and reinvigoration. Instead she traveled the world, roughly three hundred days a year, lecturing, lobbying, meeting with media people and schoolchildren, delivering her inspirational message. Hahn understood the intensity of Goodall’s protectiveness toward chimps in general, toward Gombe’s chimps in particular, and of her wariness toward anything that might put them in more jeopardy of exploitation, especially in the name of medical science. At the end of the long email, Hahn wrote:
Let me finish by saying that finding SIVcpz in the Gombe community is a virologist’s DREAM-COME-TRUE. Given the wealth of behavioural and observational data that you and your colleagues have collected over decades, it is the IDEAL setting to study the natural history, transmission patterns and pathogenicity (or lack thereof) of natural SIVcpz infection in wild chimpanzees. Moreover, all this can be done entirely non-invasively. AND there certainly are funding opportunities for such a unique study. So, the virologist’s dream-come-true does not have to be the primatologist’s nightmare, although I am sure it will take some time before I can convince you of that.
Eventually she did convince Goodall, but not before another nightmarish discovery emerged from the work.
Earlier in her email, Hahn had written: “With respect to the chimpanzees, it is probably safe to say that SIV infection will NOT cause them to develop immunodeficiency or AIDS.” On that point, she would prove herself wrong.
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Jane Goodall described her own concerns when I caught up with her during one of her stopovers. We knew each other from previous adventures—among chimps in the Congo, among black-footed ferrets in South Dakota, over single-malt scotch in Montana—but this was a chance to sit down quietly at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, during a paralyzing snowstorm, and talk about Gombe. The fiftieth anniversary of her own chimp study was approaching, and I had been assigned by National Geographic to write about it. After we discussed her childhood influences, her dream of becoming a naturalist in Africa, her mentor Louis Leakey, her early days in the field, and her time as a PhD student at Cambridge, she herself mentioned genetics and virology. At that point I turned the conversation to SIV.
“I was really, really apprehensive about Beatrice Hahn’s research,” Jane volunteered. “We were, a lot of us, really nervous about the result of what might happen if she found HIV/AIDS.” She had met Hahn, talked with her, and was reassured by the force of Hahn’s concern for the chimps’ welfare. “But still. I still have this unease because, even though she cares, once these results are out, as they are now, other people can use them in different ways.” For instance? What sort of dangers, I asked, did Jane have in mind? “That this would start a whole new flurry of research on captive chimps in medical labs.” The news of chimps with AIDS, she feared, would sound like a promising opportunity to learn more about AIDS in humans, never mind the chimps.
What about the impact of the virus at Gombe itself? We both knew that Hahn had found something resembling AIDS, and by now Gimble was dead. What about the prospect that other members of the Gombe community might die of immune failure? “Yeah, exactly,” Jane said. “That’s a very scary thought.”
As scary as it was, though, she realized from the start of her conversations with Hahn that such a finding could be taken two ways. On the one hand, Jane said, there was a possible consolation: If people heard that wild chimps carry an AIDS-causing virus, they might stop hunting and butchering and eating them. “Because they’ll be afraid. That was one side of it. Then the other side of it was, well, people will say, ‘All these creatures are really dangerous for us, so let’s kill them all.’ It could have gone either way.” Jane is a perspicacious woman. She has the aura of a secular saint but is actually quite human, grounded, savvy, and capable of ambivalence. As things have transpired so far, she noted, neither of the extreme outcomes has occurred.
Briefly we discussed Hahn’s noninvasive sampling methodology: Urine might contain antibodies, and feces could yield viral RNA. Jane allowed that that part was reassuring, not having to knock out chimps and jab them with needles. “Don’t need blood,” she said. “Just need a bit of poo.” Amazing what they can do from a bit of poo, I agreed.
So she had given her consent for Hahn’s study, and the work proceeded. At the end of November 2000, Hahn’s lab in Alabama