Lis­ten now: Side 1 | Side 2

Dr. Horow­itz’s recent book Emerg­ing Virus­es: AIDS and Ebo­la — Nature, Acci­dent or Inten­tion­al? (Hard­cov­er edi­tion, Tetra­he­dron, copy­right 1996) makes a com­pelling case that both AIDS and Ebo­la are, in all prob­a­bil­i­ty, man-made dis­eases. This inter­view pro­vides an overview of Dr. Horow­itz’s the­sis. Begin­ning with Dr. Robert Gal­lo’s genet­ic engi­neer­ing of virus­es vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal to HIV in the late 1960s and 1970s, the dis­cus­sion illu­mi­nates the prob­a­ble role of a num­ber of cor­po­rate and gov­ern­men­tal insti­tu­tions in the devel­op­ment of AIDS. Cen­tral among those ele­ments are: the Nation­al Can­cer Insti­tute’s Spe­cial Viral Can­cer Research Project; Fort Det­rick (the Army’s top bio­log­i­cal war­fare research facil­i­ty, which was turned over to the Nation­al Can­cer Insti­tute); Lit­ton Bio­net­ics (which admin­is­tered Fort Det­rick for the NCI); Mer­ck, Sharp and Dohme (a Ger­man-owned com­pa­ny which has been at the cen­ter of the Amer­i­can bio­log­i­cal war­fare pro­gram); Mer­ck­’s exper­i­men­tal Hepati­tis B vac­cine tri­als; the U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment; for­mer Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advi­sor Hen­ry Kissinger and the Rock­e­feller indus­tri­al and med­ical empire. Par­tic­u­lar atten­tion is paid to some very dis­turb­ing research in Africa on the dis­eases which appear to fig­ure in the devel­op­ment of AIDS and Ebo­la. This research was fol­lowed by a series of vac­ci­na­tion pro­grams which may have been the vec­tor for intro­duc­ing AIDS into the pop­u­la­tion there.