HIV/AIDS Virus Identified
In 1983, a team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris led by Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi reported the isolation of a previously unknown retrovirus from a patient with swollen lymph nodes, a possible warning sign of the illness then spreading among several groups of people. The virus was later named human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. Identifying the cause of AIDS made reliable testing possible, opened the way to treatment, and turned a baffling epidemic into a problem science could address.
The first reports of AIDS came in mid-1981, when physicians in the United States described clusters of rare infections and cancers, such as Pneumocystis pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma, in previously healthy young men. Similar cases soon appeared among injecting drug users, people with hemophilia who had received blood products, and recipients of transfusions, which suggested an infectious agent carried in blood and sexual fluids. Fear and stigma grew quickly, and the cause remained unknown. Researchers considered several explanations before attention settled on a retrovirus, a type of virus that copies its genetic material into the host's DNA.
The Paris group, working with clinicians including Willy Rozenbaum, cultured the virus from a lymph node biopsy and published their findings in the journal Science in May 1983. They called it lymphadenopathy-associated virus, or LAV. Their evidence was initially cautious, and the link to AIDS was not yet proven. In 1984, Robert Gallo and colleagues at the US National Institutes of Health published work presenting a virus they called HTLV-III as the cause of AIDS and developed a blood test. The two viruses proved to be the same, which led to a bitter dispute over credit and patent rights. It was eventually settled by an agreement between the French and US governments, and in 1986 the name HIV was adopted. In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi, along with Harald zur Hausen for his separate work on papillomavirus. Gallo was not included, a decision that still draws debate.
The consequences were profound. Antibody tests introduced in the mid-1980s allowed screening of blood supplies, which sharply reduced transmission through transfusion, and gave individuals a way to learn their status. The first antiretroviral drug, zidovudine, was approved in 1987, and combination therapy from the mid-1990s transformed HIV from a near-certain death sentence into a manageable chronic condition for people with access to treatment.
Later genetic studies indicate that HIV-1 descended from a simian virus in chimpanzees in west-central Africa and crossed into humans in the early twentieth century. Tens of millions of people have died of AIDS-related causes, and access to treatment remains uneven around the world.