Robert Gallo, M.D.
When Dr. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer
of the human immunodeficiency virus, first came to the National Cancer
Institute in 1965, he didn't know he would be staying so long. He planned
to eventually return to academia, where he could teach and do clinical
work as well as basic research. But he became "addicted," he
says, to the research. “There was constant stimulation from so many
good people, easy access to technology from so much diverse science around
me, and the steadiness of funding.”
He also saw basic research translated into effective treatments at the
NIH Clinical Center, the nation's premier research hospital. “With
my own eyes I saw children beginning to be cured of leukemia for the first
time," he says.
When Dr. Gallo decided to search for a human retrovirus, an effort he
details in his book Virus Hunting, most scientists thought human
retroviruses simply did not–could not–exist. But Dr. Gallo
noticed holes in the standard arguments, and he was prodded by a strong
intuition. His discovery of the first known human retroviruses, human
T-cell leukemia viruses I and II, came just before AIDS emerged in the
United States and proved invaluable to those searching for the cause of
this mysterious disease.
Dr. Gallo proposed that a retrovirus caused AIDS in 1982. By 1984, his
group at the NCI and a scientific team at the Pasteur Institute had discovered
HIV and identified it as the cause of AIDS. Dr. Gallo currently heads
the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland Biotechnology
Institute in Baltimore.
|Robert Gallo, M.D.