Customer Reviews

The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS

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The title of this book refers to the Congo River of Africa. This great river became famous in Western minds in the 1800s with the journeys of Dr. Livingstone. 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 1950s, 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... sounds like HIV to me... 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. 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.

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. Mr. 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.

If there was a Nobel Prize for Journalism, Hooper should get it. 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 1950s. 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.' The book reflects no credit on the drug industry, doctors' codes of secrecy, or medical ethics. 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. It's the science book of the year, unparalleled since Rhodes' "Making Of The Atomic Bomb."

As a Biology and Pre-med student in 1999, I purchased this book fresh off the shelf, when it was first being sold. Dedicated to the world of science and research, I was eager to learn more about health, science, diseases, and the epidemic called AIDS.

As other reviewers have stated, this book is an excellent body of investigative research. It is also speculative in some instances to bridge the gaps between science and reality. I believe Hooper stayed as neutral as possible. He did interview many people, but guards against letting contaminate his own views in recording the evidence. The results are very clear and concise. The answers are all supported very thoroughly.

This book was inspiring to me because it opened the eyes of a dedicated young scientist (myself) to the dangers of science. There is corruption in every system, even one founded on saving people's lives! For the love of humanity, I do not understand how competition and greed has been so interlaced with our medical system from researchers to personal doctors, but it has. People should know the truth. This book takes one huge step towards revealing it! Aids is not the only epidemic or disease created by our own hands.


Thank you Mr. Hooper!

~SS

What led me to get this book is that I have still not heard anything convincing as to what caused the AIDS pandemic. Particularly, the "monkey bite" or "sexual transmission during intercourse with monkeys" explanation doesn't seem to make much sense to me, nor do any of the many "conspiracy theories" out there. So I figured, I see what this author has to say and whether or not it makes any more sense in explaining where AIDS came from than what I've come across so far.

The sheer number of pages in this book has originally scared me a little, and I was also concerned whether or not I'd be able to understand the scientific background this author bases his theory on. So I started the book almost reluctantly, but after the first 100 pages or so, I was completely hooked. It is voluminous, but easy to read and, despite its actually dry subject, a surprisingly suspensefull read. The points made appear to be well researched and backed up, and all is explained in a fashion that can be followed by a non-scientist. And even more importantly, the book presents a theory of the origin of AIDS that is at least as plausible, if not much more so than any other I've ever come across. I would even go as far as to say that if the theory presented in this book has been or were to be proven wrong, it would still be a very worthwhile read as a throught-provoking fiction thriller. In any case and at the very least, it is a testimonial of incredible research and writing skills, not to mention invested effort, and worthwhile a closer look.

When I read a book that tells me new and important things about the world that I have been living in, i note the pages with important info with paperclips. This book is easily a 100-200 paperclip book.

Only other books that compare to this in my large library, devoted to the history of the USA since 1933, are THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes and THE ORIGINS OF THE KOREAN WAR by Bruce Cumings.

I have yet to finish the book, I am only finished with chapter 39[out of 58], but these 535 pages were consumed in two evenings, late.

The fascination for me was learning about a set of medical research activities of which I was unaware. From my high school biology I had learned that vaccines were cultured in eggs. What a shock to learn that live polio vaccines were cultured from the cuisinarted kidneys of wild primates.

As of page 535, my only complaint is that I would have liked Hooper to have spent a chapter, with photos, illustrating the mechanism[s] of vaccine production.

As Hooper has developed the recounting of his odyssey, so far, it seems to me clear that there have been a number of knowledgeable medicos who looked the other way when confronted with the Koprowski procedures, a number of medicos who buttoned their lips after the loose scientific procedures went astray.

In closing, I want to add that I passed this book by for weeks because I felt that there was nothing new that I could learn about viral diseases[HIV, AIDs]. And then I read a squib in a newspaper recently where the CDC was recommending that live[oral] polio vaccinations be discontinued as the entire method of polio vaccination. When I read that, I immediately ordered this book.

Vaccines as a business. As a claim to gold and glory.

A perfect sidelight history on the postWW2 era.

Indispensable for understanding the investigative process as it pertains to causation.

The best investigative book of the decade.

A wonderful book which clearly explains some intriguing, if unproven, theories. As much a cautionary tale as a scientific work.

In reference to the Clinical Infectious Diseases article (2001;32:1068-1084), it should be noted that the author of this article was one of the scientists possibly implicated by this book.

Hooper experienced many roadblocks during his research for the book and many of them were placed before him by eminent scientists who preferred not to get involved in a book which might harm the reputation of their profession by suggesting that it may have been responsible (accidentally or otherwise) for disastrous wrongdoing during the development of the OPV.

In the article, the author acknowledges the assistance and input from many of his colleagues in the scientific profession. Personally, I believe this is further proof that the medical/scientific community are more than happy to work together to protect the reputation of their profession but are less inclined to involve themselves in a project aiming to reveal the truth, no matter how horrifying and sinister that truth may turn out to be.

Hooper's book is a probing, thoughtful assay into the unintended consequences (HIV) of good intentions (preventing polio); his response to a reader comment confirms that view, and skewers the understandably reactive comments of Dr. Koprowsi's son. (I agree, with the son, however, that Hooper falts his father's failing memory too much to be seemly.) What Hooper proposes is an unlikely (but like many unlikely things, quite possible) chain of events beginning with an unlikely transmission of SIV to humans; but Hooper shows (1) that it was distinctly possible and (2) that a small number of infections, and not mass infection, of humans with SIV was all that was needed to start the AIDS epidemic. And he repeatedly seeks the means to prove or disprove it, which are denied to him by those with the information and materials to do so (who have pride and position, at least, to lose). If nothing else, the publication of this book may force the hands of insitutions that have the material (old polio vaccine lots) that could largely disprove this theory to make those samples available for testing. Moreover, this book also may cause us to be more careful, as we tinker with nature and science (think of BGH and genetically engineered corn), to consider whether the unintended, and sometimes unforeseeable, consequences of our present actions create such that present needs must go unmet in light of those risks. If Hooper's theory is right, Dr. Koprowski did not set out to be careless and to expose the world to disease (quite the opposite is true); but even he knew at the time that he could have been much more risk averse that he chose to be.

Is it possible that an experimental vaccine against polio gave HIV to the world and resulted in the death of millions of people (and millions more yet to come)?

Edward Hooper argues this theoretical possibility and backs it up with exhaustive research, years of travelling around the world interviewing the chief protagonists, other scientists and eyewitnesses and provides a compelling (if circumstantial) case that this may, indeed, have been how HIV was visited upon the human race.

The sciences of virology, molecular biology and genetics are broken down into bite-sized pieces so that the untrained reader is able to follow the theory to its logical conclusion.

However, the greatest value in this book is that it gives a frightening picture of what goes on behind the scenes in science labs everywhere and in the minds leading scientists at times when there is a race to find a cure for some human disease - the competitiveness which sees scientists fudging the reporting of experimental methods and results in order not to give too much away to their opponents and of leaping forwards too fast and often unethically, to be the first to "come up with the goods".

There are many lessons to be learned in this book, the most pertinent of which is that we haven't learned from our mistakes of the past - xenotransplantation involving tissues and whole organs from other animal species are still being used experimentally in humans, and the potential is there to perhaps unleash something even more frightening than HIV onto the human race in the future.

Also, the closing of scientific ranks behind the scientists involved (especially the use of the law to stifle debate) is an unwelcome development. If the theory is impossible or highly unlikely, then prove it scientifically - from what I have seen and read, many spurious arguments are being used to counter this theory and all of them fail to hold up under close scrutiny.

We may never know for sure the origins of HIV, but all theories need to be debated rationally and examined in critical detail. I suspect that after this, the OPV theory will be the one that holds up the best.

Highly recommended.

In The River, Hooper amasses a mountain of evidence in favor of the OPV/AIDS theory. The River is a monumental book: an exhaustive epidemiological study, perhaps the most thorough piece of investigative journalism ever undertaken, and a sober and sobering study of the practice of modern medicine (at least certain fields of medicine).

What Hooper does not do: establish, with certainty, the truth of the OPV/AIDS theory. (In fact, he never claims to). What he does do: present a meticulously researched and documented case for the origin of AIDS. What he does in addition (in The River and in subsequent publications): describe a specific program for testing the hypothesis, and systematically undermine, if not demolish, every argument his detractors have leveled against it.

The OPV/AIDS theory was shocking when it was first proposed. It is no less shocking today. That it has evidently never been given proper consideration by the scientific establishment is shameful and shocking, especially in view of the potential for future avenues of medical research to give rise to new iatrogenic diseases. Whether or not Hooper's theory proves right, his book is a call to arms. The River establishes Hooper's place as one of our era's most persistent journalists, and a scientist in all but name.

The River is an enormously important book.