San Francisco - Researchers using one of the most powerful computers in the world said yesterday they had traced the origin of the AIDS virus, dating it to around 1930.
Ms Bette Korber and colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico used a computer model to calculate the mutations found in the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) and estimate when it would have jumped from chimpanzees to humans.
"We estimated the time of origin of the HIV-1 main group to be near 1930," they said, in a written statement at the 7th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. This fits in with previous estimates.