HIV (2018, The Lancet)
Gallo (1980, National Cancer Institute)
The Road to the Discovery of HIV
Doctors
The discovery of the AIDS-causing virus was at the center of failed communication between the U.S. and France. In 1979, U.S. scientist Dr. Robert Gallo identified a new type of virus, the retrovirus, naming his strain “Human T-Lymphotropic Virus” (HTLV). HTLV's target and symptoms are similar to those of AIDS, therefore Gallo was convinced it caused AIDS.
"AIDS was a mystery. It was a puzzlement even to the scientists. Before we knew what to do or how much it would cost or anything like that, we needed to find out what the scientists could tell us."
~Margaret Heckler (Former Secretary of Health and Human Services)
Simultaneously, Dr. Luc Montagnier at France's L’Institut Pasteur was studying AIDS. He and his team suspected the disease was caused by a retrovirus, and detected one in a biopsy from a patient with AIDS symptoms. After experimenting, they recognized that this virus attacked T-cells, similar to AIDS. Although they weren’t certain it caused AIDS, they knew the virus wasn’t related to HTLV, contradicting Gallo’s hypothesis. They presented and published their discovery of ‘Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus’ (LAV) in 1983, when Gallo “abused [Montagnier] with a memorable viciousness.” However, the French noted LAV's role in causing AIDS “remains to be determined”.
Montagnier's team (1984, Phnom Penh Post)
"[Dr. Montagnier's team] called the virus ‘lymphadenopathy virus.’ I do not think lymphadenopathy virus was a very good name because it said the virus was associated with lymph gland enlargement, and that was not the key thing with this virus. Secondly, there was not much of a precedent for that in animal retrovirology; it was a very unusual name.”
~Robert Gallo
Gallo, Montagnier, and scientists (1987, The Nobel Foundation)
Gallo, aware of the French team’s discovery, requested their LAV samples to compare to his HTLV samples. Nevertheless, Gallo remained steadfast in his conviction that HTLV caused AIDS. He later isolated his own virus samples from AIDS patients.
“AIDS being identified right after the discovery of the first and the second human retroviruses is one heck of an extraordinary phenomenon. All I can say is that it appears to be a coincidence. It has actually misled me. As well as leading me right, it also led me wrong. I put that in my book. For me, AIDS could not conceivably be a different category of a retrovirus. We predicted it was a retrovirus; we were right."
~Robert Gallo
1999, Getty Images
"I really think that, with a little more attention to a couple of details, I could have had the cause of AIDS in hand sooner by a solid year. I was just too much influenced by what I understood from HTLV-I and II. I was waiting for things to be happening in exactly the precise way that they would if it was a member of that family.”
~Robert Gallo
Previous
NextTop