No Politician is a keener armchair scientist than South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki. He sits up late searching the Internet for titbits on AIDS, the disease that is devastating Africa. He invites foreign scientists to discuss it. He encourages a South African institute, the Medical Research Council (MRC), to develop vaccines against the disease. But Mr Mbeki is a politician, not a scientist, and his cyber-excursions have led him to take a tragically misguided stance. He rejects the scientific consensus that AIDS is caused by the human-immunodeficiency virus (HIV), opining that poverty, poor diets and other social ills may be to blame. Mr Mbeki does not care that HIV "has been investigated more thoroughly than almost any other virus in the history of science", as William Makgoba, who heads the MRC, puts it.
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