[skip navigation]
There have been a spate of developments on the AIDS research front over the past few weeks. The biggest news item was research purporting to demonstrate conclusively that the HIV virus was spread from chimpanzees to human beings (hmmm…maybe there are similarities between humans and non-humans after all.)
The evidence is from a chimpanzee named Marilyn who died in 1985. According to Dr. Beatrice Hahn, whose findings were published in Nature, although Marilyn had never been used in HIV research and had not received human blood products after 1969, simian immunodeficiency virus was found in Marilyn’s system.
The first known incident of a human contracting AIDS, a Bantu man who died in 1959 in the Belgian Congo, occurred in the same area where the particular subspecies of chimpanzee that Marilyn belonged to resides. There is some speculation, though no evidence at the moment, that the disease might have passed to humans through the eating of chimpanzees which does occur in some parts of Africa (personally, I think there is still far too much that isn’t known about HIV to start saying this is how AIDS was transmitted to humans).
On a sour note, tests of a live vaccine antidote for AIDS involving macaques failed when the animals developed the disease itself. The live vaccine used genetically crippled versions of the virus, but HIV is so wily that the virus managed to somehow reconstruct itself and infect the target animals. As Dr. Ruth Ruprecht of Boston’s Dan-Farber Cancer Institute said, "There is a real risk of contracting AIDS from the vaccine itself."
Some AIDS activists are still pushing the National Institute of Health to approve limited trials of the vaccine in ill patients. The NIH should approve such trials, but the outlook for this vaccine is not good.
Finally, Scripps Howard environmental writer Mitzi Perdue wrote an excellent article, "A different perspective on AIDS," on the role of fundamental research which did not address animal rights specifically but was a good rebuttal of arguments that only research that provides clear, immediate benefits should be approved. As Perdue notes, the discovery that AIDS was caused by a virus was in many ways an accident.
Among the happy coincidences Perdue mentions is that research and development of techniques involving viruses, and especially retroviruses, were relatively recent. If AIDS had hit in the 1960s, the technology simply wouldn’t have been there to identify it. As Perdue writes,
Dr. Ronald Bosch . . . sees this last point as an important lesson about medical research. The research we had already done on viruses and the immune system benefited humanity enormously by enabling us to detect the AIDS virus as soon as we did. Bosch believes that the current AIDS research will prove similarly valuable. "Some people argue that the amount spent is disproportionate to the number who die," he says, "but much of it is basic virology and immunology research that may help combat other diseases such as cancer."
The bottom line is that medical research does not follow a simple two or three step process from identifying a problem to producing a cure. Numerous times over the past few decades information gleaned from basic research experiments on animals that produced no immediate benefit for human beings was later the key in understanding important phenomenon. Any requirement that basic research fulfill some utilitarian program of immediate beneficial results is simply bad science.
Sources:
HIV: from chimps to humans. Reuters, February 1, 1999.
Chimp research may help AIDS vaccine development. Elizabeth Cohen, CNN, February 2, 1999.
Expert conclude AIDS virus orginated from chipms. Daniel Q. Haney, Associated Press, January 31, 1999.
'Live' AIDS vaccine will not work, study shows. Reuters, February 1, 1999.
A different perspective on AIDS. Mitzi Perdue, Scripps Howard, January 26, 1999.
Modified HIV shows therapeutic promise. The BBC, January 29, 1999.