The Early Years of HIV/AIDS
Gallo, R.C.
Science 298: 28-30
2002
ISSN/ISBN: 0091-7729 Document Number: 240979
Part of a special section featuring different perspectives on the scientific background behind the discovery and initial characterization of the HIV retrovirus. The role played by NIH viral researchers in the discovery of the HIV virus is reviewed. In 1981, on the basis of similarities between the risk factors for human T cell leukemia virus (HTLV)-1 and a new disease later called AIDS, as well as on clinical and epidimiological data, researchers at the NIH proposed that AIDS might be caused by a new retrovirus of the HTLV family. Subsequently, Luc Montagnier and colleagues of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, identified a virus from a patient with suspected AIDS and lymphadenopathy as a new human retrovirus, and, by summer 1983, the NIH team had obtained evidence for an HTLV-related virus in many patients with AIDS and pre-AIDS. In 1984, the researchers described isolates of the new retrovirus, techniques for its continuous production, analyses of its proteins, and evidence that it causes AIDS.