Discoverers of AIDS Virus Honored for Work
The discoverers of the AIDS virus, Dr. Robert C. Gallo of the National Cancer Institute and Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, were in Los Angeles Thursday to receive an award at the annual meeting of the American Assn. of Blood Banks.
Gallo said he was “optimistic” that improvement therapies against the AIDS virus will be developed within the next five years, but added that he “will never predict one way or the other when we will have a vaccine.” Montagnier elaborated on his controversial theory that a small microbe known as a mycoplasma has a role along with the AIDS virus in causing the deadly disease.
Gallo declined to comment on an ongoing National Institutes of Health probe of possible scientific misconduct in some of the AIDS research in his laboratory in the mid-1980s. “Wait a few months and I will have a lot to comment on and a lot of things to release,” he said.
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