1983. HIV/AIDS: Who really discovered the AIDS virus?
The story behind the identification of the AIDS virus illustrates how the supposedly objective world of science is tainted by less scientific characteristics such as ego, power and greed.
Shortly after the appearance of AIDS in the early 80’s, scientists around the world set to work to discover what caused it. Two players who were to become central to this process were Dr Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Dr Robert Gallo of the National Institutes of Health in the USA.*
In January 1983 Montagnier and his team had isolated a new retrovirus that they felt had a role in AIDS. They named it LAV (Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus).
On May 20th 1983 they published a paper in the journal Science announcing their findings. They did not, however, state outright that LAV was the cause of the disease; essentially they merely noted that it had been found in people with AIDS and, from that, speculated some kind of relationship.
In July and September 1983, Montagnier shared samples of the virus with Gallo in the USA.
In April 1984, the US Secretary for Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler held a press conference where she announced that Robert Gallo and his colleagues had discovered the cause of AIDS – a virus that they named HTLVIII (Human T-cell Lymphotropic Virus III). At the same time, Gallo filed a patent application for a diagnostic blood test for AIDS based on ‘his’ discovery.
In a joint French-US press conference in June 1984, Gallo and Montagnier agreed that HTLVIII and LAV were probably the same. Yet this simply marked the beginning, not the end, of a prolonged dispute between the two parties. AIDS research was effectively disrupted by their refusal to cooperate with each other.
It was quickly established that the virus that Gallo had ‘discovered’ had, in fact come from samples provided by the French. But that didn’t really settle the argument.
Few people doubt that Gallo rushed to patent ‘his’ discovery because of the millions of dollars that would flow from licensing fees for diagnostic tests. It was not science’s most shining moment.
But the vested interests were still so strong that it took an out-of-court agreement to share licensing fee royalties AND a joint statement by the presidents of both countries declaring Montagnier and Gallo as joint discoverers of the virus before cooperation was re-established.
In 1995, the United States ‘House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations’ released a report entitled ‘Institutional Response to the HIV Blood Test Patent Dispute and Related Matters’. It found that Gallo and his staff “knew or had reason to know that the virus they were working with and claimed as their own was the IP virus”.
It went on to declare that the Department of Health and Human Services had “conducted a parody of an investigation; they did not seek the truth but rather sought to create an official record to support the claims of Gallo et al.”
As if to further clarify who really discovered the AIDS virus, the Nobel Prize Committee decided in 2008 to award the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine only to Dr Montagnier.
- A detailed account of this dispute is contained in my eBook Gay in the 80s. Full details are available here.
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