Overall, this is a very good book. Even if you do not believe the author's theory, I still highly recommend it for the author covers a lot of aspects of the medical field that one might not necessarily learn in school or in the newspapers.
These include making and testing vaccines, animal testing, human testing, obtaining funding for medical research, scientific protocol, relationships between the medical community and governments, medical reporting, competition in the medical community, statistical sampling, and epidimiology.
Gordon, MD, MPH Perhaps it is because I am a physician with a background in public health who also had polio as a child that I am so captivated by the narrative that Mr. Hooper tells. In spite of its length and weight I could not put the book down till I finished it. Hooper is an extraordinary persistant journalist and detective as well as raconteur, ferreting out details of process, politics, culture, and personality to weave an extraordinary story about the possible origins of the AIDS epidemic.
In spite of the fact that he is the ardent advocate of a horrific iconoclastic hypothesis he tells the story of his searches in a most honest andeven handed way. His laying out in fine detail the history of the development of the polio vaccine, of medical research in tropical Africa, Europe and the United States both in technical terms and in the personalities involved, and the investigation of the earliest AIDS cases is a tour de force.
All this in a first person narrative that reads like a detective story. As a reader I felt introduced on intimate level to the many people and locales on three continents where these events unfold. This book teaches us to admire the verve, creativity, and daring of medical innovators as well as their arrogance, while at the same time, whatever actually happended, the events in retrospect constitute a spiritual lesson in humility.
Step by step he takes you through his investigations and interviews, seeking to prove the link between the sudden appearance of HIV-1 and some shabbily-constructed mass trials of a polio vaccine in the s. In a vanity contest with Sabin and Salk, the lesser-known Koprowski took various experimental shortcuts that seem reckless in hindsight.
It's amazing to see the way Hooper cuts through the obfuscations and obstructions of the science establishment, and sifts facts from the few living people associated with the trials. With the casual racism of the day, these were mostly conducted in the Congo, or on handicapped children or newborns at prisons and hospitals in the US. A sneaking suspicion that 'Hooper may be right' builds into almost total conviction that this theory bears intensive investigation by the time you reach the halfway mark.
Almost incredibly, the records of these 'trials' -- I put them in quote marks because they were not properly conducted, by any scientific standards of today, or of the time -- are either incomplete, or 'missing. Quite probably, if Hopper has it right -- and it seems he does -- some of the living players ought to be facing a grand jury investigation, in view of the millions who have suffered in the resulting plague of AIDS. Later, it would be the setting of The Heart of Darkness. Doctors and scientists in the heart of darkness indeed as The River explains in its long, well-documented, exhaustive tale of secretive, unregulated medical research.
This book's author interviews hundreds of individuals involved in this process, goes over countless documents, and from it, pieces together the following story. After WWII there was a race to find a vaccine for polio that could be administered orally. Numerous groups of scientists from around the world took part in this race; the prize being fame, fortune, and patents galore.
In public, these teams agreed to perform all their research in Western countries, document everything, and only conduct tests on adults who had signed written consent forms. In reality, many of these teams flocked to the Africa Congo to perform large-scale tests on unwitting and unknowing human populations, often without oversight by the press or medical institutions.
These groups would inject various African primates with polio, extract serum from the infected primates, and using this serum to make experimental vaccines which would then be given to the local human populations.
This book contends that by this process, HIV was accidentally transmitted from certain monkeys into humans. The author provides numerous pieces of evidence in proof of this theory. First, the very same villages in the Congo where HIV was first discovered also happened to be the very same villages in which the polio tests were performed.
Second, HIV was diagnosed in these villages 10 - 20 years after the polio tests were performed. Third, none of the other currently existing theories can explain how a primate virus passed into the human population, and spread so quickly, over a period of 4 decades, given that the two populations of monkeys and humans had coexisted in the same habitat since the dawn of man without any such transmission.
Fourth, during public hearings in the s, the various teams presented their oral vaccines to the world scientific community. One team found an unknown immunodeficiency virus in one of the samples provided by another team.
Hmmm, an unknown immunodeficiency virus Fifth, the scientists that conducted these trials in the Congo are unwilling to release their samples and scientific data for public scrutiny, even though all the patents and honors have already been distributed Overall, this is a very good book. Even if you do not believe the author's theory, I still highly recommend it for the author covers a lot of aspects of the medical field that one might not necessarily learn in school or in the newspapers.
Finally, it is intensely engaging to read. This great river became famous in Western minds in the s with the journeys of Dr. Later, it would be the setting of The Heart of Darkness. Doctors and scientists in the heart of darkness indeed as The River explains in its long, well-documented, exhaustive tale of secretive, unregulated medical research.
This book's author interviews hundreds of individuals involved in this process, goes over countless documents, and from it, pieces together the following story. After WWII there was a race to find a vaccine for polio that could be administered orally. Numerous groups of scientists from around the world took part in this race; the prize being fame, fortune, and patents galore.
In public, these teams agreed to perform all their research in Western countries, document everything, and only conduct tests on adults who had signed written consent forms. In reality, many of these teams flocked to the Africa Congo to perform large-scale tests on unwitting and unknowing human populations, often without oversight by the press or medical institutions.
These groups would inject various African primates with polio, extract serum from the infected primates, and using this serum to make experimental vaccines which would then be given to the local human populations. This book contends that by this process, HIV was accidentally transmitted from certain monkeys into humans. The author provides numerous pieces of evidence in proof of this theory. First, the very same villages in the Congo where HIV was first discovered also happened to be the very same villages in which the polio tests were performed.
Second, HIV was diagnosed in these villages 10 - 20 years after the polio tests were performed. Third, none of the other currently existing theories can explain how a primate virus passed into the human population, and spread so quickly, over a period of 4 decades, given that the two populations of monkeys and humans had coexisted in the same habitat since the dawn of man without any such transmission.
Fourth, during public hearings in the s, the various teams presented their oral vaccines to the world scientific community. One team found an unknown immunodeficiency virus in one of the samples provided by another team. Hmmm, an unknown immunodeficiency virus Fifth, the scientists that conducted these trials in the Congo are unwilling to release their samples and scientific data for public scrutiny, even though all the patents and honors have already been distributed A very thorough look at how HIV might have first been spread to humans and then eventually lead to an epidemic.
Since it's a very thorough and very long book, there is quite a lot of repetition. Also, Hooper wrote the sections as he investigated so that makes the narrative longer and sometimes harder to follow. In fact, maybe he does a better job than most scientists since he is looking at it from the outside. I had high hopes for this book, but it's impenetrable, disorganised and hopelessly wordy. The thread of the author's argument gets lost well before the half way mark, and it's an uncomfortable mixture of investigative journalism, science and biographical ramblings.
View 1 comment. Jan 06, Barry Phillips rated it it was amazing. Makes a persuasive case to support his thesis that AIDS was essentially a man-made epidemic. Feb 07, Wonderlandkat rated it liked it. The best researched conspiracy theory you'll ever read in your entire life.
Jun 01, barbara stanisz rated it it was amazing. While I am not a virologist or even a doctor of any type, this book was written in a style that I could understand. An amazing premise that is even more pertinent to right now. It is pitiful that this book showed that the medical establishment could not then and still cannot be trusted to police itself. Koprowski should be vilified by the medical community for his research methods and his total lack of regard for human life and instead he is held up as a hero.
This man experimented on the mentally handicapped in the US without consent. What an eye opener this book was. Jan 04, diana Mackin rated it it was amazing. This is real journalism -- what journalism used to be. Excellent and well-researched, including Hooper's traveling the globe to get first-hand accounts and interviews. Kennedy Jr's The Real Anthony Fauci, I was thrilled to realize Hooper's book had laid a great deal of g This is real journalism -- what journalism used to be.
Kennedy Jr's The Real Anthony Fauci, I was thrilled to realize Hooper's book had laid a great deal of groundwork for understanding those two worthy books. This is not past history, or it certainly isn't right now -- the same issues arising in the 80s are surfacing now, and we, especially within western civilization, need to take this on and fix it. Mar 15, Jean Marie Angelo rated it really liked it Shelves: history. I stumbled across this book on YouTube because it received a prominent mention in a free documentary on the origin of AIDS.
Edward Hooper presents a captivating theory that the OPV vaccine developed in the late s unwittingly unleashed the HIV virus on humanity. His theory has been challenged and debunked, but the idea still fascinates me. If the pages could be summed up with any questions it would be, "Why now? Hooper goes on to write, "If as seemed increasingly likely SIVs had been had been present in African monkeys for many thousands of years, why was it only now that many of these viruses had been transferred into humans?
Hilary Koprowski, developed their important oral polio vaccines in the late s with tissue taken from chimpanzees infected with the simian immunodeficiency virus. This SIV contaminated vaccines were "tested" on unwitting subjects in African villages and in prisons and children's homes in the United States.
While Koprowski denied that he could have unleashed HIV on humans with his vaccine, he was incredibly uncooperative in released research data, notes, and old samples of his vaccine. While I was gripped by the topic and Hooper's theories, this became one long, ponderous read. What started as an easy and understandable story because a real labor. Not for the faint of heart. Jul 19, Ryan rated it really liked it Shelves: favoritebooks.
This book was a difficult read but it was an amazing story. It's a bit like reading a doctoral thesis or a legal brief at times. Because of the controversial nature of his theory he is forced to make his case in the most detailed way possible, which results in a sometime tedious writing style. The author's basic claim is extremely inflammatory: he explains why he believes that AIDS was inadvertently created by American and European doctors in Central Africa during the late s as a result of t This book was a difficult read but it was an amazing story.
The author's basic claim is extremely inflammatory: he explains why he believes that AIDS was inadvertently created by American and European doctors in Central Africa during the late s as a result of their search for a Polio vaccine. They used "monkey kidney tissue culture" to propagate the vaccines. At this point in time SIV simian immuno-deficiency virus had not yet been discovered but was apparently very common.
They theory is that monkey kidney tissue culture infected with SIV went undetected into the polio vaccine and mutated into HIV. The vaccine was then, in fact, given to hundreds of thousands of Africans.
Interestingly it also documents the fact that the first known case of HIV wasn't in the early s as is generally assumed but was in Sep 30, Lisa Gallagher rated it liked it Shelves: nonfiction , history , mystery , africa , pandemic , conspiracies , s.
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