[I wrote this in 1993 and published it in the first edition (offset, 50 copies!) of Looking for the Enemy, and it also appeared online, e.g. in 1994 in a newsgroup called misc.activism.progressive.]
I heard about Jakob Segal's theory that the AIDS virus originated in a US government biological warfare research laboratory in early 1989. After some preliminary research, I was amazed to find that this shocking theory had received no attention whatsoever in the mainstream American press, and almost none in Europe.
The questions this theory raised were a matter of pure science, or so it seemed to me. There were only three possibilities: 1) Segal was wrong; 2) he was right; 3) it could not be determined either way. I resolved to find out which of these was true.