IT WAS a huge stroke of bad luck. HIV had been living quite happily in chimps without making them ill, but when it crossed the species barrier to humans something about our immune system caused HIV to have a catastrophic effect. What this could have been is the subject of intense research, and Greg Towers and his colleagues at University College London are now a step closer to an answer.
Towers and his team knew that HIV-1, the virus that crossed into humans, doesn’t infect Old World monkeys – primates such as African green monkeys and rhesus macaques. This is…
