Word: virologist
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Then in July, at an international AIDS conference in Vancouver, a virologist named David Ho reported on a most promising experiment. By administering the protease-inhibitor cocktails to patients in the earliest stages of infection, his team seems to have come tantalizingly close to eliminating the virus from the blood and other body tissues. Mathematical models suggest that patients caught early enough might be virus-free within two or three years...
...perfect place to study AIDS. The patients were men, women, European, African. So few were homosexual that French doctors were not that distracted by the idea that this was a "gay plague." To them, it was merely a sexually transmitted disease. So they turned to Dr. Montagnier, a noted virologist at the Pasteur Institute, to find the cause. By 1983 his team had isolated a new human retrovirus. Their results, published in Science, were largely ignored. Then, in 1984, Dr. Robert Gallo announced that he had discovered the virus. Only after a bitter legal battle did the two scientists agree...
Porterfield adds that however brilliant Ho's work, the researcher is really "an emblem of a key moment, picked to represent the best work of all the AIDS scientists." Ho, a virologist who directs the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City, did not make it easy for our staff; he was concerned throughout the project that his work be put in the context of all that is happening in the field. It was only when science editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt laid out our comprehensive editorial plans that Ho realized what decision had been made. "Does that mean...
...fighting it. Unfortunately, there was precious little hard information to share. No one is sure exactly how the disease gets started, how it spreads so easily, why it zeroes in on rainbows or how it can be stopped. "Our data base is almost zero," says Karl Johnson, a virologist who spearheaded the search for the Ebola virus, and is helping to lead this effort. "There are unanswered questions everywhere...
...past, they have often proved exceedingly virulent: HIV, which causes AIDS; Ebola virus; and hantavirus are all chilling precedents. In a worst-case scenario, such transplants could introduce humanity to a plague that would make all of those look tame. "This is a serious mistake," says Jonathan Allan, a virologist at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio, Texas. "It only takes one transmission from one baboon to a human to start an epidemic. There's no way you can make it safe...