The Pain, Profit and Politics of AIDS
January 15, 2013 In the May 4, 1984 issue of the prestigious journal Science, one of the most important research papers of the last quarter century was published. “Frequent Detection and Isolation of Cytopathic Retroviruses (HTLV-III) from Patients with AIDS and at Risk for AIDS” would rapidly become the medical Magna Carta for the entire gold rush to develop diagnostic methods to identify the presence of HIV in human blood and to invent pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines in a global war againstAIDS. This paper, along with three others published in the same issue of Science, was written by Dr. Robert Gallo, then head of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) inBethesda,Maryland, and his lead researcher Dr. Mikulas Popovic. To this day, this article continues to document the most cited research to prove the HIV hypothesis in scientific papers and places like the nation’s Centers of Disease Control (CDC) website.