World AIDS Day, 2005

While I think it’s fantastic that progress is being made toward producing an AIDS vaccine, I can only wonder if Dr. Gallo is truly making headway. Is he really making advances, or is he simply waiting until the day after another scientist announces they have developed a vaccine to claim ownership of said vaccine?

A scientist who helped to discover the HIV virus said he has made progress toward producing an AIDS vaccine and hopes to launch a clinical trial in about a year.

Dr. Robert Gallo, the director of the University of Maryland’s Institute for Human Virology, said results from animal studies were encouraging.

“I think we’ve made some advances in making antibodies that will react with the variety of strains of HIV,” he told Reuters, referring to the virus that causes AIDS.

Scientists believe a vaccine is the best hope for ending the global AIDS pandemic that has killed about 3.1 million people this year. But defeating the virus has proved more difficult than researchers had expected.

For those of you who haven’t been following along, Robert Gallo did discover the virus that causes AIDS. Of course, it was the same virus the French had already discovered. Literally. It was the exact same virus sample, which the French had sent to his lab for the NCI to study.

In April 1984 Robert Gallo of the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) announced his discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS. Subsequently, Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris filed a lawsuit claiming he had first discovered the AIDS virus at Pasteur, and that Gallo had stolen the French virus after it was sent to his lab for study.

Needless to say, greed and politics entered the picture and while they fought over “ownership” of the virus, people continued to die from that virus. And none of those who died, really cared who “owned” it.

For a clear picture of Dr. Gallo’s “professionalism” while searching for the virus which would later be named HIV, watch the critically acclaimed movie, “And The Band Played On“.

One lawsuit, two co-discoverers, three years, and thousands of lives later, the real work to find a cure could begin.

A bitter lawsuit followed, which was finally settled privately in 1987 through the intervention of the French Premier and President Ronald Reagan. To this day, the two ‘co-discoverers’ of HIV continue to disagree about the origin of HIV and the birthplace of AIDS.

In Montagnier’s book, Virus (2000), he states: “The origin of the epidemic remains a mystery, and the virus seems older than the epidemic” and “it is important to distinguish between the origins of the virus and that of the (AIDS) epidemic.”

The scientific scandal provoked by Gallo’s “stealing” the virus from the French, as well as the ensuing government investigations into allegations of scientific irregularities and falsification of data in Gallo’s lab, undoubtedly is the reason both scientists have never received a Nobel Prize for their discovery of HIV. A highly unsympathetic account of this scientific mess is provided by Pulitzer prize-winning author John Crewdson in, Science Fictions; A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (2002).

And, regardless of who takes credit for discovering the virus, the work to find a vaccine has continued to this day. This day. World AIDS Day, 2005.

It’s been over 20 years since the discovery of HIV, and there is much more work to be done. All of the researchers and scientists involved, even Dr. Gallo, should be commended for their commitment to finding a vaccine for this horrible illness.

For a detailed, online history of AIDS, visit AVERT.ORG.

For the most concise information, in one place, visit AEGIS.ORG.