Who discovered the HIV virus?
Luc Montagnier
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi for the discovery of HIV. They shared the Prize with Harald zur Hausen, who discovered that human papilloma viruses can cause cervical cancer. Montagnier said he was "surprised" that Robert Gallo was not also recognized by the Nobel Committee: "It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and Gallo had a very important role in that. I'm very sorry for Robert Gallo." According to Maria Masucci, a member of the Nobel Assembly, "there was no doubt as to who made the fundamental discoveries."
Harvey J. Alter
Harvey James Alter (born September 12, 1935) is an American medical researcher, virologist, and physician who is best known for his work that led to the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. Alter is the chief of the infectious disease section and the associate director for research of the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center in the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In the mid-1970s, Alter and his research team demonstrated that most post-transfusion hepatitis cases were not due to hepatitis A and hepatitis B viruses. Working independently, Alter and Edward Tabor, a scientist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, proved through transmission studies in chimpanzees that a new form of hepatitis, initially called “non-A, non-B hepatitis” caused the infections, and that the causative agent was probably a virus. This work eventually led to the discovery of the hepatitis C virus in 1988.
Discredited HIV/AIDS origins theories
Various fringe theories have arisen to speculate about purported alternative origins for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), with claims ranging from it being due to accidental exposure to supposedly purposeful acts. Several inquiries and investigations have been carried out as a result, and each of these theories has consequently been determined to be based on unfounded and/or false information. HIV has been shown to have evolved from or be closely related to the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in West Central Africa sometime in the early 20th century. HIV was discovered in the 1980s by the French scientist Luc Montagnier. Before the 1980s, HIV was an unknown deadly disease.
Flossie Wong-Staal
In 1972, following the receipt of her PhD, Wong-Staal undertook postdoctoral research at UCSD. Her postdoctoral work continued until 1973, when she moved to Bethesda, Maryland to work for Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). At the institute, Wong-Staal began her research into retroviruses. In 1983, Wong-Staal, Gallo and her team of NCI scientists identified HIV as the cause of AIDS, simultaneously with Luc Montagnier. Two years later, Wong-Staal became the first researcher to clone HIV. She also completed genetic mapping of the virus which made it possible to develop HIV tests. .This led to the first genetic map of the virus, which aided in the development of blood tests for HIV.
History of HIV/AIDS
In May 1983, a team of doctors at the Pasteur Institute in France including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier reported that they had isolated a new retrovirus from lymphoid ganglions that they believed was the cause of AIDS. The virus was later named lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV) and a sample was sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which was later passed to the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Contact tracing
In the 1980s, first genital herpes and then AIDS emerged into the public consciousness as sexually transmitted diseases that could not be cured by modern medicine. AIDS in particular has a long asymptomatic period—during which time HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS) can replicate and the disease can be transmitted to others—followed by a symptomatic period, which leads rapidly to death unless treated. HIV/AIDS entered the United States in about 1969 likely through a single infected immigrant from Haiti. Recognition that AIDS threatened a global pandemic led to public information campaigns and the development of treatments that allow AIDS to be managed by suppressing the replication of HIV for as long as possible. Contact tracing continues to be an important measure, even when diseases are incurable, as it helps to contain infection.
Robert Gallo
Gallo was awarded his second Lasker Award in 1986 for "determining that the retrovirus now known as HIV-1 is the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS)." He is the only recipient of two Lasker Awards. In 1986, Gallo, Dharam Ablashi, and Syed Zaki Salahuddin discovered human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6), later found to cause Roseola infantum, an infantile disease.
Khalid Yasin
Yasin believes that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is probably man-made and that the US Government is the likely culprit. He said that “missionaries from the World Health Organization and Christian groups ... went into Africa and inoculated people for diphtheria, malaria, yellow fever and they put in the medicine the AIDS virus.”
François Mitterrand
Controversy surrounding the discovery of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was intense after American researcher Robert Gallo and French scientist Luc Montagnier both claimed to have discovered it. The two scientists had given the new virus different names. The controversy was eventually settled by an agreement (helped along by the mediation of Dr Jonas Salk) between President Ronald Reagan and Mitterrand which gave equal credit to both men and their teams.
Janet Rideout
In June 1984, Burroughs Wellcome initiated a program to identify chemical compounds that might be effective against HIV, and they put Rideout in charge of choosing which compounds to test. There was limited knowledge about HIV at the time, but Rider's search was aided by the finding that HIV was a retrovirus, a type of virus that transfers between cells with its genome encoded in RNA but, once it infects a host cell, reverse transcribes its RNA genome into a DNA copy which it then inserts into the host cell's DNA, so that the cell and all its progeny are perpetually infected. Knowing that HIV was a retrovirus, Rideout searched for compounds with antiretroviral activity; the company didn't have the necessary set-up for studying live HIV, so they screened against animal retroviruses, with the screening carried out by virologist Martha (Marty) St. Clair.
HPV vaccine
Harald zur Hausen, a German researcher who initially suspected and later helped to prove that genital HPV infection can lead to cervical cancer, was awarded half of the $1.4 million Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work. Verification that cervical cancer is caused by an infectious agent led several other groups (see above) to develop vaccines against HPV strains that cause most cases of cervical cancer. The other half of the award went to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, two French virologists, for their part in the discovery of HIV.
Inventing the AIDS Virus
Inventing the AIDS Virus is a 1996 book by molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, in which the author argues that HIV does not cause AIDS. Duesberg contends that HIV is a harmless passenger virus and that AIDS is caused by unrelated factors such as drug abuse, antiretroviral medication, chronic malnutrition, poor sanitation, and hemophilia. The unambiguous scientific consensus is that HIV causes AIDS and that Duesberg's claims are incorrect. Duesberg received a negative response from the scientific community for supporting AIDS denialism, misrepresenting and ignoring the scientific evidence that HIV causes AIDS, and for relying upon poor logic and manipulation. Duesberg's book was also the subject of an authorship dispute with one of his graduate students.
Robert Gallo
In 2008, Montagnier and his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi from the Institut Pasteur were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on the discovery of HIV. Harald zur Hausen also shared the Prize for his discovery that human papilloma viruses lead to cervical cancer, but Gallo was left out. Gallo said that it was "a disappointment" that he was not named a co-recipient. Montagnier said he was "surprised" Gallo was not recognized by the Nobel Committee: "It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and Gallo had a very important role in that. I'm very sorry for Robert Gallo."
Maurice Hilleman
Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, once said "If I had to name a person who has done more for the benefit of human health, with less recognition than anyone else, it would be Maurice Hilleman. Maurice should be recognized as the most successful vaccinologist in history."
Misconceptions about HIV/AIDS
Origin of AIDS through human–monkey sexual intercourse
While HIV is most likely a mutated form of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a disease present only in chimpanzees and African monkeys, highly plausible explanations for the transfer of the disease between species (zoonosis) exist not involving sexual intercourse. In particular, the African chimpanzees and monkeys which carry SIV are often hunted for food, and epidemiologists theorize that the disease may have appeared in humans after hunters came into blood-contact with monkeys infected with SIV that they had killed. The first known instance of HIV in a human was found in a person who died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1959, and a recent study dates the last common ancestor of HIV and SIV to between 1884 and 1914 by using a molecular clock approach.
Henry Nicols
Henry Joseph Nicols (August 9, 1973 – May 8, 2000) was an American HIV/AIDS activist who became the first American student to intentionally disclose his HIV infection to his community in March 1991.
Kimberly Bergalis
Kimberly Ann Bergalis (January 19, 1968 – December 8, 1991) was an American woman who was one of six patients purportedly infected with HIV by dentist David J. Acer, who was infected with HIV and died of AIDS in September 1990. This incident is the first known case of clinical transmission of HIV.
Charlotte Friend
Charlotte Friend (March 11, 1921 – January 13, 1987) was an American virologist. She is best known for her discovery of the Friend leukemia virus. She helped to establish the concept of the oncovirus, studied the role of the host immune response in disease development, and helped define modern retrovirology.
HIV/AIDS in New York City
Dr. Michael Simberkoff, chief of staff of the Department of Veterans Affairs New York Harbor Medical Center, was a member of the Infectious Diseases staff in 1980 and was one of the first medical researchers to treat AIDS patients. According to Simberkoff, at first the outbreak was identified as a "gay-related immunodeficiency disease" that his group knew very little about and didn't know how to treat. The Infectious Diseases community began to get together on a regular basis at the and at the New York Department of Health to share their experiences. Soon it became clear that gay men were not the only ones who had the disease; intravenous drug abusers also appeared to get infected.
In 1983, the virus that causes AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) was identified and labeled as Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus (LAV) by Dr. Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In 1984, it was also identified by Dr. Robert Gallo of National Cancer Institute and named the Human T-cell Lymphotropic Virus (HTLV III). There was a conflict as to who first identified the virus, but it was resolved in a joint agreement. The virus was later renamed Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
Discredited HIV/AIDS origins theories
Jakob Segal (1911–1995), a professor at Humboldt University in then-East Germany, proposed that HIV was engineered at a U.S. military laboratory at Fort Detrick, by splicing together two other viruses, Visna and HTLV-1. According to his theory, the new virus, created between 1977 and 1978, was tested on prison inmates who had volunteered for the experiment in exchange for early release. He further suggested that it was through these prisoners that the virus was spread to the population at large.
Misconceptions about HIV/AIDS
The current consensus is that HIV was introduced to North America by a Haitian immigrant who contracted it while working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the early 1960s, or from another person who worked there during that time. In 1981 on June 5, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) publish a "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report" (MMWR), describing cases of a rare lung infection, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), from five healthy, gay men in Los Angeles. This edition would later become "MMWR's" first official reporting of the AIDS epidemic in North America. By year-end, an cumulative total of 270 reported cases of severe immune deficiency was founded amid gay men, 121 out of the 270 reported cases had died. On September 24 in 1982, CDC started to use the term “AIDS” (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) for the first time, and released the first case definition of AIDS: “a disease at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell-mediated immunity, occurring in a person with no known case for diminished resistance to that disease.” Than an edition in March 4,1983 of the "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report" (MMWR), notes that CDC founded most cases of AIDS have been reported among homosexual men with multiple sexual partners, injection drug users, Haitians, and hemophiliacs. The report suggests that AIDS may be caused by an infectious agent that is transmitted sexually or through exposure to blood or blood products and issues recommendations for preventing transmission. Although most cases founded of HIV/AIDS were founded in gay men on January 7, 1983 CDC reported cases of AIDS in female sexual partners of males with AIDS. In 1984 Scientists identified the virus that causes AIDS, which was first named after the T-cells affected by the strain and is now called HIV or human immunodeficiency virus. Afterwards, A Canadian flight attendant, dubbed "Patient Zero," dies of AIDS-related complications. His sexual connection to several of the first victims of HIV is erroneously reported that he is responsible for introducing the virus into North America. By this time there were 8,000 confirmed cases in the U.S., resulting in an alarming 3,500 deaths.
Jean-Claude Chermann
Jean-Claude Chermann is a French virologist who managed the research team which, by 1983, under the administrative supervision of Luc Montagnier, had discovered the virus associated with AIDS. Whereas second author of this initial publication and obviously involved as team manager in this discovery, he had been omitted from the Nobel Prize attributed to its colleagues. The virus was named lymphadenopathy-associated virus, or LAV. A year later, a team led by Robert Gallo of the United States confirmed the discovery of the virus, but renamed it human T-lymphotropic virus type III (HTLV-III).
People With AIDS
Bobbi Campbell was a gay San Francisco man who was diagnosed with AIDS in September 1981, making him one of the first people in the US to be diagnosed with AIDS. On the recommendation of Marcus Conant, a doctor specializing in AIDS care, Bobbi began meeting with another man diagnosed with HIV, Dan Turner. The two met at Turner’s house in the Castro. There, they laid the groundwork for what was to become known as People with AIDS San Francisco. After that, Turner was invited to speak at the birthday party of the late Harvey Milk, the openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco who had been assassinated in 1978. On Castro street, Turner, as well as Campbell, identified themselves publicly as having AIDS. Turner’s speech urged people to do three things: keep informed, be cautious but not paranoid, and be supportive. This was the first of many speaking events for Campbell and Turner.
HIV
The earliest, well-documented case of HIV in a human dates back to 1959 in the Belgian Congo. The virus may have been present in the United States as early as the mid-to-late 1950s, as a sixteen-year-old male presented with symptoms in 1966 and died in 1969.
HIV and men who have sex with men
Since reports of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) began to emerge in the United States in the 1980s, the HIV epidemic has frequently been linked to gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) by epidemiologists and medical professionals. The first official report on the virus was published by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) on June 5, 1981 and detailed the cases of five young gay men who were hospitalised with serious infections. A month later, The New York Times reported that 41 homosexuals had been diagnosed with Kaposi’s Sarcoma, and eight had died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made. By 1982, the condition was referred to in the medical community as (Gay-related immune deficiency (GRID), "gay cancer," and "gay compromise syndrome." It was not until July 1982 that the term Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was suggested to replace GRID, and even then it was not until September that the CDC first used the AIDS acronym in an official report.
And the Band Played On
Around the same time gay men were getting sick in the United States, doctors in Paris were receiving patients who were African or who had lived in Africa with the same symptoms as the Americans. Parisian researchers Jean-Claude Chermann, Françoise Barre, Luc Montagnier, and doctor Willy Rozenbaum began taking biopsies of HIV-infected lymph nodes and discovered a new retrovirus. As a scientific necessity to compare it to the American version of HIV, French doctors representing the Pasteur Institute sent a colleague to the National Cancer Institute, where Robert Gallo was also working on the virus. The colleague switched the samples, Shilts reported, because of a grudge he had against the Pasteur Institute. Instead of Gallo comparing his samples with the French samples, he found the very same retrovirus as the French sample, putting back any new results in AIDS research for at least a year.
James Chau
Chau has been described as one of China's leading AIDS activists. He came under the early mentorship of Belgian scientist Peter Piot, who co-discovered the Ebola virus, and has traveled on health missions to India, Norway, Indonesia, and the United States. In August 2009, the United Nations announced his appointment as its first UNAIDS Goodwill Ambassador on the Chinese Mainland, joining Naomi Watts, Michael Ballack and Princess Stephanie of Monaco. In April 2010, his first show as presenter of the new "China 24" program was headlined by China's lifting of the HIV-related travel ban.
Peter Piot
Peter Karel, Baron Piot, KCMG, FRCP, FMedSci (born 1949) is a Belgian microbiologist known for his research into Ebola and AIDS. After helping discover the Ebola virus in 1976 and leading efforts to contain the first-ever recorded Ebola epidemic that same year, Piot became a pioneering researcher into AIDS. He has held key positions in the United Nations and World Health Organization involving AIDS research and management. He has also served as a professor at several universities worldwide.
HIV/AIDS
Therese Frare's photograph of gay activist David Kirby, as he lay dying from AIDS while surrounded by family, was taken in April 1990. "LIFE magazine" said the photo became the one image "most powerfully identified with the HIV/AIDS epidemic." The photo was displayed in "LIFE magazine", was the winner of the World Press Photo, and acquired worldwide notoriety after being used in a United Colors of Benetton advertising campaign in 1992.
In 1996, Johnson Aziga, a Ugandan-born Canadian was diagnosed with HIV, but subsequently had unprotected sex with 11 women without disclosing his diagnosis. By 2003 seven had contracted HIV, and two died from complications related to AIDS. Aziga was convicted of first-degree murder and was sentenced for life.
HIV/AIDS
Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Following initial infection, a person may not notice any symptoms or may experience a brief period of influenza-like illness. Typically, this is followed by a prolonged period with no symptoms. As the infection progresses, it interferes more with the immune system, increasing the risk of developing common infections such as tuberculosis, as well as other opportunistic infections, and tumors that rarely affect people who have working immune systems. These late symptoms of infection are referred to as acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). This stage is often also associated with unintended weight loss.
HIV is spread primarily by unprotected sex (including anal and oral sex), contaminated blood transfusions, hypodermic needles, and from mother to child during pregnancy, delivery, or breastfeeding. Some bodily fluids, such as saliva and tears, do not transmit HIV. Methods of prevention include safe sex, needle exchange programs, treating those who are infected, and male circumcision. Disease in a baby can often be prevented by giving both the mother and child antiretroviral medication. There is no cure or vaccine; however, antiretroviral treatment can slow the course of the disease and may lead to a near-normal life expectancy. Treatment is recommended as soon as the diagnosis is made. Without treatment, the average survival time after infection is 11 years.
In 2016, about 36.7 million people were living with HIV and it resulted in 1 million deaths. There were 300,000 fewer new HIV cases in 2016 than in 2015. Most of those infected live in sub-Saharan Africa. From the time AIDS was identified in the early 1980s to 2017, the disease has caused an estimated 35 million deaths worldwide. HIV/AIDS is considered a pandemic—a disease outbreak which is present over a large area and is actively spreading. HIV originated in west-central Africa during the late 19th or early 20th century. AIDS was first recognized by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 1981 and its cause—HIV infection—was identified in the early part of the decade.
HIV/AIDS has had a great impact on society, both as an illness and as a source of discrimination. The disease also has large economic impacts. There are many misconceptions about HIV/AIDS such as the belief that it can be transmitted by casual non-sexual contact. The disease has become subject to many controversies involving religion including the Catholic Church's position not to support condom use as prevention. It has attracted international medical and political attention as well as large-scale funding since it was identified in the 1980s.
Bette Korber
Korber conducts her research at Los Alamos National Laboratory where she began in 1990. Her approach involves applying computational biology to the design of a vaccine against the HIV/AIDS virus. She first became interested in HIV when a close friend of hers and her fiancé's at Caltech contracted one of the first cases of AIDS in Pasadena, California. She said, "We learned a lot about HIV while he was sick. But there was no treatment for him and he died in 1991. I decided when I graduated from my PhD program that I wanted to work on HIV." Several years later, looking back on this event, she described its effects: "I "hate" HIV ... I lost a couple friends to it. HIV kills in horrible ways. I think of what the epidemic has done to Africa and it motivates me."
Dharam Ablashi
Dharam V. Ablashi (born October 8, 1931) is an American biomedical researcher born in India. He is best known for his co-discovery of Human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6), an immunosuppressive and neurotropic virus that can cause encephalitis and seizures during a primary infection or when reactivated from latency in immunosuppressed patients. He has contributed more than 95 papers on HHV-6; most of which appeared in top medical journals and has authored or co-authored over 300 journal articles on herpes viruses. He is internationally known for his research on Human and Simian herpesviruses and has also been a major contributor to research in HIV, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and the field of immunovirology.
History of HIV/AIDS
A Canadian airline steward named Gaëtan Dugas was referred to as "Case 057" and later "Patient O" with the alphabet letter "O" standing for "outside Southern California", in an early AIDS study by Dr. William Darrow of the Centers for Disease Control. Because of this, many people had considered Dugas to be responsible for taking HIV to North America. However, HIV reached New York City around 1971 while Dugas did not start work at Air Canada until 1974. In Randy Shilts' 1987 book "And the Band Played On" (and the 1993 movie based on it), Dugas is referred to as AIDS' Patient Zero instead of "Patient O", but neither the book nor the movie states that he had been the first to bring the virus to North America. He was incorrectly called "Patient Zero" because at least 40 of the 248 people known to be infected by HIV in 1983 had had sex with him, or with someone who had sexual intercourse with him.
Dmitri Ivanovsky
Dmitri Iosifovich Ivanovsky (alternative spelling "Dmitrii" or "Dmitry Iwanowski"; ; 28 October 1864 – 20 June 1920) was a Russian botanist, the discoverer of viruses (1892) and one of the founders of virology.
Luc Montagnier
In 1982, Willy Rozenbaum, a clinician at the "Hôpital Bichat" hospital in Paris, asked Montagnier for assistance in establishing the cause of a mysterious new syndrome, AIDS (known at the time as "gay-related immune deficiency" or GRID). Rozenbaum had suggested at scientific meetings that the cause of the disease might be a retrovirus. Montagnier and members of his group at the Pasteur Institute, notably including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann, had extensive experience with retroviruses. Montagnier and his team examined samples taken from Rozenbaum's AIDS patients and found the virus that would later become known as HIV in a lymph node biopsy. They named it "lymphadenopathy-associated virus", or LAV, since it was not then clear that it was the cause of AIDS, and published their findings in the journal "Science" on 20 May 1983.
Darren James
Darren James (born on February 25, 1964) is an American former pornographic actor and director. He gained notoriety after he contracted the HIV virus and unwittingly infected three pornographic actresses.
Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus
In 1872, Moritz Kaposi described a blood vessel tumor (originally called "idiopathic multiple pigmented sarcoma of the skin") that has since been eponymously named Kaposi's sarcoma (KS). KS was at first thought to be an uncommon tumor of Jewish and Mediterranean populations until it was later determined to be extremely common throughout sub-Saharan African populations. This led to the first suggestions in the 1950s that this tumor might be caused by a virus. With the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, there was a sudden resurgence of KS affecting primarily gay and bisexual AIDS patients,with up to 50% of reported AIDS patients having this tumor—an extraordinary rate of cancer predisposition. Careful analysis of epidemiologic data by Valerie Beral, Thomas Peterman and Harold Jaffe, led these investigators to propose that KS is caused by an unknown sexually transmitted virus that rarely causes tumors unless the host becomes immunosuppressed, as in AIDS.
As early as 1984, scientists reported seeing herpesvirus-like structures in KS tumors examined under electron microscopy. Scientists had been searching for the agent causing KS, and over 20 agents were proposed as the possible cause, including cytomegalovirus and HIV itself. The pathogen was ultimately identified in 1994 by Yuan Chang and Patrick S. Moore, a wife and husband team at Columbia University, through the isolation of DNA fragments from a herpesvirus found in a KS tumor in an AIDS patient. Chang and Moore used representational difference analysis, or RDA, to find KSHV by comparing KS tumor tissue from an AIDS patient to his own unaffected tissue. The idea behind this experiment was that if a virus causes KS, the genomic DNA in the two samples should be precisely identical except for DNA belonging to the virus. In their initial RDA experiment, they isolated two small DNA fragments that represented less than 1% of the actual viral genome. These fragments were similar (but still distinct from) the known herpevirus sequences, indicating the presence of a new virus. Starting from these fragments, this research team was then able to sequence the entire genome of the virus less than two years later.
HIV/AIDS
Two types of HIV have been characterized: HIV-1 and HIV-2. HIV-1 is the virus that was originally discovered (and initially referred to also as LAV or HTLV-III). It is more virulent, more infective, and is the cause of the majority of HIV infections globally. The lower infectivity of HIV-2 as compared with HIV-1 implies that fewer people exposed to HIV-2 will be infected per exposure. Because of its relatively poor capacity for transmission, HIV-2 is largely confined to West Africa.
Robert Gallo
In 1989, the investigative journalist John Crewdson suggested that Gallo's lab might have misappropriated a sample of HIV isolated at the Pasteur Institute by Montagnier's group. Investigations by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the HHS ultimately cleared Gallo's group of any wrongdoing and demonstrated that they had numerous isolates of HIV of their own. As part of these investigations, the United States Office of Research Integrity at the National Institutes of Health commissioned Hoffmann–La Roche scientists to analyze archival samples established at the Pasteur Institute and the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute between 1983 and 1985. They concluded that the virus used in Gallo's lab had come from Montagnier's lab; it was a virus from a patient that had contaminated a virus sample from another patient. On request, Montagnier's group had sent a sample of this culture to Gallo, not knowing it contained two viruses. The sample then contaminated the pooled culture on which Gallo was working.
On 12 December 1985 the Institut Pasteur filed suit to challenge a patent for an HIV test that had been granted on 28 May 1985 to the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In 1987, the two governments agreed to split equally the proceeds from the patent, naming Montagnier and Gallo co-discoverers. Montagnier and Gallo resumed collaborating with each other again for a chronology that appeared in "Nature" in 1987.
Beatrice Hahn
Hanh made the startling discovery that certain SIVs had traversed between humans and certain nonhuman primate species a multitude of times to result in types 1 and 2 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The two viruses she identified were SIVcpz from chimpanzees ("Pan troglodytes") and SIVsmm from sooty mangabeys ("Cercocebus atys"). The realization that the transfer of SIVs had generated HIV led Hahn to conclude that presence of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was due to the cross-species infections of humans by lentiviruses of primate origin.
History of HIV/AIDS
Whether Gallo or Montagnier deserve more credit for the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS has been a matter of considerable controversy. Together with his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Montagnier was awarded one half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his "discovery of human immunodeficiency virus". Harald zur Hausen also shared the prize for his discovery that human papilloma virus leads to cervical cancer, but Gallo was left out. Gallo said that it was "a disappointment" that he was not named a co-recipient. Montagnier said he was "surprised" Gallo was not recognized by the Nobel Committee: "It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and Gallo had a very important role in that. I'm very sorry for Robert Gallo." Dr Levy's contribution to the discovery of HIV was also cited in the Nobel Prize ceremony.
HIV/AIDS
One of the first high-profile cases of AIDS was the American Rock Hudson, a gay actor who had been married and divorced earlier in life, who died on October 2, 1985 having announced that he was suffering from the virus on July 25 that year. He had been diagnosed during 1984. A notable British casualty of AIDS that year was Nicholas Eden, a gay politician and son of the late prime minister Anthony Eden. On November 24, 1991, the virus claimed the life of British rock star Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the band Queen, who died from an AIDS-related illness having only revealed the diagnosis on the previous day. However, he had been diagnosed as HIV positive in 1987. One of the first high-profile heterosexual cases of the virus was Arthur Ashe, the American tennis player. He was diagnosed as HIV positive on August 31, 1988, having contracted the virus from blood transfusions during heart surgery earlier in the 1980s. Further tests within 24 hours of the initial diagnosis revealed that Ashe had AIDS, but he did not tell the public about his diagnosis until April 1992. He died as a result on February 6, 1993 at age 49.
Discovery and development of non-nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitors
Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a leading cause of death in the world. It was identified as a disease in 1981. Two years later the etiology agent for AIDS, the HIV was described. HIV is a retrovirus and has two major serotypes, HIV-1 and HIV-2. The pandemic mostly involves HIV-1 while HIV-2 has lower morbidity rate and is mainly restricted to western Africa.
History of virology
The second half of the 20th century was the golden age of virus discovery and most of the 2,000 recognised species of animal, plant, and bacterial viruses were discovered during these years. In 1946, Bovine virus diarrhea was discovered, which is still possibly the most common pathogen of cattle throughout the world and in 1957, equine arterivirus was discovered. In the 1950s, improvements in virus isolation and detection methods resulted in the discovery of several important human viruses including Varicella zoster virus, the paramyxoviruses, – which include measles virus, and respiratory syncytial virus – and the rhinoviruses that cause the common cold. In the 1960s more viruses were discovered. In 1963, the hepatitis B virus was discovered by Baruch Blumberg (b. 1925). Reverse transcriptase, the key enzyme that retroviruses use to translate their RNA into DNA, was first described in 1970, independently by Howard Temin and David Baltimore (b. 1938). This was important to the development of antiviral drugs – a key turning-point in the history of viral infections. In 1983 Luc Montagnier (b. 1932) and his team at the Pasteur Institute in France, first isolated the retrovirus now called HIV. In 1989 Michael Houghton's team at Chiron Corporation discovered Hepatitis C.
New viruses and strains of viruses were discovered in every decade of the second half of the 20th century. These discoveries have continued in the 21st century as new viral diseases such as SARS and nipah virus have emerged. Despite scientists' achievements over the past one hundred years, viruses continue to pose new threats and challenges.
Hitler-Ransomware
The virus was discovered by the AVG Technologies analyst Jakub Kroustek. Upon further investigation of it, he determined that it likely originated in Germany as a prototype given that the batch file associated with it had the words "Das ist ein Test" (German: This is a Test) in it. It is noted that while the Hitler ransomware's demand for payment in gift cards instead of Bitcoin was uncommon, it was not unique to this ransomware. Spelling mistakes made in the demands have led technology journalists to joke that it could upset Grammar Nazis.
Common chimpanzee
Two types of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infect humans: HIV-1 and HIV-2. HIV-1 is the more virulent and easily transmitted, and is the source of the majority of HIV infections throughout the world; HIV-2 is largely confined to west Africa. Both types originated in west and central Africa, jumping from primates to humans. HIV-1 has evolved from a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIVcpz) found in the common chimpanzee subspecies, "P. t. troglodytes", native to southern Cameroon. Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has the greatest genetic diversity of HIV-1 so far discovered, suggesting the virus has been there longer than anywhere else. HIV-2 crossed species from a different strain of HIV, found in the sooty mangabey monkeys in Guinea-Bissau.
Bruce Chatwin
Chatwin's case was unusual as he had a fungal infection, "Penicillium marneffei", which at the time had rarely been seen and only in South Asia. It is now known as an AIDS-defining illness, but in 1986 little was known about HIV and AIDS. Doctors were not certain if all cases of HIV developed into AIDS. The rare fungus gave Chatwin hope that he might be different and served as the basis of what he told most people about his illness. He gave various reasons for how he became infected with the fungus — ranging from eating a thousand-year-old egg to exploring a bat cave in Indonesia. He never publicly disclosed that he was HIV-positive because of the stigma at the time. He wanted to protect his parents, who were unaware of his homosexual affairs.
III International AIDS Conference, 1987
Robert Gallo announced the discovery of HIV-2.
Robert Gallo
Robert Charles Gallo (; born March 23, 1937) is an American biomedical researcher. He is best known for his role in the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the infectious agent responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and in the development of the HIV blood test, and he has been a major contributor to subsequent HIV research.
Antonín Holý
Antonín Holý (1 September 1936 – 16 July 2012) was a pioneering Czech scientist. He specialised in the field of chemistry and cooperated on the development of important antiretroviral drugs used in the treatment of HIV and hepatitis B. He was involved in the creation of the most effective drug (as of early 2009) in the treatment of AIDS. Antonín Holý is the author of more than 400 scientific discoveries and holds 60 patents. With more than 400 discoveries to his credit, his work has affected millions of people with viral diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis B and many other viral diseases. In 2008 he received an Honorary Professorship at the University of Manchester's School of Chemistry.
Robert Gallo
In 1991, following years of controversy surrounding a 1987 out of court settlement between the National Institutes of Health and France's Pasteur Institute, Gallo admitted the virus he claimed to have discovered in 1984 was in reality a virus sent to him from France the year before, putting an end to a six-year effort by Gallo and his employer, the National Institutes of Health, to claim the AIDS virus as an independent discovery.
Wilson Carswell
John Wilson Carswell OBE FRCS (born 1937) is a Scottish physician who was one of the first medical researchers to identify HIV/AIDS in Uganda.
HIV/AIDS in the United States
Gallo, who appeared to question the primacy of the French scientist's discovery, refused to recognize the "French virus" as the cause of AIDS, and tried instead to claim the disease was caused by a new member of a retrovirus family, HTLV, which he had discovered. Critics claim that because some scientists were more interested in trying to win a Nobel prize than in helping patients, research progress was delayed and more people needlessly died. After a number of meetings and high-level political intervention, the French scientists and Gallo agreed to "share" the discovery of HIV, although eventually Montagnier and his group were recognized as the true discoverers, and won the 2008 Nobel Prize for it.
Marvelyn Brown
Having little knowledge on HIV, Brown was unaware that the disease could be contracted through heterosexual sex. She was a healthy track and basketball athlete but began showing symptoms of an unknown illness that became critical enough to put her in an intensive-care unit. Doctors were unable to determine the cause of her illness, and Brown began to wonder if she had contracted HIV. She was diagnosed HIV-positive thereafter at the age of 19 in 2003, and discovered she had contracted the virus from her boyfriend at the time. In an interview with "The Body", Brown stated "How did I not know that the virus was sexually transmitted? I felt I had been robbed by my community, my school and my church. The mantras I had heard over and over again growing up — 'Don't do drugs; don't get pregnant; don't smoke' — suddenly seemed so worthless. Never had someone mentioned the possibility of me, Marvelyn Brown, contracting HIV from unprotected sex. I had seen it as something only Africans or gay men got."
Don Francis
Francis began his work on AIDS in 1981. He was one of the first scientists to suggest that AIDS was caused by an infectious agent. As director of the CDC's AIDS Laboratory Activities, he worked closely with the Institut Pasteur which isolated HIV.
HIV/AIDS denialism
In 1986, the viruses discovered by Montagnier and Gallo, found to be genetically indistinguishable, were renamed HIV.
Jacques Leibowitch
When in July 1982, the first cases of AIDS appear in hemophiliacs receiving highly filtered blood samples, the scientific community realized that AIDS was most likely caused by a virus. Jacques Leibowitch noticed some intriguing similarities between AIDS and the pathology linked to HTLV (Human T Cell Leukemia Lymphoma Virus), the only known human retro-virus at that time. Both situations affect CD4 T helper lymphocyte cells. HTLV induces the massive proliferation of one or several clones and their cancerization, whereas the other virus, the HIV virus tends to eradicate these cells without apparent discrimination. Otherwise, these two pathological descriptions are present in both Africa and the Caribbean (see. A Strange Virus of Unknown Origin Jacques Leibowitch, Ballantine Books, New York, 1985, translated from Un Virus Etrange Venu d’Ailleurs, Grasset Paris 1984 ). Indeed, in both Paris and Brussels, doctors had seen cases of patients having lived or spent time in Francophone Africa or in Haiti who suffered from a disease with an undeniable resemblance to that arising at the time in the United States in "immuno-deficient homosexuals". Leibowitch, informed by the Franco-American literary author Gilles Barbedette of the announcement by Robert Gallo in Medical World News (August 1, 1982) that an HTLV type retro-virus could be at the cause of AIDS, found in that most succinct brief the profile matching his CD4-tropic exotic viral suspect (in Grasset, Ballantine Books, workS cited). The retro-viral inspiration was thus consolidated and opened between Bethesda (Gallo) and Paris (Leibowitch et al.) from August 1982 onwards. 
Failing to find in the Paris team of Professeur Jean-Paul Lévy or the Lille team of Dominique Stéhelin a French retro-virus specialist eager to pursue this line of investigation, he contacted upon a recommendation by Jean Paul Lévy Professor Robert Gallo in Bethesda, the then world-renowned virologist on HTLV. It was then in November 1982 that Gallo informed him from Bethesda of his initial virology findings in keeping with the AIDS HTLV-type virus hypotheses. For his part, Willy Rozenbaum, warned in private by Leibowitch that an exotic HTLV-type retrovirus could well be the cause of AIDS, embarks upon a discreet collaboration with the Luc Montagnier team of the Pasteur Institute. Montagnier, along with his collaborator Jean-Claude Chermann, had just recently received news of the HTLV and AIDS hypotheses by Dr Paul Prunet, the then director of « Recherche&Développement » at Sanofi-Pasteur-Marnes La Coquette, where Leibowitch had given a speech at the end of November 1982. The Montagnier team subsequently detected in the cell culture of patient BRU the traces of the first non HTLV retrovirus in January 1983, a virus eventually recognized as the cause of AIDS thanks to the conclusive additions by Robert Gallo and his group (April 1984) "Memo Regarding Chronological Summary of Experiments Leading to the Isolation of HTLV-III from AIDS and ARC" sur le site de la Jon Cohen AIDS Research Collection, 2 pages. Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for their work. In a letter to the prestigious magazine Nature Medicine in 2003, as well as in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2008, Luc Montagnier recognizes Jacques Leibowitch as being the initiator of the retro-virus hypothesis in France . However, the patented list of the discoverers of AIDS and HIV do not take Jacques Leibowitch into account for his contribution in the initial phases of the discovery. The scientific historian Mirko Grmek reflects back on the details of the stages that led to the discovery of the AIDS virus in his work “the History of AIDS” and the Jon Cohen AIDS Research Collection contains numerous archived documents on the subject. The book “Sida.O” (AIDS.O) written by D. Lestrade and G.Pialoux contains also many details on the history of AIDS.
Bette Korber
Bette Korber is an American computational biologist focusing on the molecular biology and population genetics of the HIV virus that causes infection and eventually AIDS. She has contributed heavily to efforts to obtain an effective HIV vaccine. She created a database at Los Alamos National Laboratory that has enabled her to design novel mosaic HIV vaccines, one of which is currently in human testing in Africa. The database contains thousands of HIV genome sequences and related data.
Max Essex
In 1984, Essex identified gp120, the virus surface protein that is used worldwide for blood screening, HIV detection, and epidemiological monitoring. With collaborators, he discovered the first simian immunodeficiency virus, as well as HIV-2. Since 1986, he has developed programs for AIDS collaboration in Senegal, Thailand, Botswana, India, Mexico, and China. In 1996, Essex helped establish the Botswana–Harvard Partnership for HIV Research and Education (now the Botswana–Harvard AIDS Institute). This is a collaboration between the Ministry of Health in Botswana and HAI.
National Microbiology Laboratory
Dr. Plummer received his medical degree from the University of Manitoba in 1976. Between 1984 and 2001, Dr. Plummer lived in Nairobi, Kenya where he spearheaded the development of the world renowned "Kenya AIDS Control Program," established by the Universities of Manitoba and Nairobi. This HIV epidemiological work was central to global understanding of the risk factors for HIV transmission and how to prevent its spread. Dr. Plummer was the first to reveal that heterosexual women could also be infected with HIV/AIDS and that a cohort of Nairobi sex workers had a natural immunity to HIV/AIDS. This latter discovery suggested the possibility that a vaccine could eventually be developed.
HIV/AIDS denialism
At a 23 April 1984 press conference in Washington, D.C., Margaret Heckler, Secretary of Health and Human Services, announced that Gallo and his co-workers had discovered a virus that is the "probable" cause of AIDS. This virus was initially named HTLV-III. That same year, Casper Schmidt responded to Gallo's papers with "The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS", "Journal of Psychohistory". Schmidt posited that AIDS was not an actual disease, but rather an example of "epidemic hysteria" in which groups of people are subconsciously acting out social conflicts. Schmidt compared AIDS to documented cases of epidemic hysteria in the past which were mistakenly thought to be infectious. (Schmidt himself would later die of AIDS in 1994.)
Richard J. Schmidt
HIV is a fairly fragile virus, and lasts for only a few hours outside the human body. Detectives examining hospital records found that Schmidt had taken blood from one patient that night, but had never sent the blood to the lab. The absence of laboratory testing identification references against this patient's name led to police visiting the man who readily disclosed that he had AIDS and that he had been called in for a blood test by Schmidt on the evening in question. The forensic challenge at that point was to match the DNA from the virus itself from the patient to the victim, something that had never been done before. HIV DNA was collected from the victim, from the putative patient source, and from thirty-two other unrelated, HIV-positive individuals living in the same metropolitan area. Scientists concluded that of all the samples they tested, the two viruses' DNA from the victim and the patient matched almost exactly, even with HIV's potential to mutate very rapidly.
Gurmit Singh Aulakh
He was the first to demonstrate unequivocal evidence of the footprints of viral genetic material in human cancer tissue which was absent in the normal tissue of the same person, thus proving the viral etiology of cancer. He carried out this work in the Tumor Cell Biology laboratory headed by Dr. Robert Gallo, who just a few years later co-discovered the AIDS virus. Dr. Aulakh also tested the swine flu vaccine for viruses before it was released to the public in the US in 1976. Before ending his professional scientific career, Dr. Aulakh was credited with more than 27 scientific publications in various prestigious scientific journals, as well as chapters in university level books pertaining to his research work.
The Perth Group
Members of the Perth Group attempted to testify at the trial of Andre Chad Parenzee, an Australian man charged with endangering human life after having unprotected sex with three women despite knowing he was HIV-positive, but the supreme court judge threw out their claims as "implausible." Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of HIV, testified at the trial and noted that Turner, who had also testified, had incorrectly claimed HIV was identified through the activity of reverse transcription when in fact it was identified through the presence of the reverse transcriptase enzyme, stating that '"only a fool" would mistake the two'. Gallo pointed out during the trial that Turner lacked any credibility to testify during the trial regarding HIV infection as he lacked any qualifications as a virologist and conducted no research in the field. Gallo later stated in an e-mail that he was amazed at the Perth Group's "mass ignorance coupled with the grandiosity of selling themselves as experts". Australian Research biologist Gustav Nossal, along with several other Australian scientists, gave evidence during the trial and described the group as '"a very considerable embarrassment" to Australian science'.
Harold Ginsberg
Harold Samuel "Harry" Ginsberg (May 27, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American microbiologist who made early discoveries in virology and infectious disease.
Daniel Peterson (physician)
In 2010, Peterson left WPI due to personal reasons. He stated there was a lack of collaboration with him over the research direction of the institute concerning XMRV. Peterson then teamed with Jay Levy, one of the original discoverers of HIV, to try to determine whether XMRV is truly present in patients by testing the same patients used in the study published in "Science". They did not find indications of XMRV in the blood of the patients tested, and also concluded from their experiments that XMRV does not, "survive well in human blood", so human infection is unlikely. They also stated that research results published by others suggested that laboratory contamination may have resulted in false positive results in the original study.
Beatrice Hahn
They were able to determine that the isolated retrovirus was the cause of AIDS. They went on to discover that HIV originated from chimpanzees, gorillas, and sooty mangabey strains of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). Contrary to the prevailing scientific opinion, Hahn found that SIV does cause disease in its hosts and that chimpanzees represent a reservoir of HIV. She has also cloned HIV-2 and catalogued genetic variants of HIV-1 and their drug resistance.
Victor Anomah Ngu
Victor Anomah ngu (1926–2011) was a Cameroonian professor, researcher and one time Minister of Public Health.
The Professor became famous after inventing VANHIVAX, a vaccine he affirmed is an immunological solution in the treatment of HIV/AIDS.
Discovery and development of HIV-protease inhibitors
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a lentivirus that has two major species, HIV-1 which causes the majority of the epidemic, and HIV-2, a close relative whose distribution is concentrated in western Africa. HIV infection was first described in 1981 in San Francisco and New York City. In 1985, HIV was identified as the causative agent of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and its complete genome was immediately available. This knowledge paved the way for the development of selective inhibitors.
Donald Jeffries
Professor Donald Jeffries (29 August 1941 – 7 December 2011) was a British virologist and academic. He was a leading expert on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.
Ryan White
Healthy for most of his childhood, White became extremely ill with pneumonia in December 1984. On December 17, 1984, during a lung biopsy, White was diagnosed with AIDS. By this time the scientific community had studied the epidemic in great detail. Earlier that year, HTLV-III was identified and isolated by American research scientists, confirming the work done by French research scientists who called it LAV. A lengthy public battle to determine who should be recognized as the discoverer of the human retro virus delayed development of a test for what would later be called HIV. White had apparently received a contaminated treatment of Factor VIII that was infected with HIV, as did thousands of other Americans with hemophilia and hemophiliacs around the world. At that time, because the retrovirus that causes AIDS had been recently identified, much of the pooled Factor VIII concentrate was tainted. Blood banks and pharmaceuticals dismissed calls by the CDC to use a Hepatitis B test as a surrogate until a HIV test could be developed. Late plasma products were screened and heat-treated to deactivate both HIV and Hepatitis. Among hemophiliacs treated with blood-clotting factors between 1979 and 1984, nearly 90% became infected with HIV and/or Hepatitis C. At the time of his diagnosis, his T-cell count had dropped to 25 (a healthy individual without HIV will have around 500–1200). Doctors predicted Ryan White had only six months to live.
Jakob Segal
Jakob Segal (17 April 1911 – 30 September 1995) was a Russian-born German biology professor at Humboldt University of Berlin in the former East Germany. He was one of the advocates of the conspiracy theory that HIV was created by the United States government at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Stephen Feinstone
Stephen Mark Feinstone is a virologist who, together with Albert Kapikian and Robert Purcell, co-identified the Hepatitis A virus (HAV) in 1973.
HIV/AIDS in the United States
The Shilts work popularized the misconception that the disease was introduced by a gay flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas, referred to as "Patient Zero," although the author did not actually make this claim in the book. However, subsequent research has revealed that there were cases of AIDS much earlier than initially known. HIV-infected blood samples have been found from as early as 1959 in Africa "(see HIV main entry)", and HIV has been shown to have caused the death of Robert Rayford, a 16-year-old St. Louis male, in 1969, who could have contracted it as early as 7 years old due to sexual abuse, suggesting that HIV had been present, at very low prevalence, in the U.S. since before the 1970s.
Arvid Noe
Arne Vidar Røed, known in medical literature as Arvid Darre Noe (23 July 1946 – 24 April 1976), was a Norwegian sailor and truck driver who contracted one of the earliest confirmed cases of HIV/AIDS. His was the first confirmed HIV case in Europe, though the disease was not identified at the time of his death. The virus spread to his wife and youngest daughter, both of whom also died; this was the first documented cluster of AIDS cases before the AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s. The researchers studying the cases referred to Røed as the "Norwegian Sailor" and the anagram "Arvid Noe" to conceal his identity; his true name, Arne Vidar Røed, became known after his death.
Jakob Segal
One of Segal's claims was that Prof. Robert Gallo crossed the Visna sheep virus with the Human T-lymphotropic virus (HTLV I) in 1978 in the P4 laboratory of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick. Proponents of this theory claim that 90% of HIV RNA is found in Visna and 10% in HTLV I. Genomic analysis, however, shows that such claims are false. Research after Segal's theory shows that HIV is much more closely related to the simian immunodeficiency virus than to any other virus.
Luc Montagnier
Today it is agreed that Montagnier's group first isolated HIV, but Gallo's group is credited with discovering that the virus causes AIDS and with generating much of the science that made the discovery possible, including a technique previously developed by Gallo's lab for growing T cells in the laboratory. When Montagnier's group first published their discovery, they said HIV's role in causing AIDS "remains to be determined."
Zidovudine
In 1983 researchers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris identified the retrovirus now known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) as the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in humans. Shortly thereafter, Samuel Broder, Hiroaki Mitsuya, and Robert Yarchoan of the United States National Cancer Institute (NCI) initiated a program to develop therapies for HIV/AIDS. Using a line of CD4 T cells that they had made, they developed an assay to screen drugs for their ability to protect CD4 T cells from being killed by HIV. In order to expedite the process of discovering a drug, the NCI researchers actively sought collaborations with pharmaceutical companies having access to libraries of compounds with potential antiviral activity. This assay could simultaneously test both the anti-HIV effect of the compounds and their toxicity against infected T cells.
History of HIV/AIDS
In May 1984 a team led by Robert Gallo of the United States confirmed the discovery of the virus, but they renamed it human T lymphotropic virus type III (HTLV-III).
Willy Rozenbaum
A co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) with Jean-Claude Chermann of Luc Montagnier's team, he has since held the chair of France's "conseil national du SIDA" (National Council on AIDS) and before that had since 1989 practiced in the infectious and tropical diseases service at l'hôpital Tenon and been professor of infectious and tropical diseases at l'hôpital Saint-Antoine in Paris.
David Cooper (immunologist)
David Albert Cooper (19 April 1949 – 18 March 2018) was an Australian HIV/AIDS researcher, immunologist, professor at the University of New South Wales, and the director of the Kirby Institute. He and Professor Ron Penny diagnosed the first case of HIV in Australia.
Wolf Szmuness
A highly controversial theory suggested that HIV-contaminated Hepatitis B vaccine trials in 1978 were responsible for the original spread of AIDS in the United States by infecting gay men in New York City with HIV. Evidence as to the presence of HIV in Szmuness's lab, or a mechanism for this introduction have not been offered, and scientific data strongly suggests that HIV instead first came to the United States with Haitian immigrants around 1969, many years prior to trials conducted on the Hepatitis B vaccine.
Robert Willner
Robert Willner (21 June 1929 — 15 April 1995) was an American doctor noted for his role in AIDS denialism, the view that AIDS is not caused by HIV infection.
Rock Hudson
Unknown to the public, Hudson was diagnosed with HIV on June 5, 1984, just three years after the emergence of the first cluster of symptomatic patients in the U.S., and only one year after the initial identification by scientists of the HIV virus that causes AIDS. Over the next several months, Hudson kept his illness a secret and continued to work while, at the same time, traveling to France and other countries seeking a cure—or at least treatment to slow the progress of the disease.
History of HIV/AIDS
In 1975 and 1976, a Norwegian sailor, with the alias name Arvid Noe, his wife, and his seven-year-old daughter died of AIDS. The sailor had first presented symptoms in 1969, eight years after he first spent time in ports along the West African coastline. A gonorrhea infection during his first African voyage shows he was sexually active at this time. Tissue samples from the sailor and his wife were tested in 1988 and found to contain HIV-1 (Group O).
AmfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research
In honor of its founding chair, amfAR launched the Mathilde Krim Fellowship in Basic Biomedical Research in 2008. The goal of this fellowship is to spur young and independent research groups who are actively searching for HIV/AIDS medical advancements. This grant has spurred discoveries such as the first recorded birth of new HIV virus particles by Dr. Nolwenn Jouvenet, as well as other developments at the pinnacle of HIV research. Other recipients of the Mathilde Krim Fellowship such as Bing Chen and Rosa Cardoso have made discoveries that have been central to the modern understanding of the HIV virus.
Robert Gallo
On May 4, 1984, Gallo and his collaborators published a series of four papers in the scientific journal "Science" demonstrating that a retrovirus they had isolated, called HTLV-III in the belief that the virus was related to the leukemia viruses of Gallo's earlier work, was the cause of AIDS. A French team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, led by Luc Montagnier, had published a paper in "Science" in 1983, describing a retrovirus they called LAV (lymphadenopathy associated virus), isolated from a patient at risk for AIDS.
HIV/AIDS denialism
In 1995, The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis in 1991 published a letter in "Science" similar to the one they had attempted to publish in 1991. That same year, Continuum, a denialist group, placed an advertisement in the British gay and lesbian magazine "The Pink Paper" offering a £1,000 reward to "the first person finding one scientific paper establishing actual isolation of HIV", according to a set of seven steps they claimed to have been drawn up by the Pasteur Institute in 1973. The challenge was later dismissed by various scientists, including Duesberg, asserting that HIV undoubtedly exists. Stefan Lanka argued in the same year that HIV does not exist. Also that year, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases released a report concluding that "abundant epidemiologic, virologic and immunologic data support the conclusion that infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the underlying cause of AIDS."
Harald zur Hausen
Two years later, he joined the Institute for Microbiology at the University of Düsseldorf as a laboratory assistant. After three and a half years, he moved to Philadelphia and worked at the Virus Laboratories of the Children's Hospital together with the famous husband and wife virologists, Werner and Gertrude Henle, who had to escape from Nazi Germany. In a ground-breaking study, he contributed to finding for the first time that a cancer virus (Epstein-Barr virus) can transform healthy cells (lymphocytes) into cancer cells. This directly showed that viruses can cause cancer cell formation. He became an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1969, he became a regular teaching and researching professor at the University of Würzburg, where he worked at the Institute for Virology. In 1972, he moved to the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. In 1977, he moved on to the University of Freiburg (Breisgau), where he headed the department of virology and hygiene. Working with Lutz Gissmann, zur Hausen first isolated human papillomavirus 6 by simple centrifugation from genital warts. Together with Ethel-Michele de Villiers, who would marry zur Hausen after his divorce from his first wife, this group isolated HPV 6 DNA from genital warts, suggesting a possible new way of identifying viruses in human tumors. This paid off several years later in 1983 when zur Hausen identified HPV 16 DNA in cervical cancer tumors by Southern blot hybridization. This was followed by discovery of HPV18 a year later, thus identifying the culprits responsible for ~75% of human cervical cancer. This sparked a major scientific controversy with other scientists favoring herpes simplex as a cause for cervical cancer.
Flossie Wong-Staal
Flossie Wong-Staal (born August 27, 1947), née Wong Yee Ching (), is a Chinese-American virologist and molecular biologist. She was the first scientist to clone HIV and determine the function of its genes, which was a major step in proving that HIV is the cause of AIDS. From 1990 to 2002, she held the Florence Riford Chair in AIDS Research at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She was co-founder and, after retiring from UCSD, she became the Chief Scientific Officer of Immusol, which was renamed iTherX Pharmaceuticals in 2007 when it transitioned to a drug development company focused on hepatitis C, and where she remains as the Chief Scientific Officer.
HIV/AIDS in India
In 1986, the first known case of HIV was diagnosed by Dr. Suniti Solomon and her student Dr. Sellappan Nirmala amongst female sex workers in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Later that year, sex workers began showing signs of this deadly disease. At that time, foreigners in India were traveling in and out of the country. It is thought that foreigners were the ones responsible for the first infections.
Janice E. Clements
With the discovery of AIDS and its cause, HIV, Clements' work took on a new dimension of relevance. In 1985, she published an article with HIV co-discoverer Robert Gallo and others describing the relationship of HIV to visna virus. This article helped to establish HIV as a lentivirus, not a leukemia virus as was originally thought. At the time, the origin of HIV was unknown, and Clements' work presented the possibility that HIV could have been transferred to humans from animals. Later, it was found that simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) strains from chimpanzee and monkey hosts were the likely progenitors of HIV.
Giuliano Giuliani
Giuliani believed that he contracted the HIV virus in 1989 in Buenos Aires during Diego Maradona's wedding party on 7 November. There he met a woman – possibly a prostitute – whom he believed had infected him; in 1991 Giuliani confided to his wife that he had betrayed her only on that one occasion. The news of his illness was leaked by the media in 1992, and there were initially rumours in the press that his disease was related to drug use, which were later discredited however. He subsequently retired to Bologna in 1993, where he ran a clothing store and received treatment for the disease. Although he and his wife had initially separated 1991, Del Rosario later tended to Giuliani throughout his illness. Giuliani died from a pulmonary complications which arose as a result of AIDS on 14 November 1996, at the Policlinico Sant'Orsola-Malpighi in Bologna.
Max Essex
Myron Elmer "Max" Essex (born August 17, 1939) is the Mary Woodard Lasker Professor of Health Sciences in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard University, Chair of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health AIDS Initiative (HAI) in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, and Chair of the Botswana–Harvard AIDS Institute in Gaborone, Botswana. Essex was one of the first to link animal and human retroviruses to immunosuppressive disease, to suspect that a retrovirus was the cause of AIDS, and to determine that HIV could be transmitted through blood and blood products to hemophiliacs and recipients of blood transfusions. With collaborators, Essex also provided the first evidence that HIV could be transmitted by heterosexual intercourse.
Virus
Most researchers believe that HIV originated in sub-Saharan Africa during the 20th century; it is now a pandemic, with an estimated 38.6 million people now living with the disease worldwide. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate that AIDS has killed more than 25 million people since it was first recognised on 5 June 1981, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. In 2007 there were 2.7 million new HIV infections and 2 million HIV-related deaths.
Several highly lethal viral pathogens are members of the "Filoviridae". Filoviruses are filament-like viruses that cause viral hemorrhagic fever, and include ebolaviruses and marburgviruses. Marburg virus, first discovered in 1967, attracted widespread press attention in April 2005 for an outbreak in Angola. Ebola Virus Disease has also caused intermittent outbreaks with high mortality rates since 1976 when it was first identified. The worst and most recent one is the West Africa epidemic.
Rupert Whitaker
Dr Rupert Whitaker (born 1963) is a psychiatrist, immunologist, and patient-advocate. He is one of Europe’s longest-surviving people with HIV, having contracted the disease in 1981. Following the death of his partner, Terrence Higgins, from AIDS in 1982, he co-founded the Terrence Higgins Trust, a charity set up to provide services for people with HIV. In 2007, Dr Whitaker’s professional and personal experiences led to his founding the Tuke Institute, an international organisation researching the health-effectiveness of medical services.
John R. Seale
John Richard Seale (born 1927) is a British venereologist and advocate in the 1980s of the now-discredited theory that HIV which causes AIDS might have been created in a germ-warfare laboratory by gene-editing. His views and writings were subsequently used to back-up the claims of those that proposed a man-made origin for the virus, and in Soviet propaganda against the United States. A collection of papers relating to Seale's views on HIV are held by the Wellcome Collection.
Raymond F. Schinazi
He began his work as a herpes virologist with a specific focus on developing drug therapeutics for orolabial and genital herpes and severe life-threatening infections like herpes encephalitis. When HIV was identified as a virus in the 1980s, Schinazi and his fellow researchers directed their attention towards the problem. He was able to translate his knowledge gained through his work on the herpes viruses towards addressing HIV and HBV. He is credited for setting up the first-ever HIV laboratory at Emory University complete with a protocol on how to handle the dangerous virus in the laboratory setting so he and his team could pursue the development of novel antiviral drugs. In 1987, he helped Prusoff’s laboratory discover that d4T, a nucleoside analog, had selective activity against HIV.
Joseph Sonnabend
Prior to the identification of HIV as the cause of AIDS in 1984, Sonnabend's investigations led him to propose that AIDS among gay men might be caused by multiple factors including Epstein–Barr virus and repeated exposure to cytomegalovirus and semen. This suggestion conflicted with the prevailing view that a single agent was likely responsible.
Sexually transmitted infection
In the 1980s, first genital herpes and then AIDS emerged into the public consciousness as sexually transmitted diseases that could not be cured by modern medicine. AIDS in particular has a long asymptomatic period—during which time HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS) can replicate and the disease can be transmitted to others—followed by a symptomatic period, which leads rapidly to death unless treated. HIV/AIDS entered the United States from Haiti in about 1969. Recognition that AIDS threatened a global pandemic led to public information campaigns and the development of treatments that allow AIDS to be managed by suppressing the replication of HIV for as long as possible. Contact tracing continues to be an important measure, even when diseases are incurable, as it helps to contain infection.
History of HIV/AIDS
Dr. Jay Levy's group at the University of California, San Francisco also played a role in the discovery of HIV. He independently isolated the AIDS virus in 1983 and named it the AIDS-associated Retrovirus (ARV), publishing his findings in the journal Science in 1984.