해밀턴의 아내 Maria Luisa Bozzi의 연설 :"해밀턴의 유산"

Maria Luisa Bozzi, “"Truth and science: Bill Hamilton’'s legacy”", Atti dei Convegni

Lincei 2003; 187; 21-26. This is part of the proceedings of the round table

conference on "Origin of HIV and Emerging Persistent Viruses", Rome, 28-29

September 2001.

TRUTH AND SCIENCE: BILL HAMILTON’'S LEGACY

by Maria Luisa Bozzi

 

 

‘'Is it possible for minds to be completely free

(...)?

Thucydides’' dedication to truth in history in the

opening pages of his Peloponesian War is a more

realistic example of what I have in mind,’'1 (...)

‘'telling how he intended to stick to the truth

about the recent war with Persia and not to be

swayed by Athenian wishfulness and pride- and how

he well knew that his truth was going to be

disliked.’'2 w D. Hamilton 1999

 

 

 

 

I owe this talk to many people. First to Professor

Floriano Papi, whose determination to keep his

word with the late Professor Bill Hamilton caused

this Conference to be held and its original

intentions to be preserved. Then to Bill, as his

companion of the last 6 years of his life, I owe

to speack in his account about what he believed.

For this privilege, my deep gratitude goes to the

President of the Accademia dei Lincei and to the

organizers of this meeting. It is a great honour

for me to speak in one of the oldest and most

prestigious academies in Europe. And I also thank

doctor Mary Bliss, Bill’'s sister, for her generous

support and help with the manuscript.

William Donald Hamilton (1936-2000) –- Bill, for

everybody –- is regarded as ‘'the most influential

evolutionary biologist of the second half of the

20th century’'3. His wide knowledge of the natural

world, combined with a creative imagination, a

deep free spirit and a very rational mind allowed

him to give birth to bold theories that opened new

fields of inquiries in social behaviour and in the

2 2

evolution of sexual reproduction. He was honoured

with many prizes, including in 1993 the Crafoord

Prize of the Royal Swedish Accademy of Science,

equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

Bill’'s 1982 ‘'sex and parasites’' theory brought him

to focus his thinking on the field of health and

medicine. According to Bill Hamilton, sex was the

invention of metazoans and large plants to

counteract the pressure of co-evolving parasites.

He postulated that parasitism has caused not only

arrays of varying traits concerned directly with

disease resistance, but also the evolution of

meiosis itself. Sexual reproduction is thus able

to provide every generation with a new combination

of alleles with potential to resist disease.4

The light shed by his theory about the role of

parasites in our evolution changed Bill’'s view of

life and of the future of human beings.5 He

developed a very pessimistic long distance vision

about the fate of our species if modern medicine

will continue to develop without taking into

account the biological environment in which humans

and all other species have evolved and are still

evolving.6 In this very grim picture he believed

that ‘'the immensely powerful medical and

pharmaceutical interest, busy with ever more and

more profits’' plays a huge role.7

Connected to this theme was Bill’'s feeling about

the responsibility of scientists. According to

him, scientists ‘'ought to let their providers know

of any dangers that they find, in the course of

their studies, affecting society.’' 8

This combination of rational ideas and deep ethics

must be taken into account if we want to

understand why, since 1991, Bill Hamilton began to

be interested in a theory considered by the

scientific establishment to be unfashionable if

not cranky: the oral polio vaccine (OPV)

hypothesis of the origin of AIDS. According to

this hypothesis, originally published in two

3 3

articles in 1991 and 1992 by Louis Pascal9 and Tom

Curtis10, HIV-1 Group M arrived in our species via

a live oral polio vaccine which had been

accidentally contaminated by chimpanzee SIV. This

vaccine was tested on a million Africans in a mass

campaign of polio eradication conducted in Central

Africa (mainly in the Congo) in the late fifties.

Impressed by this theme, Bill became more and more

converted to the OPV/AIDS theory during his

intellectual partnership with Edward Hooper, who

spent 9 years of intensive research on the origin

of AIDS epidemics. As he described in his book The

River, Hooper reached the conclusion that OPV/AIDS

was more plausible than other theories.11 During

this time Bill simply watched Hooper’'s discoveries

from the sidelines. He thought that although none

of Hooper’'s discoveries by itself amounted to a

proof, taken together ‘'the steady trend and

accumulation was very impressive’'. 12 To Bill there

was a 95% probability that the theory was right.13

However, from its outset in the early 90’'s, the

OPV theory was not taken seriously by scientists

or by the medical profession. Threats of

litigation against its authors, including Hooper,

were used by the people directly involved in this

postulated medical misadventure, in an attempt to

suppress any publication on the subject. Bill

himself had a similar experience.12 In the last 9

years of his life the reactions he met ranged from

an embarrassed avoidance of the topic by his

peers, to the refusal of the editors of Science,

Nature and Lancet, to publish his comments about

the OPV theory and its implications. Therefore,

Bill reached the conclusion that ‘'the best known

and seemingly most indipendent science and medical

journals joined forces on the side of the

countercritique’', while rejecting papers or

letters about the original issue.14,15

As a consequence, with the exception of his

Foreword to Hooper’'s The River, what Bill Hamilton

thought about the OPV theory is unpublished; and

4 4

is only available in correspondence with Hooper,

Pascal and Curtis, letters to colleagues, friends

and relatives and in the memory of discussions

with members of his family and with me. With few

exceptions, the articles devoted to Bill after his

death suffer from this lack of information.

According to Bill, the implications of this

hypothesis were dreadful. As he wrote in a letter

to a collegue of the Royal Society, in October

1999:‘'the AIDS disaster, if the OPV theory is

right, (I rate the chance at about 95%) arose out

of well-meaning (though also, it must be said,

egotistical and profit-seeking) medical motives.

But, the potential compaunding of this, through

failure to find the truth, to publicise and to

study what happpened, is that medical science

continues virtually unwarned towards other equal

–-or conceivably greater- disasters.’'13

The ‘'greater disasters’' that Bill had in mind were

the effects of unknown viruses contaminating live

animal products which are administered to our

bodies in modern medical treatments. Bill’'s

concern was that the basic evolutionary knowledge

of the long term consequences of these treatments

is very poor in the medical industry. In December

1999, just before his final illnes and death, he

wrote about his fears with these

words:‘'transplants of pig organs to humans may

indeed soon be endowing more years of life to

millions (...). Those wonderful millions of

immunosuppressed human bodies are the prepared

feather-beds for potentially vaster billions of

virus bodies to lie in (...) and a few of them

hatching, via mutations and recombinations,’' new

fatal deseases. ‘'Evolution is relentless,

undirectional, caring not who it slays: these

viruses, too, in a few years may be acquiring the

capacity almost to end our species.’'16

In this context, Bill felt that doctors needed to

be more aware of the dangers of ‘'the effects of

the millions of profit that dangle before the

5 5

nascent industry proposing to transplant organs

into humans from other species.’'14

After The River was published, Bill decided to try

to find out more facts himself to test the OPV

hypothesis.17 He thought that was his duty, because

he was convinced that, as an evolutionary

biologist, he better than any other person might

be able to help the scientific community

understand the biological factors implicated in

the possible transfer of viruses to humans. He was

convinced that an unwanted transmission of a virus

from another species via a vaccine was possible;

and that if it did not happen in this case, it

could have happened; and could happen with

vaccines or with other treatments in the future,

if we are not properly aware of the possibility.13

First, he asked the Royal Society to hold an open

scientific debate about the OPV hypothesis. This

meeting was held on September 2000. Second, he

made two expeditions to the Congo to search for

lentivirus infection in wild chimpanzees living in

the forests where, in the fifties, hunters caught

these animals for medical tests connected to the

polio vaccine campaign. Before his second mission

in January 2000, virtually no samples had been

taken from wild adult chimpanzees, especially in

the Congo, to test for SIV. Bill had two goals,as

he wrote at the end of December 1999, few days

before leaving for his second expedition: ‘'Our

line is that we are on a mission that should be

close to the hearts of all Africans of whichever

faction- a better understanding of the awful

epidemic that has struck them and a step towards a

possible vaccine or cure. This is an idea which I

really believe in and which I hope I can persuade

them that I believe.’'17

He was aware of the danger of these missions in a

country affected by a civil war, and where it was

easy to get sick. As he told many people,

including myself, he was prepared to go to jail

6 6

and even to die, if that was needed to find the

truth.13

The second mission –-in January 2000- was indeed

fatal to him.

A year and half after Bill’'s death and a year

after the Royal Society’'s Conference on the Origin

of AIDS, the prevailing opinion is that the OPV

hypothesis is weaker or has even been disproved.

This is because of recent findings about the

phylogeny of HIV-118,19 and negative tests of the

few surviving vials of original OPV CHAT

stocks20,21. I will not discuss these matters: they

are not my business. But, what can be said from an

Hamiltonian point of view is that the general

approach to the OPV hypothesis is virtually

unchanged. The scientific reports have focused

their attention on results which they believe show

the theory to be wrong22 and have avoided the

arguments of counter critics. As an echo of the

attitude of the medical and scientific

establishment, which seems to be one general

relief, most of the media -not all, it must be

said- have relayed the news to the public with

irony and triumphant derision.

Still, something has changed. Scientists are well

aware that the assumptions based on negative

results can be faulty. Further examination may

produce different findings and conclusions. For

this reason, many scientists believe that the

doubt -in the case of the OPV theory and its

implications- is still alive. This meeting itself,

which covers a wide range of subjects about the

emerging persistent viruses, is encouraging.

Bill’'s intention to look at this topic with an

evolutionary point of view could not have been

better served. The goal of the OPV controversy is

not to find the villain of the story, but to

protect our future via a wiser use of modern

medicine and science.