Was AIDS man-made?

Was it developed by the Reagan administration as a "final solution" to the "gay question" in America? That seems highly unlikely, but the belief that AIDS is a man-made disease is not uncommon, and is even held by people like this retired physician, Alan Cantwell. On the site Mathaba he has a very large and detailed article about the secret history of AIDS.

Who does he place the blame on? Some cancer project the guy who discovered AIDS was involved with years earlier. He writes:

"By the late-1970s the War against Cancer and the Virus Cancer Program proved a bust with no cancer-causing retroviruses found in humans. The Program was winding down in 1978, at the exact time when government scientists were also enrolling thousands of gay men in New York City to serve as guinea pigs in the hepatitis B experiment that took place that same year at the New York Blood Centre in Manhattan. In 1979 the first cases of AIDS in gay men were reported from Manhattan. Coincidence? I think not.

Five years later, Gallo, who had worked for the Virus Cancer Program (VCP), “discovered� the retrovirus that causes AIDS; and Duesberg, who also worked for the VCP, continues to declare that HIV is harmless."

His evidence for this not being a coincidence is tenuous at best:

"Most importantly, the vaccine was developed in chimpanzees, the primate now thought to contain the “ancestor� virus of HIV."

And does he give any evidence that the Chimpanzees involved in the vaccine program were the ones that later contracted AIDS? No, he does not. Nor does he explain what the connection could possibly be or why this information is 'most important'. It seems as though a mountain is being made out of a molehill, and these ludicrous claims have no legs to stand on. It's a shame though, you see - if AIDS were a man-made disease a cure would be probably very easy to come up with, humans aren't nearly as original a creator as nature.