David Kirby, an HIV/AIDS activist, near death, surrounded by his family in Ohio, 1990.
Photo by Therese Frare
The day they discovered the AIDS virus
—UPDATED
Dr. Robert Gallo, chief of the National Cancer Institute laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology, along with Health and Human Services secretary Margaret Heckler, face reporters in Washington on April 23, 1984 announcing that the probable cause of AIDS has been found.
Lana Harris/AP
Three years earlier, in the spring of 1981, a ghastly new disease had exploded in the gay communities of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It eviscerated people’s immune systems, allowing normally harmless pathogens to consume them. Though initially dismissed as a “gay plague,” it had begun killing hemophiliacs and injection drug users, as well as their partners and newborns, and it was spreading worldwide.
The cause was still a mystery, and ignorance was fueling fear and stigma. San Francisco cops had started wearing masks and gloves to shield them from gay men, and right-wing commentators were shaming the afflicted for their wickedness. “The poor homosexuals,” Pat Buchanan wrote in the New York Post in 1983. “They have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”
A 1983 New York Times story captured the growing sense of helplessness. “In many parts of the world,” wrote medical correspondent Lawrence Altman, “there is anxiety, bafflement, a sense that something has to be done—although no one knows what—about this fatal disease whose full name is Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and whose cause is still unknown.”
Ryan White sits on an examining table as his physician Dr. Martin Kleiman uses a stethoscope to listen to his lungs, while his mother Jeanne looks on at hospital.
Taro Yamasaki/Getty
By isolating the culpable virus, and developing a reliable test for it, researchers had suddenly cleared a path from superstition to reason. Almost overnight, the discovery helped scientists explain how AIDS spread and how it did not. It enabled rich countries to secure their blood supplies and reduce hospital infections. And though science has yet to produce an effective vaccine, it has made the infection survivable. The first anti-HIV medication, a failed cancer drug called AZT, reached the market in 1986, and by 1996 a three-drug cocktail had turned a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition.
The science advanced swiftly, as researchers elucidated HIV’s structures and survival strategies, but public attitudes evolved slowly. Fear and ignorance reigned for years (the Ryan White saga is but one memorable example). And as science spawned new tools for prevention and treatment, rich countries kept the benefits largely to themselves. Congress and the NIH spent $10 billion a year on the domestic response during the 1990s, while largely ignoring a burgeoning global crisis. From 1996 to 2000, annual AIDS deaths declined by nearly 60% in the United States (from 38,000 to 16,000). Yet the global toll rose by the same proportion during that period, growing from 1 million to 1.6 million a year.
Rich countries had a collective awakening after the millennium, as the burgeoning humanitarian disaster started to ruin economies and destabilize governments. In 2002, donor countries banded together to form the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria, and in 2003 President George W. Bush stunned the world by launching PEPFAR, a five-year, $15 billion effort to expand testing, treatment and prevention in 15 target countries. Thanks mainly to those initiatives, the number of people receiving HIV treatment in low- and middle-income countries grew 40-fold over the next decade, reaching 9.7 million in 2012. The global death toll has fallen steadily since 2004, when it peaked at 2.3 million, and the number of children born with HIV has fallen by half.
All of this stems ultimately from the discovery Heckler announced 30 years ago. And for all the folly of the past three decades, we’ve advanced socially as well as technically. President Reagan never publicly uttered the word “AIDS” until 1987, when he threw his support behind a bill to bar people with HIV from entering the country. Sixteen years later, an equally conservative Republican president (George W. Bush) launched what would become the largest single-disease treatment initiative in history.
Luc Montagnier at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, 1986.
Keystone/Gamma/Getty
Even Heckler’s ham-fisted triumphalism has lost its sting over time. Robert Gallo, the American researcher she hailed for discovering the AIDS virus, had in fact rediscovered a virus that was isolated in France and shared with his lab. It wasn’t the “known cancer virus” Heckler touted at the press conference but a previously unknown chimpanzee virus that had adapted to humans in West Africa and gone global as cars, trucks and airplanes made people more mobile. After several years of bitter feuding over credit for the breakthrough, Gallo and his French counterpart, Luc Montagnier, agreed to call themselves the co-discoverers of HIV. Montagnier’s team got the credit for isolating the virus, Gallo’s for conclusively linking it to AIDS.
The Nobel Committee didn’t sign that treaty. In 2008, it awarded Montagnier and a colleague the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, snubbing the American team. “I’m a little down about it but not terribly,” the once-fierce Gallo told Science magazine, adding that the prize was well deserved. Montagnier made nice too. “It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS,” he said, “and Gallo had a very important role in that.”
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The day they discovered the AIDS virus
—UPDATED
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@jgordon1942
Our vote and out spend the super pacs money for every $1.00 they spend our vote can be more!!!!! VOTE>
Larry Havard III
Too much money in politics is bad. But much more important to many people, are having heath care, food, shelter, security in a job that lets them support their family, and put something in savings, so when the federal governments' childishness in the GOP obstructs extended un-employment, and...>
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Jazz Hayden
What amazes me is that there is not a global call for the production and free distribution of the pharmaceutical remedies now available throughout the impoverished segments of the world. The greedy cares nothing for the needy. Where are the Christians, Muslims, and Jews? Where are the...>
#Reiders
Alexis Garrett Stodghill
We have come very far in terms of fighting the disease, but there is still so much more to be done. Do you think that we should work better internationally between governments to provide treatments and seek a cure? Sometimes I think the scientific community knows how to do this, but...>
Dawn Shaw
careless stupid ignorant people are to blame they know the risks but care less about them self to get their new partners tested instead they rely on condoms like that will be all they need to never get infected and six months down the line they say its time to go natural and both take no...>
Progressive State of Mind
Calbab
Arthur Robert Ashe, tennis player star....>
L78lancer
To Darlene, Kevin, Lennie, Joe and the countless others who succumbed to the struggle. You were never objects of politics or ideology, but treasures to the people who knew you.The only the sheer joy you left behind makes the heartache bearable.You will NEVER be forgotten.>
Davey Williams
Jan. 15, 1981: the first U.S. Death from Aids occurs in New York
Reagan says and does nothingJuly, 1981: at least three clusters of 41 cases emerge in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. The CDC acknowledges a possible link.
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RSwonger
The republican Mr Christie makes no contributions to the shows he is invited to. People like him need to just visit Fox- opposite view points are though provking, but Christie is just plain rotten. Please do not have him on any show, it is hard enought to put up with M Steele.>
@jgordon1942
Christie reminds me of the big bosses in the moffia>
Team Ed Show
@jgordon1942
Don't people understand that ever dollar the super pacs Your vote is worth $5.00 no one can out spend our vote>
General Discussion
Geoffrey Cowley
I’d like to share a note I received in response to The Day They Discovered the AIDS Virus. It comes from Dr. Edmund Tramont, a veteran NIH scientist who recalls the ugly politics that surrounded AIDS research during the 1980s. He was recruited to investigate Robert Gallo after the Chicago...>
dinm76
Of all the immoral, criminal and disgusting actions taken by the republicans St Ronnie, ignoring AID's for 2 YEARS because the "right" saw it (and still do) as some sort of God's wrath on the LGBT community is one of the worst! How many more American Martyrs did that throw on the vast pile of...>
ihara saikaku
Just to be clear, Ronald Reagan ignored the AIDS crisis throughout his administration, because he regarded it as a queer's disease and didn't care that they died by the thousands.>
UglyShotGoAgain-USGA
HIV/AIDS does not discriminate and it affects everybody directly or indirectly; I lost my only sister in 2006 after her 10yr long battle with the virus. In 1996 she had a miscarriage; we’ll never know how she got the virus because she was never the same after the miscarriage she required a...>
Sean-3842592
Oh, I remember when they discovered (1980's) AIDS; while I was middle school and we had a Republican President. But I always wondered since that time how such a virus suddenly appeared upon the scene.Usually there's history we can follow to trace either the origin or cause of something but...>
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