The issue of possibility then gave way to the issue of fact. What had actually happened? Where was the evidence? At the urging of an eminent evolutionary biologist named William Hamilton, who believed that the OPV theory deserved investigation, the Royal Society convened a special meeting in September 2000 to discuss the subject within its broader context. Hamilton was a senior figure, liked and respected, whose early work in evolutionary theory helped inform Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. He swung the Royal Society into giving the OPV theory a fair hearing. Edward Hooper, though not a scientist himself, was invited to speak. Hilary Koprowski also came, as well as a roster of leading AIDS researchers. By the time that meeting convened, though, William Hamilton was dead.
He died suddenly in March 2000, of intestinal bleeding, after an attack of malaria contracted during a research trip to DRC. In his absence, his colleagues at the Royal Society discussed a wide range of matters related to the origins of HIV and AIDS. The OPV theory was just one topic among many, though implicitly it drove the agenda of the whole meeting. Did the available data from molecular biology and epidemiology tend to support, or to refute, the vaccine-contamination scenario? A corollary to that question was: When had HIV-1 first entered the human population? If the earliest infections occurred before 1957, those infections couldn’t have resulted from Koprowski’s OPV trials. Archival HIV-positives might be decisive.
This is the context that brought DRC60 out of Kinshasa. After the Royal Society meeting, a Belgian physician named Dirk Teuwen, who had taken part, recollected some references to early pathology work in the Congo that he had seen in archival reports of the colonial medical laboratories. Teuwen conceived the idea—and raised it with other attendees—that HIV-1 might be detected in some of the tissues preserved within those old paraffin blocks. He met skepticism; the others doubted that any useful traces of virus could have survived through the decades—decades of tropical heat, simple storage, administrative upheaval, and revolution. But Teuwen was stubborn. He enlisted an ally, a senior Congolese bacteriologist named Jean-Jacques Muyembe, and, with approval from the Ministry of Health, Muyembe started looking. He went up to the University of Kinshasa, rifled through the pantry behind the blue curtain, packed 813 paraffin-embedded specimens into an ordinary suitcase, and carried it with him on his next professional visit to Belgium. There he handed the trove to Dirk Teuwen. Teuwen, in accord with a prior agreement for collaborative study, sent the samples to Michael Worobey in Tucson.
These two lines of narrative fold back into each other. Worobey, as a grad student, knew both Bill Hamilton at Oxford and some of the disease biologists in Belgium. Impelled by his own interest in the origins of HIV, Worobey accompanied Hamilton to DRC on that last fatal fieldtrip. They went in January 2000, during the chaotic aftermath of the civil war, which had replaced President Mobutu Sese Seko with President Laurent Kabila. Hamilton wanted to collect fecal and urine samples from wild chimpanzees; those specimens, he hoped, might help confirm or refute the OPV theory. Worobey, for his part, put little stock in the OPV theory but wanted more data from which to chart the origin and evolution of HIV. It was a crazy time in DRC, more crazy than usual, because two rebel armies opposed to Laurent Kabila still controlled much of the eastern half of the country. Hamilton and Worobey flew into Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville), a regional capital along the upper Congo River, the same city where Koprowski had begun his vaccinating enterprise. Now it was occupied by Rwanda-backed forces on one riverbank and Uganda-backed forces on the other. Commercial airlines weren’t flying, because of the war, so the two biologists shared a small, chartered plane with a diamond dealer. In Kisangani they paid their respects to the Rwanda-backed commander, whose ambit included most of the city, and as quickly as possible got out into the forest, where they would be safer among the leopards and snakes. They spent a month collecting fecal and urine samples from wild chimpanzees, with help from local guides, and by the time they left, Hamilton was sick.
Neither he nor Worobey knew how sick, but they caught the next exit flight they could, which took them to Rwanda. From there they bounced to Entebbe in Uganda, where Hamilton got a confirmed diagnosis of falciparum malaria and some treatment, then onward