The Discovery of HIV as the Cause of AIDS

Abstract

Progress in scientific research rarely follows a straight path. Generally it entails many unexpected meanderings with a mix of good and bad ideas good and bad luck. The discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS did not avoid this pattern. The story began in an unfavorable environment: during the late 1970s many people thought that epidemic diseases caused by microbes including viruses no longer posed a threat in industrialized countries. Other prevailing beliefs were that viruses did not cause any human cancers and that there was no such thing as a retrovirus that infected humans. Some of these beliefs were justified since attempts to find tumor viruses and in particular retroviruses in cancers or other diseases in humans had a troubled history and many of the groups that had the greatest expertise in the study of retroviruses had turned their efforts toward research on oncogenes. Luckily and rather amazingly however the conceptual and technical tools arrived in our hands just before the first patients with AIDS were identified in 1981. In addition there remained a few heretical or old-fashioned groups - among which were our two laboratories - that persisted in searching for retroviruses in human cancers particularly breast cancers and leukemias. This search finally paid off with the discovery of human T-cell leukemia virus types 1 and 2 (HTLV-1 and HTLV-2) the first of which was shown to cause an unusual T-cell leukemia. This discovery was made possible by 15 years of basic research on leukemogenic retroviruses in animals including the design and development of highly sensitive biochemical assays that were based on reverse transcriptase - the enzyme that is present in all retroviruses which was discovered in 1970 by Temin and Baltimore. (excerpt)