Michael Worobey’s possession of 1950s tissue samples from Stanleyville (Kisangani).

Michael Worobey’s first active participation in the origins-of-AIDS debate is believed to have occurred in late 1999, when Professor Bill Hamilton (a highly-respected evolutionary biologist, then rated by many as the “star” of the Royal Society) was seeking someone to accompany him on his second trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to test the SIV of wild chimpanzees.

Some background. Since I first met him in 1993, Bill Hamilton had been my mentor, and he wrote a powerful and highly supportive foreword to “The River”. In July 1999, after the book was completed but before it was published, Bill and I spent just over a week in the DRC, but we had some quite serious disagreements during the trip, which focussed on whether I was there mainly to help him with the collection of samples from local chimpanzees, or was also there to conduct my own historical research into Lindi Camp and the Laboratoire Medical de Stanleyville. We had obtained visas from the rebel government based in Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville) that were good for six further months, and Bill in particular wanted to return there to do more research. Since he and I were, by late 1999, still going through a cooling-off period (and since I was busy dealing with the response to The River, published in September 1999), Bill looked around for a companion in his own Department of Zoology at Oxford University, and came across a young Rhodes Scholar, Michael Worobey, who suggested that they also bring along a Canadian friend of his, Jeff Joy, who had practical skills and experience of living in the wilds.

Michael Worobey’s wobbly research into the early history of HIV.

In late October and early November 2007 there was coverage in several media outlets (mainly in the US) of a newly-published study entitled “The Emergence of HIV/AIDS in the Americas and Beyond”. The lead author was Michael Worobey, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Worobey’s study focuses on the early spread of HIV-1 and AIDS out of Africa – and to the rest of the world. It concludes that, after it emerged from Africa, the first staging-post of pandemic HIV-1 was on the island of Haiti, and that it was from there that the virus later moved on to the United States and Canada. (The phrase “pandemic HIV-1” is used to mean the type of HIV that is found predominantly in North America and Europe: the so-called “Euro-American strain” of HIV-1, known officially as HIV-1 Group M, sub-type B.)

In itself this seems a reasonable hypothesis, one that was first mentioned in the non-medical literature as long ago as 1987, when it was proposed in Randy Shilts’ seminal book on the AIDS epidemic, “And The Band Played On” [New York: St Martin’s Press]. It is one of several hypotheses that seek to explain how the human immunodeficiency virus arrived on the North American continent, three of which are outlined below.

Professor Brian Martin, the sociologist of science from Wollongong University, Australia, first entered the origins of AIDS debate in 1991, when he arranged for the publication of Louis Pascal's seminal monograph on the OPV theory: "What Happens When Science Goes Bad?". He has never concealed his belief that the OPV hypothesis has not been fairly treated by mainstream Science, and since about 1997, he has given me a great deal of helpful feedback on my work. During the last 15 years he has written a number of essays on origins-of-AIDS - and his sense of fairness and balance, plus his track-record as a defender of free speech in Science, have won the respect of all sides in the debate. At the Royal Society conference in 2000, he made a speech on "The burden of proof and the origin of AIDS" which caused a significant amount of defensive anger among supporters of Hilary Koprowski and the bushmeat theory. In his latest essay on "Contested Testimony", available here, he examines the question of whose testimony on key issues such as the CHAT campaigns in Africa (that gathered by Stanley Plotkin and associates, or that gathered by Edward Hooper and associates) is more likely to be reliable.

EH 3/11/07

I have greatly enjoyed the feedback and comment which this site has engendered since it first opened three years ago.

During those three years I have received thousands of messages and enquiries, and I have replied to the great majority. Occasionally one slips through the net, and to those persons I have failed to respond to, I do apologise.

Incredibly, whenever there has been comment from my readers, it has been positive. Sometimes people have debated with me about this or that aspect of the work, but all the feedback (where there has been feedback) has been extremely kind, and has encouraged me to continue my work. By chance, the first exception to this arrived this past week, but it was a letter couched in reassuringly childish terms of personal abuse, and not one to cause too many sleepless nights!

NEWSFLASH: How to buy "The River" on CD, and "The Origins of AIDS" on DVD.

For the last year or more, I have received enquiries on virtually a daily basis from people who wanted to buy my book "The River", or the film documentary that highlighted my research: "The Origins of AIDS". Recently both have been difficult to obtain, and copies of "The River" have been selling second-hand for prices of up to $200 US. Happily, and after many months of delays, there is now some good news to report on both fronts.