10/28/22
Newletter141
The Crack of Dawn
My dad had a trashcan under his desk that he had gotten when he was a kid that had a map of the world on it. He threw it out when I was about eight and I retrieved it trash. I had that trashcan for the next 50 years. I spent hours studying that map. What I loved about it was that because it was from about 1940 the name of almost every country in Africa had changed. Burkina Faso was Upper Volta (whose capital is Ouagadougou), Togo was Togoland, Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, Zaire was the Belgian Congo, Somalia was Somaliland, etc. Anyway, about ten years ago I got sick and went into the hospital for a week. Upon my release I found that my lovely sister surprised me by having completely cleaned my house, which included throwing out that trashcan. She had no idea that it had ever belonged to dad, and I don’t blame her because it was truly shabby looking and rusted in spots, but I did love it.
Letting one idea flow into the next one, there is a tremendously interesting documentary called The Origin of AIDS (2004). In 1950 American Dr. Hilary Koprowski (a man) developed the first polio vaccine, which was taken orally and was not tremendously effective (and therefore didn’t go into wide use), but it was a gigantic breakthrough. In 1955 Dr. Jonas Salk came out with a similar vaccine that was much more effective and given intravenously. Dr. Jonas Salk became a world hero and Dr. Koprowski was ignored and forgotten. Because the vaccine now had to be injected, many Africans wouldn’t take it. So, Dr. Koprowski decided to develop an oral vaccine, like his first one, but based on Jonas Salk’s science, which included hormones from the kidneys of rhesus macaques monkeys from India.
Dr. Koprowski somehow got the Belgians to let him experiment on humans in what was then the Belgian Congo. Alas, there are no rhesus macaques monkeys there, so Dr. Koprowski decided it didn’t matter, a monkey is a monkey, and since there were a plethora of chimpanzees in the Congo, he’d use those instead, except chimpanzees aren’t monkeys. In the movie they speak to native villagers who clearly remember rounding up chimps and being well paid for them. Ultimately, 600 chimps were used. Dr. Koprowski developed his oral polio vaccine. He then chose six villages and with the help of Belgian Congolese authorities, sprayed his vaccine down the throats of thousands of people, whether they liked it or not.
To date, the earliest known case of HIV-1 infection in human blood is from a sample taken in 1959 from a man who’d died in Kinshasa, Belgian Congo.
They tracked it down and the virus came from the six Congolese villages where Dr. Koprowski tested his ultimately ineffective polio vaccine.
Coincidence?
And that’s the whole story.
hmmm...