I’m quite sure’ Scientists are divided over a theory that claims Aids was created by Western virologists developing polio vaccines in Africa in the 1950s John Vidal and James Meek The Belgian Congo, 1959. The winds of change are sweeping through Africa. There are riots for self-determination in the capital, Stanleyville (now Kisangani, Congo), and chaos everywhere. In Europe and America concern is at its peak over the most feared Western disease of the time – polio. Poliovirus is common enough. It mostly gives mild, flu-like symptoms, yet if it develops in children or young people who have not built up a natural immunity it can be devastating. Virology and immunology are rapidly developing and a global race between scientists to develop and licence more effective and cheaper polio vaccines is under way. Some favour inactivated polio vaccines administered by needle, others the oral kind. One group, led by Dr Hilary Koprowski, a Polish-born American virologist and the first man to develop and give a “live” oral polio vaccine to a human, set up the Lindi research camp in the deep forest five miles from Kinshasa. What exactly took place at Lindi camp in the late 1950s is cloaked in secrecy. Forty years on, only the most basic details of the research and vaccination programmes carried out by Koprowski’s team have been fully reported. The team and drug companies involved admit that records have been lost, memories have faded. What is known is that Koprowski and his team had brought to Camp Lindi great numbers of chimps. It is known, too, that the white doctors carried out safety tests on their vaccine by injecting a new vacine Koprowsi called Chat into the chimps’ spines. They also carried out efficacy tests by vaccinating the animals and then challenging them with virulent polio viruses.
But what if the Lindi scientists were also experimenting – secretly but quite legally – by growing the vaccine in different types of tissue culture, specifically chimp kidneys? And if so, could some of the batches of the Chat vaccine have been contaminated with the Aids virus naturally carried by some of the chimps? And could the mass experimental Chat vaccinations between 1957-1960 have unwittingly led to the rapid dissemination of the Aids virus? In short, could the Lindi camp and the laboratories used by the Western doctors effectively have been the source of Aids, the disease that has to date killed more than 35-million people? No, say Koprowski, Paul Osterrieth and Stanley Plotkin, three of the white team at Lindi. Every member of the team involved in the Chat programme has strongly and categorically denied that chimp kidneys were ever used to make vaccine. There are few clues or signs at Lindi today, and the Mission Courtois Koprowski Experimental Centre is fast returning to the forest from which it was hacked. “But this is where Aids started, I’m quite sure,” says Ed Hooper, the British journalist/researcher who has spent nine years investigating the origins of Aids. All his research, he says, points towards contaminated polio vaccines being the culprit. And certainly there is an extraordinary coincidence between the Chat trials and the first incidents of Aids. “The more I looked at it, the more everything came to support the hypothesis. I’ve tried to disprove it at every point. All the time I have acted the sceptic. “I’ve interviewed everyone- Koprowski twice. I’ve sent him a set of 45 questions. But he has never replied. His memories are varying. Where I’ve hypothesised [about his actions] I have made it quite clear. I do not see how he can give categorical assurances that none of the batches of Chat vaccine made in Africa, Belgium or his laboratory was prepared in chimp kidneys.” Hooper’s book, The River, challenges the accepted establishment theory that Aids began by “natural transfer”, that it was casually passed to a human when a chimp was killed for meat or when a chimp scratched its owner. For decades, perhaps centuries, wild chimpanzees have carried a virus, SIVcpz, which is genetically close to HIV. The virus has adapted to its host: it does not give carrier chimps Aids. Occasionally, an SIV-infected chimp passed the virus on to a human being, and the virus could then mutate to adapt to its new host, and become HIV.
His findings, right or wrong, pose fundamental questions about science, the way the West used Africa as an experimental research laboratory and how science is conducting itself today. On his own, Hooper admits he would never have had the scientific acumen to prove or disprove anything so complex. He received the guidance and advice of many scientists but particularly that of the eminent Oxford-based evolutionary biologist and Royal Society research professor Bill Hamilton, an undisputed star of British science and sometimes referred to as the “father of socio-biology”. Without Hamilton’s backing the Royal Society conference held last week would never have taken place. Hooper came to the showdown understandably nervous, one of the few “laymen” ever accorded a debate at one of the world’s leading science institutions. The venerable Royal Society has played host to many a clash of scientific personalities and opinions in its 340-year history. Seldom can it have witnessed anything like the confrontation between Hooper and the accumulated weight of scores of doctorates and professorships. Hooper came with new evidence to support the vaccine hypothesis. In the past two months, he told the society, he had been back to central Africa and collected reputable eye-witness evidence that kidneys were extracted from chimps . Some of the chimps, he claimed, were sacrificed and had both kidneys removed, others had a single kidney removed and were sewn up again. He also found the original fridge where the kidneys were kept and presented circumstantial evidence that Koprowski’s chimp kidneys were sent to the United States, Belgium and, for the first time, he claimed, to at least one vaccine-making laboratory in Africa itself. “Whereas before I was 98% certain [that Aids started at Lindi camp], now I’m 100%. I’m now absolutely certain that the camp was being used to harvest the kidneys of the chimps. They [the Koprowski team] all say that they didn’t use them, but I believe they routinely extracted them and they were sent to Koprowski’s collaborators.”
Koprowski and Plotkin came out fighting: “Nothing suggests chimp kidneys were being used,” said Plotkin, who brought testaments from many scientists. He described Hooper’s correlation of vaccine tests with the first incidence of Aids as “an illusion”. Koprowski dismissed Hooper’s work as an “irresponsible fantasy”, denying he had acted unethically at any time. He admitted some facts had been lost to history but said: “We never used chimp kidneys. A switch to a new substrate would not have been a whimsical decision.” Meanwhile, the Wistar Institute in America, for which Koprowski was working in the 1950s, announced recently its analysis of the only surviving Chat vaccine, showing that it had not been contaminated. Hooper is unfazed: “It was only one batch of many. I have never claimed that all the Chat vaccine was contaminated,” he says.
Each side accused the other of lies and distortions; on one occasion, they brandished rival signed statements from the same Belgian vet of the colonial era. Hooper said “untoward approaches” had been made to scientists and health workers who had been in central Africa in the 1950s, urging them to “sign letters which would change the content or emphasis of their previous testimony.” Plotkin countered with screeds of testimonials from staff at the labs where the vaccines were made denying any knowledge of chimp kidneys being used. Hooper has had his integrity questioned throughout. His critics have accused him of being a “madman”, “a tenth-rate journalist”, a “conspiracy theorist”. John Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Cornell University, has accused him of “twisting and manipulating” facts, of being paid by his “crony Hamilton to write about his pet theory”. “Most scientists who have read your book regard you as a fool who is dabbling in a scientific area you do not understand,” he e-mailed Hooper. But he has his powerful supporters, too. Gordon Scott, former head of virology at Edinburgh University and head of the East African Veterinary Research Organisation in the 1950s, said in a recent statement he gave to Hooper: “Our naivety in the 50s misled us to assume that … healthy donors of kidneys and serum were pristine carriers of pathogens. We all did it! The sequel was unforeseen, unforgivable contamination of the live virus vaccine … Some viral contaminants were missed and novel worldwide pandemics resulted. I cannot believe that everyone is so thick that they cannot see that this is an inevitable problem that needs to be addressed. My colleagues in the Centre of Tropical Veterinary Medicine who have worked in the tropics have no difficulty in accepting your hypothesis.” It looks bad for Hooper that residual samples from the Wistar Institute have now been tested from independent labs and been found to be free of SIV contamination and to have been made from another type of primate. However, this does not necessarily prove him wrong; only that monkey kidneys were used for at least some Chat manufacture.
Hooper believes he has found – but will not divulge the details yet – someone in the Congo who almost certainly received an original, very weak contaminated Chat vaccine who is still alive and has never developed Aids. She has agreed to have a blood test but it will be some time before the results are known. On another level he is deeply worried. “This surely is the quintessential lesson that if we continue to be over-hasty in our pursuit of biotechnology advances we may as a species spark a chain reaction that leads to a terminal disaster. There are massive commercial pressures for xeno- transplantation to go ahead despite ever- present risks that undiscovered viruses may be passed from animals to humans during the transplantation process. Once again, this is an event that we may only know about years later.” BSE, known as mad cow disease, he says is a classic case of what can happen. “This investigation is an object lesson for science. I’m not sure we have moved far ahead from the 1950s when men in white coats were the priests and prophets of society. There is still an overweening arrogance in some branches of science. The attitude of we-know-best is still ever- present.”