Using computers to scan sequences for patterns and similarities, the GenBank group was able to construct a family tree, viral bit by viral bit. With PCR and the computerized telecommunications systems that allowed scientists to instantly relay their findings to one another and to GenBank, the AIDS viral files mushroomed in six years to include over 170 sequences, thus reaching proportions that gave Myers and his colleagues information that was statistically highly significant.
When the accumulated HIV-1 data was computer-analyzed, six distinct groups, or “clades,†emerged. Within clades the various types of HIV-1 differed by less than 20 percent. The clades were designated A through F, and scientists immediately saw that the various HIV subtypes clustered in distinct geographic areas.
For example, Type A was found in people in Central Africa and India. It was logical that a Central African family of viruses would make its way to India, as tens of thousands of Indians lived in the African region and regularly traveled to the Indian subcontinent. Type B was the only clade of HIV found in North America. Its members could also be found in Peru, Europe, Brazil, southern Thailand, and several parts of Africa.
The most lethal clade—one whose members seemed to kill human beings with terrifying efficiency—was Type D, which was found almost exclusively in Africa’s Lake Victoria region, encompassing Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania.
Within clades were so-called quasispecies, swarms of HIV types commonly found within individual AIDS patients, varying genetically by less than 10 percent.
And between the six clades, the GenBank group discovered, was a consistent 1992 variation of 30 percent.
When the GenBank group looked at viral strains collected in a given geographic location over a period of years they could see that HIV-1 was evolving—or mutating—at an overall rate of 1 percent per year.198 Assuming the 1 percent rate had been a consistent feature of the virus since its emergence, that would mean the clades had a common HIV ancestor that existed just thirty years prior, perhaps around 1962. And after ten years of mutating along a single course, the HIV family tree had spread out suddenly, yielding the six distinct clade lineages.
Myers called this “the Big Bang,†a deliberate turn of the phrase used by physicists to describe the moment when the density of the universe reached critical mass, causing an inconceivably massive explosion that generated all the nuclear subparticles and mass known to exist. On a humbler scale, Myers suggested that sometime in the early 1970s a biological event occurred that resulted in the sudden and explosive divergence of what had been a virtually linear evolutionary path for HIV-1. He could only speculate as to when and where that event—whatever it might have been—occurred.
Interestingly, the GenBank group’s observation, based on viral genetics, that “something explosive†happened in the early 1970s coincided reasonably well with Project SIDA and Kapita’s assertion, based on disease epidemiology in Central Africa, that a radical change took place in the region around 1975.
Beatrice Hahn’s group, as well as the University of California, San Diego, team headed by Russell Doolittle, were convinced that the human virus was a distant descendant along a lineage that began with SIV in African green monkeys. Because all seven species of African greens carried the virus harmlessly, and some animals located in the wild over 1,000 miles apart had identical SIV strains, Hahn felt certain that the virus originated in the common ancestor of all African green monkeys—a species that theoretically inhabited the continent’s rain forests over 10,000 years ago.
One disconcerting finding, however, was that African green monkeys in the Caribbean in the 1990s did not carry SIVagm. The animals were all descendant from two vervet monkeys brought from Africa by Spanish sailors to the islands sometime in the sixteenth century. If SIVagm was an ancient virus that had infected half the monkeys in the wild for centuries, it would seem logical that 50 percent of their Caribbean descendants should be infected. Desrosiers argued that the Caribbean situation could be due to a simple progenitor effect: if all the region’s African greens were truly descendant from two wild monkeys, pure chance could have resulted in a Spanish sailor’s selection of an uninfected pair of African animals.
If SIVagm was the ultimate father of all SIV/HIV viruses, the lineage events between that monkey virus and HIV-1 were sparse and mysterious. The only HIV-1 clade that didn’t fit Myers’s “Big Bang†theory was Type O, the West African group that included the ANT70 strain, which bore striking similarity to SIVcpz. Hahn and Myers guessed that the Type O clade appeared well before the rest of the HIV-1s, perhaps decades earlier.
Going back even further in time, Doolittle’s group compared the HIVs and SIVs to other so-called lentiviruses, showing that, as Doolittle put it, “HIV and visna virus [in sheep] are about as much alike as your average fungus is to a Homo sapiens.â€
But HIV was more akin to the sheep virus than to HTLV-1 and HTLV-II, once considered by Gallo, Essex, and many other American scientists to be the most likely candidates for either the etiology of AIDS or the ancestral origin of the AIDS virus.199
The availability by 1990 of advanced techniques for finding and analyzing viral genes hidden in samples of human blood or tissue prompted some scientists to go back and reanalyze the oldest HIV-1 antibody-positive samples to see if the individuals were, in fact, infected with the AIDS virus.
The “Robert R.†samples collected in 1968 in St. Louis did not, as it turned out, contain HIV viruses. Nor did the 1970 Zaire samples originally tested by the Pasteur Institute. These individuals apparently did not die of AIDS. The 1959 “Leopoldville strain†was lost by American scientists and, therefore, could never be confirmed.
The PCR data seemed to confirm Myers’s assertion that HIV-1 underwent some radical event after 1970; before that it was either virtually harmless or nearly noninfectious to human beings.
But the New York City laboratory of Dr. David Ho (at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Laboratory) used PCR techniques to study samples taken in 1959 from the Manchester sailor. The sailor was, indeed, infected, and the strain of HIV-1 found in his tissue—extracted painstakingly from paraffin histology blocks made thirty-five years earlier by the Manchester hospital—fit perfectly in the Type B clade. Indeed, Ho concluded that the Manchester sailor was infected with a virus that “looks just like a contemporary European HIV-1 B-type strain.â€
That seemed to throw a serious monkey wrench in Myers’s Big Bang theory. Myers, however, felt the sailor was an aberration; “the preponderance of evidence still argues for an explosive event in the mid-1970s,†he said. Furthermore, he insisted that the HIV-1 virus was fairly new, certainly only a few decades old, not centuries.
Ho and a number of other virologists disagreed, arguing that HIV-1 was “an ancient virus†that had existed at a low level in human beings for centuries. If an explosive surge occurred in the 1970s, as all epidemiological evidence indicated, it was due to human events, not to biological changes in the virus.200
And what might those human events have been?
First of all, they had to have taken place simultaneously on at least two continents: Africa and North America. Though the Manchester sailor had the AIDS Type B strain in 1959, he could have become infected during travels to the United States or Canada. There is no evidence that he traveled in Central Africa. In the early 1980s all original European AIDS cases directly or indirectly involved visitors from North America and Africa.
If one of the explosive epidemics preceded the other—Africa’s or North America’s—it could not have been by many years; perhaps one preceded the other only by months.
In light of this duality in occurrence many people sought iatrogenic or conspiratorial explanations for the appearance of HIV-1. One set of theories shared the belief that HIV-1 entered the Homo sapiens population via vaccine prod
ucts. Topping the suspect list was a batch of live polio vaccine that was prepared on African green monkey kidney cells.201 The vaccines derived from that batch were widely dispensed between 1957 and 1960 in Zaire, Rwanda, and Burundi. Another polio vaccine distributed by Lederle in 1977 was suspected of containing “C-type particles†that some critics later claimed were AIDS viruses. A scientific panel was assembled in the United States in 1992–93 to review available samples of early polio vaccines, as well as the safety and laboratory techniques used by polio pioneers of the late 1950s. After careful study it was concluded that the polio vaccines were HIV-free.202
There were several other reasons to reject the polio vaccine hypothesis. To begin with, HIV-1 and SIVagm were only distantly related at the genetic level, so it seemed unlikely that in less than twenty years’ time viruses originally from African green monkey cells could have mutated some 60 percent of their nucleotides to produce HIV-1.203
Another theory, that a contaminated polio vaccine batch allegedly used in 1977 by American homosexuals to treat herpes was actually the source of AIDS, could be dismissed both because the vaccine was not AIDS-CONTAMINATED and because the timing was wrong. Clearly, 1977 was too late a date. Furthermore, the 1977 vaccine was used widely on populations that did not go on to develop AIDS—Polish schoolchildren, for example.
Two far more elaborate theories of vaccine origin of the AIDS epidemic put the blame on the global campaign to eliminate smallpox. The first version of the smallpox idea was promoted by The Times of London in 1987. It claimed that long-latent, ancient HIV infections were activated when people were vaccinated against smallpox. Failing to prove a connection between HIV and the smallpox campaign, five years later the same newspaper would lead an international campaign to discredit HIV’s role in AIDS altogether.
The second twist on the smallpox theory, whose chief proponents were an anti-genetic engineering group called the Foundation for Economic Trends and an anti-vivisectionist organization in Los Angeles, claimed smallpox viruses grown on cow cells recombined in test tubes with the bovine leukemia virus, producing HIV.204 Genetic sequence analysis of the smallpox and BLV viruses indicated that it would be impossible to create, through either deliberate or mistaken recombination of the two, anything that even remotely resembled HIV.
Nevertheless, a retired physician living in London, Dr. John Seale, asserted in 1985 that the AIDS virus was absolutely the result of genetic engineering—the deliberate outcome of biological weaponry experiments conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland, by the U.S. Army.
“I’m totally convinced it’s man-made,†Seale said.
In an editorial published by the Royal Society of Medicine,205 Seale argued that HIV was the result of deliberately mixing bits of the genetic sequences of BLV, visna (from sheep), two other lentiviruses found in horses and goats, and HTLV-I.
“It looks like a recombinant virus to me,†Seale said, adding, “We are accusing the retrovirologists as a group of making this virus.â€
As evidence for his assertions Seale cited the work of Soviet scientist S. Drozdov of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow. Drozdov and other Soviet scientists were, in turn, influenced by retired East Berlin scientist Jacob Segal, of Humboldt University. Segal wrote a report, read throughout Eastern Europe, that claimed the AIDS virus was made at Fort Detrick in 1977 from a deliberate mixture of visna and HTLV-I. Though it had been the subject of discreet discussion inside the Soviet bloc for over a year, the Segal report was first publicly distributed at the 1986 Summit of the Nonaligned Movement, which convened in September in Harare, Zimbabwe. Over subsequent months the Segal and Seale reports got wide international play, particularly in developing countries.206
The seventy-six-year-old Segal claimed to be the victim of CIA harassment. And he said that he possessed, but refused to reveal, documents proving that U.S. prisoners were injected with various experimental combinations of visna and HTLV-I until the perfect lethal form, HIV, was found. All this, he said, took place in 1977.
That such sophisticated forms of cloning hadn’t yet been invented in 1977 did not seem to faze Segal. And the Segal/Seale notion that AIDS was the result of a sinister CIA plot found favor in many quarters, particularly African countries that felt unjustly targeted and blamed by American scientists as the origin of AIDS. A popular Soviet cartoon pictured an American scientist who was exchanging a test tube full of swastikas for a wad of cash, proffered by a general. At the characters’ feet lay dead bodies.
In a blame-counterblame campaign, the U.S. State Department widely distributed a detailed denial in 1987, charging the KGB had concocted the entire campaign in order to discredit American government credibility in developing countries.207 Years later, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet National Academy of Sciences would formally apologize for the accusation, acknowledging that it had been KGB-inspired.
Another theory of deliberate recombination came from Los Angeles anti-vivisectionist Dr. Robert Strecker, who gained a large following in 1987 by again claiming, on the basis of a supposed BLV connection, that the CIA made the AIDS virus.
“The AIDS virus was manufactured by crossing BLV and visna virus from animals into man to make the AIDS virus, and growing it in human tissue culture, and that’s AIDS. And that’s not complicated,†Strecker said in a fund-raising speech before wealthy North Hollywood residents. Asked why such a monstrous thing was done, Strecker said the CIA “requested it, to make cancer.â€
“Why would they want to make cancer?†he was asked.
“You’d have to ask them, I don’t know. I don’t know! Everybody wants to know why, why, why! I’m just telling you how they did it. I’m not going to tell you why, that’s for you to find out,†Strecker concluded.
Though Seale, Segal, and Strecker disappeared from the AIDS scene fairly quickly, they were replaced all over the world by others who saw in the apparently sudden appearance of HIV something terribly insidious, deliberate, even conspiratorial. The New York Native gay newspaper spent years promoting the notion that AIDS was caused by a CIA attempt to wipe out the agricultural economy of Cuba through release of African swine fever virus—the true cause of AIDS, they said, not HIV. Years later the same newspaper would abandon the African swine fever theory, claiming instead that AIDS and chronic fatigue syndrome were the same disease, both of which were caused by HHV-6, a herpes-type virus. A Vietnam War veteran living in St. Cloud, Minnesota, devoted years of his life to dispersing letters and pamphlets naming dioxin chemicals as the cause of AIDS: again, a conspiracy was afoot, involving a massive cover-up of the worldwide use of Agent Orange and the poisoning of the planet by the petrochemical industry that was destroying humanity’s white blood cells. In 1986 the North Korean government charged that AIDS was created in a South Korean laboratory by, of course, the CIA with the goal of wiping out the North Koreans. The fact that virtually no Koreans had AIDS in 1986 was ignored.
Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, British astronomers, announced in 1986 that the AIDS virus came from outer space.
And sidestepping altogether the issue of the origin of HIV, University of California at Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg declared that it didn’t matter where HIV originated. The virus had nothing to do with AIDS, he said. Duesberg claimed that AIDS was not an infectious disease and had no association with any virus: the disease commonly called AIDS had existed since the beginning of time, but seemed “epidemic†in the 1980s because people were injecting narcotics, snorting nitrites, taking amphetamines, getting parasitic diseases that scientists labeled “AIDS,†and leading what he called “a self-destructive gay lifestyle.â€208
“I don’t mind to be shot up with it as long as it is a clean virus, without other junk, because I’m fully convinced it’s not the cause of AIDS,†Duesbe
rg said.
While Duesberg’s theories were debunked point by point by scientists all over the world, the public attraction to his ideas was strong, in part because they suggested that such things as consistent condom use might not be necessary. And because blame for having a deadly disease could be leveled straight at the victim—the individual who led a “bad lifestyle†that caused an illness.209
Though evidence for HIV as the cause of AIDS, the bona fide existence of a pandemic of infectious immunodeficiency, its evolutionary link to a family of monkey viruses, and its recent large-scale outbreak on earth was overwhelming, collective denial coupled with historically valid feelings of group persecution would continue to support acceptance of dark, conspiratorial theories. The most striking example of this was provided by University of Maryland researchers Stephen Thomas and Sandra Crouse Quinn, who conducted public opinion polls between 1988 and 1990 among working- and middle-class African-American residents of suburban Maryland, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Charlotte (North Carolina), Detroit, Kansas City (Missouri), and Tuscaloosa (Alabama). Among 999 surveyed members of church congregations, 65 percent either agreed with or were unsure about the statement: “I believe AIDS is a form of genocide against the black race.†Nearly 40 percent of African-American Washington, D.C., college students agreed with the statement: “I believe there is some truth in reports that the AIDS virus was produced in a germ-warfare laboratory.â€210
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