On this day in 1984, virologist Robert Gallo and his NIH colleagues published four revolutionary papers in Science in which they have provided convincing evidence that AIDS is caused by a retrovirus. Three of these documents deal with the partial characterization and isolation of retroviruses, the researchers called HTLV-3. The Gallo team showed, for example, that the virus could be detected in nearly half of the 97 people who either had AIDS or were at high risk of developing the disease, but in only one of 22 clinically normal and homosexuals in any of the 115 tested health heterosexuals.
The fourth paper describes a test method for the presence of anti-HTLV-3 antibody in human blood. Such a test has the potential to be a major moneymaker for he had previously been no definitive means of diagnosis of AIDS, and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has filed a patent on the method of team Gallo a month earlier.
documents and the patent application was controversial, however. Scientists from the Pasteur Institute in Paris have argued that Gallo had essentially re-isolated the same virus, called LAV, that Pastor Luc Montagnier had previously linked to AIDS and was sent to the Gallo team to study a few years early. And in fact, the subsequent sequencing of genomes Gallo and Montagnier viruses showed that they were similar enough to be identical. The patent dispute was resolved when Montagnier and Gallo agreed to be included on the patent as co-discoverers of retrovirus, which was renamed HIV (HIV) by an international committee. The Science papers were also at the center of an investigation of scientific misconduct lengthy that led to accusations that some details were incorrect. These charges were eventually expelled in 1993 by an appeal board HHS.
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