While I've casually entertained controversial theories on the origin of AIDS before, I've not yet been convinced that AIDS was man-made for the purpose of genocide.
However, after watching "The Origin of AIDS," I find it hard not to seriously entertain the (not new) theory that the AIDS epidemic was inadvertently caused by an anxious scientist so focused on edging out the competition with a viable polio vaccination that he ignored safety precautions and exercised questionable ethics in the creation and administration of the vaccine in the Belgian Congo in Africa.
The gist of it is this...
The Origins of AIDS probes one of the most vexing, highly charged areas of AIDS research: how and when the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was introduced to humans. Research has shown that chimpanzees carry simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a close relative of HIV. Science knows that AIDS originated in Africa, and has concluded that at some point SIV crossed over into humans and became HIV. It has been argued that the lethal contact could have come through the food supply, but there is another theory: that SIV was introduced to humans via mass polio immunization programs carried out in Africa the late 1950s. Beginning with a history of the mid-century polio eradication crusade, directors Chappell and Peix (a former biology teacher) take an in-depth look at the polio hypothesis and the furious response it has provoked in the scientific community. Their investigation ultimately leads them to modern-day Congo, site of the polio research camp set up in 1957 by the revered scientist Hilary Koprowski, inventor of an oral polio vaccine.
While it's not definitive that Koprowski's vaccine is the direct cause of the world's greatest pandemic, what is definitive, based on the investigations, is that Koprowski and his team's research of the substrate cells from which the polio vaccines were grown was lacking. And the fact that there is even a possibility that a scientist, while eliminating one disease, created a far more deadly one--out of carelessness and arrogance--brings shame upon the scientifitic community worldwide.
This theory has been refuted by a computer analysis dates the first HIV case as far back as 1930. Although, I don't know how this would excuse a scientist of possible mass administration of the disease.
Of course, all of this is predicated on the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS, which, like every other scientific theory, is in question.
This will be cross-posted at Answer this... with suggested keyword searches and additional links.
Yet another thing we can blame on Hilary.
Posted by: Joe Greenlight | June 27, 2005 at 09:54 PM