

The Donald McNeil article in the New York Times invited comments from the public, and in the following 24 hours 101 comments were logged before the Comments section on this topic on the Times web-site was closed.

As author of "The River: A Journey To The Source of HIV and AIDS" (Little, Brown; 2000), a book that strongly favours the hypothesis that AIDS is iatrogenic [and the oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory of origin of AIDS], I was immensely pleased to realise that 20 of these 101 comments alluded directly or indirectly to "The River", to myself as author, to the OPV theory, to the film made about that theory ("The Origins of AIDS"), or to some combination of the above.

A link to an online version of this article: How to attack a scientific theory and get away with it (usually): the attempt to destroy an origin-of-AIDS hypothesis

I have long admired Brian Martin, who is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is an advocate of free speech (especially in the scientific arena) and down the years has specialised in championing scientific whistle blowing, and fighting the suppression of dissent in science.

The principal author of the article, "Direct evidence of extensive diversity of HIV-1 in Kinshasa by 1960", was Michael Worobey, an ambitious young Canadian scientist who had recently been appointed - while still in his early thirties - to head the laboratory of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.

Worobey's article dealt with huge mathematical calculations done on "super-computers". In reality, however, it was a mish-mash of arguments about the likely date of the beginnings of the AIDS pandemic, which concluded that the first example of HIV-1 must have existed in humans in or around 1908. Unfortunately, Worobey's calculations were based on a scientific model (the "phylogenetic clock", or "molecular clock") that is entirely bogus when applied to a lentiretrovirus such as HIV-1. The results he came up with are therefore equally spurious.

It is with sadness that I have to report the death of Pierre Doupagne, the former technical assistant at the Laboratoire Medical de Stanleyville, (LMS) in the Belgian Congo. He died peacefully in hospital in Liege, Belgium, on October 24th, 2008. He was 85 years old.

Although he was not one of the four doctors based at the LMS in the latter half of the 1950s, Pierre Doupagne was the man whose skills underpinned their work - and in the end he played a significant part in the origins of AIDS debate that began some 40 years later.