NAIROBI -- Wangari Maathai made a typically combative start to her first full day as a Nobel laureate yesterday, defending a recent suggestion that the HIV virus might have been made in a laboratory as a plot against Africans.

The outspoken Kenyan environmentalist on Friday became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was honored for aiding the poor with a campaign to plant trees and slow deforestation.

Maathai, rarely reluctant to challenge the status quo or confront the powerful, said her comments in August were intended to promote an inquiring attitude to AIDS among Africans and combat the fatalistic notion that it was a curse from God.

''Would you solve the problem if you believed it was a curse from God?" she said at a news conference, adding that one theory was that AIDS was created by a scientist in a laboratory as an agent of war. ''I was encouraging people to ask questions, which is what I always do."

Maathai caused a furor in Kenya when she was quoted in Kenya's East African Standard newspaper as calling AIDS a biological weapon devised to destroy black people. ''Do not be naive. AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists, but we may not know who particularly did [it]," the Aug. 31 article quoted her as saying at a seminar in her home town of Nyeri...