Dr. Max Essex was at liberty to hypothesize openly about how AIDS started. His own studies on outbreaks of an AIDS-like disease among research monkeys in both Massachusetts and California had led him into research on Simian AIDS, or SAIDS, and the discovery of STLV-III, or Simian T-lymphotrophic virus. The similarities in proteins between STLV-III and HTLV-III led Essex to believe that AIDS may have been lying dormant in some primate population for thousands of years before being transferred to humans.
