Did Polio Researchers Create AIDS?

Was AIDS caused by human error? That's the intriguing question that former BBC reporter Edward Hooper tries to answer in The River (Little, Brown), an exhaustive but quite readable tome that is part travelogue, part scientific inquiry, part investigative journalism. Hooper tries to establish what a panel of scientists convened in 1992 could not--that HIV spread from chimps to man in contaminated experimental polio vaccines that were tested in Africa. He comes close--very close--but falls short of the smoking-gun evidence that would put the issue to rest.

Hooper re-creates the early days of polio-vaccine research and weaves this narrative into the story of HIV's origins, which is pretty solid until it hits Africa. HIV can be traced back to bustling villages along the Congo River in the 1950s. From there, however, the story line frays into dozens of related but possibly unconnected threads. Hooper picks up several of these, including, tantalizingly, the fact that the earliest recorded AIDS cases coincide almost perfectly with a map of the polio-vaccine testing sites. But there is no evidence that cells from African chimps were used to make the vaccines, or that the chimps were infected with HIV.

Which brings Hooper back to where he started--with an intriguing question and no definitive answer. A half-century after the trials, there's not much hard evidence left. Samples of the original vaccines still exist, but time may have degraded them; any analysis would be far from convincing.

Still, Hooper's efforts may not be in vain. We know that HIV moved from chimps to people. Figuring out precisely how could help researchers create effective treatments for aids--and maybe, someday, a vaccine.