Medicine: AIDS: Knowing the Face of the Enemy

U.S. and French teams believe they have found the AIDS virus

It was high noon in Bethesda, Md., home of the National Institutes of Health. The scene: a small French restaurant with hanging baskets and beamed ceiling. On one side of a table sat Dr. Robert Gallo, 47, a brash NIH scientist who started life as the son of a small-town welder and has become one of the nation's leading cancer researchers. Sensitive about his diploma from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia ("I had to fight to prove I was good, because I didn't go to Harvard"), Gallo gained a reputation in 1980 by becoming the first scientist to discover a virus that causes cancer in humans. Now he was claiming another victory: identification of a virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), the disease that has killed 1,758 Americans since its first U.S. appearance three years ago.

Across the table sat Dr. James Curran, 39, a clean-cut epidemiologist with an advanced degree from Harvard. Curran heads the AIDS task force at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, where more than 100 researchers have been working to discover exactly what Gallo claimed to have found. To test Gallo's claim, Curran had provided the NIH scientist with 205 anonymous blood samples, some taken from AIDS patients, some from healthy individuals. To make the test more challenging, samples were included from people with hepatitis and other infections. Gallo's task was to identify which samples had come from the AIDS patients on the basis of whether or not signs of his virus were present. Gallo pulled out his lab's results, as Curran began calling out the sample numbers.

Curran said: "M5."

Gallo replied: "M5, positive."

Again, Curran: "M28."

Gallo: "M28, positive."

So it went for an hour, until all the samples had been covered. In the end, Gallo won: signs of his virus were present in blood from AIDS patients and not in the others; he had correctly identified nearly all of them.

The respected journal Science will soon publish four papers that describe Gallo's isolation of a virus that appears to be the cause of AIDS. "He is going to nail it down cold," predicts AIDS Researcher Anthony Fauci of NIH. But as word of the discovery began to leak out last week—notably in an article in New Scientist magazine based apparently on advance copies of Gallo's papers—a scientific team in Paris rushed to call attention to their own work on an AIDS virus. A Nobel Prize was possibly at stake, and Epidemiologist William Blattner of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) observed: "People are racing to grab the brass ring on this disease."