Hooper, Edward Jonathan

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HOOPER, Edward Jonathan

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Little, Brown & Co., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

CAREER: British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), correspondent in Africa, c. 1980—.

WRITINGS:

Slim: A Reporter's Own Story of AIDS in East Africa, Bodley Head (London, England), 1990.

The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1999.

SIDELIGHTS: Edward Hooper was working as a journalist in Africa in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the AIDS epidemic began to make its presence felt there. Hooper was among the first English-language journalists who visited several African villages and towns where otherwise healthy people in the prime of life had been stricken with what the African people called "Slim." After writing a first-hand account of the devastation being wreaked in Africa by the disease, Hooper began to research the cause of AIDS, trying to determine how a worldwide illness manifested itself in a matter of a few decades. His quest led him to feel that HIV had entered the human population from oral polio vaccines administered in central Africa between 1957 and 1959. Hooper conjectured and sought to prove that the polio vaccines had been created using the organs of chimpanzees infected with a simian variety of immune deficiency syndrome. He published his findings in a controversial book. The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS.

The River sparked intense debate about the role vaccinations and injections might have played in the spread of AIDS. Reviewers of Hooper's book, even those who challenged his thesis, commended him for the thoroughness of his investigation. Richard Horton wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that Hooper "has tracked unpublished research, identified gaps in the scientific record and weaknesses in established theories of AIDS causation, revealed inconsistencies in official accounts, and followed up every lead and rumour he could lay his hands on." The resulting book, Horton maintained, is "an impressively weighty, although plainly partial, treatise." An Economist critic felt that "the trail of evidence [Hooper] uncovers is significant." In the Lancet, David Sharp concluded: "Virological opinion currently runs against the oral poliovaccine theory. Perhaps that consensus will shift once the book has been read, an action I recommend to anyone who does not insist that a good detective story has to end with handcuffs."

Guardian correspondent Giles Foden was convinced by Hooper's arguments in The River. Foden wrote: "In a context where scientists themselves are unable to provide the answers, this layman's crusade—and he does have some distinguished scientific supporters—is not only fascinating but important too. . . . On the eve of a biotechnological future, scientists and all of us would do well to read The River. For it is not often that one can say that the tensions in a book are those at the heart of civilisation and its so-called progress."

Hooper's book sparked scientifically significant testing of remaining specimens of oral polio vaccine that had been kept by the laboratories that produced the controversial batches in the 1950s. Independent laboratories tested the vaccine samples and found no evidence of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus and no evidence of chimpanzee DNA. Nevertheless, one of the researchers, Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said that Hooper had done the medical community a service by raising the possibility that unknown viruses could pass from animals to humans through mass immunizations. Wain-Hobson told New Scientist: "We were lucky. When you are using animal tissues, you have got to be careful. How can you test for a virus you don't know?"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Economist (U.S.), November 13, 1999, "Did a Vaccine Cause AIDS?," p. 3.

Guardian, October 30, 1999, Giles Foden, "AIDS: Our Gift to Africa?," p. 9.

Lancet, September 25, 1999, David Sharp, "A Controversial HIV/AIDS Hypothesis," p. 1129; April 28, 2001, Sarah Ramsey, "Cold Water Downstream from The River," p. 1343.

Library Journal, November 15, 1999, Gregg Sapp, review of The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, p. 95.

New Republic, December 27, 1999, Jerome Groopman, "The End of Aetiology," p. 28.

New Scientist, September 16, 2000, Michael Day, "Who Started It?," p. 4; April 28, 2001, Joanna Marchant, "Face the Facts," p. 10.

New York Review of Books, December 2, 1999, Helen Epstein, "Something Happened," pp. 14-18.

San Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 2001, William Carlsen, "Quest for the Origin of AIDS," p. A1; April 27, 2001, William Carlsen "Further Testing Discounts AIDS-Polio Theory," p. A4.

Science, November 12, 1999, Robin A. Weiss, "Is AIDS Man-Made?," pp. 1305-1306.

Times Literary Supplement, November 12, 1999, Richard Horton, "From the Heart of Darkness," p. 27.