You're in: AIDS at 25 Coverage / 25 Years Later: Overview
In 1981, I was on a sabbatical year in the lab of Dr. Robert Gallo at the NIH. I'd been working on retroviruses, looking at the mechanisms by which they appeared to be causing cancer in animals. One of the things we noticed was that these viruses suppressed the immune system.
That year, after young gay men inexplicably started getting sick and dying, the scientific literature was filled with speculation. Theories on the syndrome centered on known infectious organisms and substance abuse, but none could explain the variety of conditions that seemed, suddenly, to be killing people. The situation was extreme, causing fear and blame on all sides. A few religious leaders were preaching that the disease represented God's wrath against individuals who didn't share their values, while the mainstream scientific community was being accused of discrimination and of ignoring the disease. Then Haitians began getting sick and dying as well—though none of the assumed risk factors could be associated with the majority—and they too were blamed for spreading the illness.
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After a group of scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris reported that they had isolated a pathogenic retrovirus from the cells of individuals suffering from AIDS-related illnesses in 1983, Gallo's lab announced that a retrovirus had been isolated from existing cases of AIDS. Though the two groups would spend years in counterproductive legal battles over the discovery of HIV-1 and rights to royalties, their reports advanced the field enormously by teaching others how to rapidly and efficiently grow HIV in tissue culture and led to the securing of the blood supply, HIV tests and the development of antiretroviral drugs that have helped save millions of lives. Gallo provided my lab at McGill University with the reagents that we needed to work on HIV, and ours became the first Canadian lab that focused on the virus.
The progress toward treatments, however, has been slow. The FDA correctly insisted that a drug be shown to be effective in properly randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials before being approved for human use. Some anti-HIV drugs were discontinued in clinical trials because of toxic and sometimes life-threatening reactions. AZT was a first important breakthrough, but not one that immediately translated into the saving of lives (the first doses of AZT that were prescribed were far higher than those used today and were responsible for much of the toxicity associated with the early days of therapy).
By the mid 1990s, research was demonstrating the success of highly active antiretroviral therapies (HAART), which have since become the mainstay of the global effort to treat those infected with HIV. At the same time, it was becoming apparent to many of us that unless something changed, only those in wealthy countries were going to have access to these therapies. I became involved at the international level. First, I was elected to the Governing Council of the International AIDS Society, and later I was elected as president. I worked to move the International AIDS Conference to Durban, South Africa in 2000, so that the world's scientists and activists would experience the intensity and gravity of what pandemic AIDS had wrought on that region.