AIDS wars

IT IS a long way from the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia to the Royal Society in London. But the participants in a meeting at the society earlier this week, innocently entitled “Origins of AIDS and the HIV epidemic”, might have been forgiven for thinking that they could hear sighs of relief from the other side of the Atlantic ocean. For the real purpose of the meeting was to debate the accusation that some of the Wistar's researchers may have been inadvertently responsible for the global AIDS epidemic—and by the end of the meeting that notion had more or less been laid to rest.