Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and Ebola: Life Imitating Art?

W D Hamilton's rejected submission to Science about the origin of AIDS and polio vaccines

http://www.bmartin.cc/dissent/documents/AIDS/Hamilton94/

The headline "Rolling Stone rolls over for Koprowski" (Random Samples, 26 November) is right for the "clarification" that Rolling Stone published but your piece that follows oversimplifies. A reader might gather (as also from your earlier column on the Wistar Institute committee's report {30 October 1992, p738}), that the idea that the pioneer polio vaccination campaign in Central Africa in the late 50s could have started the AIDS pandemic is now thoroughly dismissed.

This is far from being the case. The "clarification" that Rolling Stone published on 9 December 1993 hardly says more than was obvious to most readers already -- no objective to defame. The original article was good science journalism. It was well researched and was attentive to alternatives: I was astonished that Koprowski sued. After a re-reading I still cannot see what, apart from a very slight geographical error which concerns only the two sides of one valley, plus a retracted report (1) that Curtis might have noticed, Koprowski considers unfactual, unreasonable, or unduly ad hominem in the matters described. Tom Curtis, the author, was airing a scientific theory and had as much evidence as is usual initially. The theory he wrote about admittedly has snags, but so does any. It is easy to make a longer list of plain errors from Koprowski's ("As a scientist ...") brief rebuttal (2). {SEE APPENDIX-NOT for publication}.