It was not how anyone expected Bill Hamilton to die. In 1999, Hamilton was celebrating his fifteenth year as a research professor in evolutionary biology at Oxford, where he had cultivated a reputation for unconventional, mathematically sophisticated theorizing. He had recently received both the Crafoord Prize and the Kyoto Prize, arguably the two most prestigious awards for scientists in fields not eligible for the Nobel. His wife had moved out, and the Italian journalist Luisa Bozzi had moved in. He was sixty-three, and with a mop of white hair, looked like an aging Beatle.
That June, Hamilton boarded a plane to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then in the midst of a civil war that would ultimately claim five million lives. He came home about a month later with samples of chimpanzee feces and a mysterious illness. By January of 2000, Hamilton had recovered and gone to the Congo again. This time, when he came back sick, he went into the hospital and did not return. After his death, Richard Dawkins declared that he was “a good candidate for the title of the most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin.”
It wasn’t until the fall of 2000 that a mystified public learned why Hamilton had made the Congo expeditions that ultimately cost him his life. Bozzi, Hamilton’s girlfriend, explained in The Guardian that he had gone to collect evidence that he hoped might vindicate a controversial theory about the origins of HIV. A year earlier, the British journalist Ed Hooper had made headlines with a door-stopper of a book entitled The River, which carried a foreword by Hamilton. In nearly twelve hundred meticulously documented pages, the book expounded the theory that a team of scientists, led by Polish-American virologist Hilary Koprowski, had unwittingly introduced the virus through a contaminated oral polio vaccine (OPV) administered to hundreds of thousands of residents of the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s. Koprowski, Hooper claimed, had secretly manufactured the batch of vaccines used in the Congo with kidneys from local chimpanzees who were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), the precursor to HIV.
Set on corroborating the so-called “OPV/AIDS hypothesis,” Hamilton believed that the evidence rested in the troupes of chimpanzees that lived near where Koprowski had purportedly harvested organs. When war broke out in the DRC, Hamilton fretted that food shortages would spur bushmeat hunters to wipe out the chimpanzee populations he was interested in, leaving him with no choice but to collect the desired samples himself—as soon as possible.
If Bozzi’s disclosure helped shed light on the reason for Hamilton’s trip, it did not do much to explain why he had become almost suicidally obsessed with the OPV/AIDS theory in the first place. Two decades later, the full story of Hamilton and the debate about the origins of HIV still hold important lessons, as we confront a new batch of conspiracy theories and recriminations in the midst of the worst pandemic since HIV/AIDS.