From the earliest reports of a new disease, scientists around the
world focused their efforts on finding the cause of AIDS. They circulated
information informally; they held meetings to exchange ideas; and
they published promising findings. A pioneer in this effort was
Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute, who only recently
had discovered the first two human retroviruses, HTLV-I and HTLV-II.
In 1984, research groups led by Dr. Gallo, Dr. Luc Montagnier at
the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and Dr. Jay Levy at the University
of California, San Francisco, all identified a retrovirus as the
cause of AIDS. Each group called the virus by a different name:
HTLV-III, LAV, and ARV, respectively. As has happened many times
in scientific history, contention emerged about who had been first.
In 1987, the president of the United States and the prime minister
of France announced a joint agreement on the issuethe first
time a medical research question had reached this level political
negotiation. More importantly, the identification of that virus,
renamed human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, provided a specific
target for blood-screening tests and for scientists around the world
conducting research to defeat AIDS.
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