Korber's methodology has been praised as "elegant" and "excellent" by members of the scientific establishment; unfortunately, those sanctions probably won't be enough to keep controversy at bay. The Los Alamos findings are at odds with the hypothesis proffered in the recent tome "The River," suggesting that HIV can be traced to chimpanzee tissue used in the development of the polio vaccines adopted in the 1950s. According to Korber's team's hypothesis, the current number of HIV strains means that in order for the virus to have originated from that vaccine, 10 different strains of the virus from different monkeys would have to have been part of each vaccination, and that, most scientists agree, is very unlikely. "The 'River' theory has always been in question, because despite the reams of detective work, there's no smoking gun," says TIME science reporter Alice Park. "It doesn't have solid scientific proof behind it." Don't look for Korber's team to start celebrating their trump card just yet. As befits their profession, scientists remain unwilling to totally discredit any conclusion or wholeheartedly endorse their own; it will take something far more absolute than a new theory to effect anything more than imperturbability from the scientific community.
Finding New Roots of the AIDS Family Tree
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Where did the AIDS virus come from? Since their initial, bewildered diagnoses of the disease, doctors and immunologists have struggled with that question, asked by anguished patients and fellow scientists alike. Tuesday, a new piece of the ever-changing puzzle emerged. In Los Alamos, N.M., researchers have traced HIV to the 1930s using current structural analysis of strains of AIDS virus. The researchers drafted a genealogy of HIV and extracted key building blocks of the virus from each strain. Following the assumption that the mutations in the virus occurred at a roughly consistent pace, scientists used their supercomputer — the Nirvana is capable of performing 1 trillion computations each second — to trace AIDS's evolution back to a single "starter" strain dating from around 1930. The team suspects that one person or a small group of people became infected with the virus through some kind of contact (a bite or accident) with a monkey carrying the strain.