SCIENCE
Author/Title: Hamilton, W.D.: LE 39303
I do not see the point of publishing this comment in Science, for
several reasons.
First, and most importantly, this does not break new ground in a
useful way. The scientific issues raised have been covered in prior
correspondence and comment in science and elsewhere (for example,
Science 256:1259, 1992; 257:1074, 1992; and
255:1905, 1992). The "Random Samples" piece alluded to seemed
to me quite neutral in tone, hardly constituting "thorough dismissal"
of the underlying hypothesis (however appropriate such dismissal
might be).
Second, this reviewer is astonished by the author's "astonishment"
about Dr. Koprowski's decision to sue the Rolling Stone. I do not
know much about British jurisprudence (beyond that acquired from John
Mortimer and Leo McKern), but a treasured (and widely exercised)
American freedom is the right of anyone to sue anybody for anything.
No matter how carefully researched and reasoned, the Curtis article
was based on a speculative hypothesis. There is a large difference
between publication of such hypotheses in the scientific literature
and in the popular press. Such publications have often been sued, for
example, for labeling celebrities as fathers of illegitimate children
on the basis of similar kinds of reasoning. Is it not a more serious
offense to label someone as the "father" of a whole epidemic and
millions of deaths?
Third, as Professor Hamilton acknowledges, the polio vaccine
hypothesis has serious flaws. What he fails to acknowledge is that
there is a far better general theory (also a feasible one) for the
origin of the epidemic. He misleads himself (as do many others) by
assuming (in the second sentence of the last paragraph on the first
page) that the origin of the epidemic can be traced to "unusual"
events. Given the virtually identical spread of at least two
different viruses (HIV-1 and -2) and the very long history of
infection of monkeys in Africa, how "unusual" can the events have
been to have occurred virtually simultaneously? As with other
zoonotic infections, it is far more likely that humans have
frequently been infected with HIV ancestors, and that, until
recently, social conditions were unsuitable for efficient spread of
the virus from individual to individual. The important variable them
[sic] would be changing conditions in Africa following the
end of World War II which promoted sufficiently efficiently spread to
allow the epidemic to begin.
Given the close association between monkeys and humans in Africa with
ample opportunity for transmission (through butchery, for example) it
is inconceivable that frequent transmission of SIV into humans has
not been occurring for a very long time. The small additional and
improbable transmission by the vaccination efforts are highly
unlikely to have contributed materially to the numbers of
SIV-infected individuals. Sero and molecular epidemiological surveys
of individuals at risk could readily test these ideas.
Finally, the issues of extract vaccine samples and the use of primary
simian cultures for vaccine production also have been thoroughly
discussed before and the present comments bring nothing new to the
table. Although there has been a lot of agitation to have Wistar
samples tested by PCR, it must be pointed out that a negative result
of such tests would not be very informative, as proponents of the
theory could reasonably argue that only an occasional culture would
have been expected to be contaminated. More useful would be to do a
large survey of samples from similar primary monkey kidney cultures
whether used for vaccine production or not. This would provide a much
more definitive test as to whether there was any possibility of such
contamination and could be done by an interested laboratory with
appropriate resources (perhaps even the author).
Polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS
in the subsection on W D Hamilton's rejected submission to Science.
It is located on the website on suppression of dissent.