But what of the genesis of the retrovirus HIV? Where did it come from?
We have a clear answer.
It came from a primate. The field agrees the precursor to HIV was the simian immunodeficiency virus or SIV.
To be more precise, the human virus came from a monkey or chimpanzee virus.
After that, any potential areas of agreement break down.
I vividly recall working as a technician at the Biological Response Modifiers Program at Fort Detrick in the early 1980s, where it was my job to isolate HIV from samples and find a cell line or tissue to grow the virus. If you can’t grow the virus outside a human body, you can’t study it.
What we were told at the time was that the disease probably jumped to humans as a result of Africans forgetting
how to cook their food, in this case chimpanzees, often referred to as “bush meat,” and that the promiscuous sexual lifestyles of African peoples (with implications of possible bestiality with primates) led to the cross-species jump and spread of the virus among the human population. I am now appalled that at the time we did not more closely question these assumptions.
Since that time, there have been two competing and, in my mind, closely related theories of how a chimpanzee retrovirus made the jump to humans.
The first was popularized by the journalist Edward Hooper and expanded upon in his lengthy 1999 book, The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, for which he conducted more than six hundred interviews. Of the interviews conducted, Hooper was most impressed with evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton, who, along with other independent researchers such as Louis Pascal, Tom Curtis, and Blaine Elswood, was proposing an idea that, before my work with XMRV, I would have found quite radical.
They proposed that the jump from chimpanzees to humans came as a result of vaccine trials in the Belgian Congo from 1957 to 1960 in which more than five hundred common chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) were killed so that their kidney cells and sera could be used to grow the oral polio vaccine. This vaccine was subsequently administered to more than a million Africans during that time period.
Hooper suggests there was great resistance to this idea, since even in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was little public support for the idea of using chimpanzees in such medical experiments. In addition, the Belgian royal family was publicly supporting the idea of wildlife conservation, and the revelation of these actions would go against that image. Hooper believes another reason for resistance to his idea is that if his theory was accepted, it would shake public confidence in the medical establishment as well as lead to multibillion-dollar class action lawsuits for the AIDS epidemic.
This is what Edward Hooper has written on his website about the circumstances surrounding the creation of HIV-AIDS from these experiments and why it makes more sense than the competing bush-meat and “cut hunter” theory.
"By contrast, the oral polio vaccine (OPV) theory proposes that an experimental OPV that had been locally prepared in
chimpanzee cells and administered by mouth, or “fed,” to nearly one million Africans in vaccine trials staged in the then Belgian-ruled territories of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi between 1957 and 1960, represents the origin of the AIDS pandemic. It provides a historically-supported background: that between 1956 and 1959 over 500 common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthi and Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees (Pan paniscus) were housed together at Lindi Camp (Near Stanleyville in the Belgian Congo, or DRC).3"
Hooper goes on to explain that the use of chimpanzees was not technically prohibited by any conventions, but that in most countries around the world at the time, Asian macaques were used in polio virus preparation. As for the claim of other outbreaks, Hooper believes they fit comfortably within the bounds of his theory:
"
The OPV theory ascribes the minor outbreaks of AIDS caused by other variants of HIV-1 (Group O, Group N and the more controversial “Group P”) to other polio vaccines (both oral and injected) that were prepared in the cells of chimpanzees and administered in French Equatorial Africa (including Congo Brazzaville and Gabon) in the same late fifties period. It ascribes the outbreak of AIDS from HIV-2 (of which it maintains that only two were epidemic outbreaks) to other polio vaccines (both oral and injected) that were prepared in the cells of sooty mangabeys (or other monkeys that had been caged with sooty mangabeys) and administered in French West Africa in 1956–1960. All the other HIV-2 groups that are claimed by bush-meat theorists have infected just a single person, and some OPV theory supporters argue that dead-end, non-transmissible infections such as these are the natural fate of SIVs that infect human beings via the bushmeat route: that unless they are introduced in an artificial manner (as via a vaccine), they simply die out.4"
But what happened after we started reading and sharing, is that it made us much happier. Don't underestimate the power of a story that takes you on an emotional ride AND has a happy ending! 
