The Scourge Of AIDS

To celebrate C&EN’s 90th anniversary, one Editor’s Page each month examines materials from C&EN Archives. Featured articles are freely downloadable for one month.

Dec. 1 was World AIDS Day, and President Barack Obama used the occasion to pledge to give up to $5 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis & Malaria. In a statement, Obama said, “If we channel our energy and our compassion into science-based results, an AIDS-free generation is within our reach.”

The world has now lived with AIDS for more than three decades. Over the years, C&EN has chronicled the valiant efforts to understand, prevent, and treat it.

On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report described cases of a rare pneumonia in five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles. The men had other rare infections, as well, indicating that their immune systems were not working. Within days, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle had published stories on CDC’s findings, and CDC began to receive reports of similar cases from around the country. The AIDS epidemic had begun.

In the 1970s, San Francisco became a mecca for openly gay men, and they had a profound influence on the city’s culture. AIDS hit San Francisco hard. It was a particularly gruesome death sentence. Its cause was unknown, although many scientists suspected a virus. However, because nearly 90% of those afflicted were gay men, a stigma was attached to AIDS in much of the U.S. Some maintained that the gay lifestyle itself was responsible for AIDS.

AIDS wasn’t an obvious topic for coverage in C&EN, but by 1983 it was clear that the disease and the scientific effort that was going into understanding it—never mind at that point trying to cure or prevent it—were of huge importance.

C&EN’s first major coverage was an 11-column story on Jan. 23, 1984. In “AIDS Researchers Track an Elusive Foe,” I wrote: “Although tragic in its results, AIDS fascinates medical researchers.” Our understanding of the immune system had undergone a revolution in the previous decade, but there was still much to be learned. One AIDS researcher, Paul Volberding, then an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, told me, “If you put up a map of what is known about the human immune system and the interactions in the different arms of it, AIDS crosses over all of them. It’s more complicated than any defect we have ever seen.”

That was a pivotal year in the history of AIDS research. In a news story in the April 30, 1984, issue, I reported on a press conference, held the previous week by Secretary of Health & Human Services Margaret Heckler, at which Robert C. Gallo of the National Cancer Institute and coworkers announced they had conclusively demonstrated that a human retrovirus that they called HTLV-III was the cause of AIDS.

The results would appear in a series of four papers in the May 4, 1984, issue of Science. No longer would AIDS be a syndrome. It was now a clearly defined infectious disease, and work could begin on a test for infection, possible treatments, and a vaccine to prevent it. The test came quickly. Treatments followed. We’re still hoping for a vaccine.

The news story also alluded to work published in 1983 by Luc Montagnier and coworkers at the Pasteur Institute in France. They had tagged a virus they called LAV as the possible cause of AIDS, presaging the bitter dispute between Gallo and Montagnier over who should receive credit for discovering the cause of AIDS.

In the following years, C&EN would publish many articles on AIDS, including a remarkable special issue on Nov. 23, 1987, comprising eight articles by six C&EN reporters and covering a total of 56 pages.

A diagnosis of HIV/AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Treatments have turned it into a manageable chronic disease, at least in the developed world. In parts of Africa, the epidemic rages unchecked, with up to 50% of young adults infected in some urban areas. In Africa and other developing parts of the world, drugs to treat HIV/AIDS are too expensive for many. And a vaccine against the virus remains elusive. Much needs to be done to achieve President Obama’s vision.