GALLO’S STORY
In the early 80s, in two places in the world, two scientists were looking at viruses in some tissue samples from patients who had died of AIDS, then called GRID (Gay Related Immuno-Deficiency). Robert Gallo, working in the US, identified a hitherto unknown virus in a tissue sample sent over from the Pasteur Institute in France. At the same time, Luc Montagnier and his team also identified the same virus. Both teams called their virus a different name.
Bitter legal battles ensued, not to be settled until many years later.
Now it is accepted by all, including the two scientists themselves, that Montagnier’s team was the first to identify the virus that would later become called HIV, and that Gallo’s team were the first to prove the link between the virus and the illness then known as AIDS (now known as Advanced HIV Infection).
The two scientists share a Nobel prize for their work in these discoveries, and have since collaborated in publishing other important papers in the field.
Montagnier has been included in my brooding rainbow from the start, and now that I have the chance to expand my circle of colours, it feels right and proper that Robert Gallo should also be recognised here.
Between them, Gallo and Montagnier paved the way for one of medicine’s most extraordinary success stories: the treatment and control of HIV in the human body, to the point where I, today, as a man living with HIV, will have the same life expectancy as the rest of the general population, and I cannot pass the virus on to anyone else.
I am grateful to Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier, and to all those who have followed them, every single day.
