Snippets from article–
At gathering of HIV/AIDS pioneers, raw memories mix with current conflicts
During the entire meeting, nary a public whisper was heard about theblood test patent feudthat led to a peace treaty of sorts signed by no less than former French President Jacques Chirac and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, as well as multilayered government probes, the enrichment of many lawyers, microscopic press coverage, books, an HBO movie, and vociferous outrage from Gallo’s many supporters who assailed the decision to cut him out of the Nobel Prize, which in 2008 went to Barré -Sinoussi and her associate, Luc Montagnier.
The first speakers, including Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, who formerly headed theNCI and its parent, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH),connected the dots between the century-old study of retroviruses and the early hunt for HIV.The signature retroviral enzyme, reverse transcriptase (RT), played an essential role,said John Coffin of Tufts University in Boston.RT was discovered in 1970 by Coffin’s mentor, the late Howard Temin, and separately, David Baltimore (another attendee).The enzymeconverts RNA into DNA,a once heretical idea, thereby enabling retroviruses to integrate with human chromosomes. “This is the most dramatic scientific discovery that I’m quite sure I’ll ever be associated with,” Coffin said.
RT is relatively easy to detect in a cell culture, where it can signal the presence of a retrovirus. Both the French team that first isolated HIV in 1983 and the U.S. group that a year later convincingly proved the virus caused AIDS relied on detecting RT in samples from patients. Without that preexisting knowledge of RT and its role in the retroviral life cycle, “I’d postulate it would have been a much longer time before we were able to deal with HIV,” Coffin said.
Still, a plethora of “ridiculous” theories persisted, Gallo said, including the assertion that HIV was created by the U.S. government.
Anthony Fauci, an immunologist at NIH, also helped change the course of the epidemic. A clinician who struggled to keep his research afloat in the early years because caring for dying AIDS patients sapped so much of his time, Fauci explained that in 1984, he took an offer to head the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda in part out of frustration. “I was not particularly enamored of administration, but I felt that infectious disease and certainly HIV/AIDS was not going in the right direction and did not have the support I thought it should have,” Fauci said. “That opened my life to things I never would have been prepared for as a clinician, as a scientist.” Under Fauci’s leadership, NIAID became the single largest funder of HIV/AIDS research in the world. His own lab’s research also has helped clarify fundamental relationships between the virus and the immune system.
Neither Gallo nor Barré-Sinoussi mentioned the blood test patent dispute or the intense competition between their teams. Barré-Sinoussi did describe an evening in Paris in 1984 when they reviewed data from a study that compared the ability of both labs to detect the virus in blinded samples from AIDS patients and controls. “It was so hot and strong a discussion that we decided to go to a cabaret,” she said. “It was a difficult period but we had a nice time all together.”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/gathering-hivaids-pioneers-raw-memories-mix-current-conflicts
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https://libraries.mit.edu/150books/2011/05/14/1988/1988-reagan-and-chirac/