A tempest that has been raging in the outwardly dignified world of academia is set to die down with the publication today of three papers in Nature and one in Science. The story -- about the origin of AIDS -- is one of intrigue, mystery and death. Mostly, however, it is about death.
AIDS is the world's leading infectious killer and the fourth-commonest cause of death. More than 30 million people have AIDS, and more than 19 million people, most of them Africans, have died of the disease.
In 1999, a British journalist, Edward Hooper, alleged that the AIDS pandemic is man-made, the result of the contamination of polio vaccines used in Africa in the late 1950s. Conspiracy theorists will tell you that, in fact, the CIA manufactured and spread HIV, but they'll have trouble backing up their claim. Hooper, however, spent more than nine years researching his theory, conducting more than 600 interviews with scientists and traveling widely across Africa. His arguments were published in his book "The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS," which ran over 1,000 pages.