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The advent of AIDS (acquired immunity deficiency syndrome) in early 1981 stunned the scientific community, as many researchers at that time viewed the world to be on the brink of eliminating infectious disease. AIDS, an infectious disease that suppresses the immune system, is caused by the Human Immune Deficiency Virus (HIV), part of a group of viruses known as retroviruses. The name AIDS was coined in 1982. Victims of AIDS most often die from opportunistic infections that take hold of the body because the immune system is severely impaired.

Following the discovery of AIDS, scientists attempted to identify the virus that causes the disease. In 1983-4, two scientists and their teams reported isolating HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. One was French immunologist Luc Montagnier (1932-), working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and the other was American immunologist Robert Gallo (1937-) at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Both identified HIV as the cause of AIDS and showed the pathogen to be a retrovirus, meaning that its genetic material is RNA, instead of DNA. Following the discovery, a dispute ensued over who made the initial discovery, but today Gallo and Montagnier are credited as co- discoverers.
Scientists believe that HIV originated in the region of sub-Saharan Africa and subsequently spread to Europe and the United States by way of the Caribbean. Since viruses exist that suppress the immune system in monkeys, scientists hypothesize that these viruses mutated to HIV in the bodies of humans who ate the meat of monkeys, and subsequently caused AIDS. A fifteen-year-old male with skin lesions who died in 1969 is the first documented case of AIDS. Unable to determine the cause of death at the time, doctors froze some of his tissues, and upon recent examination, the tissue was found to be infected with HIV. During the 1960's, doctors often listed leukemia as the cause of death in many AIDS patients. After several decades...