Jun is absolutely correct. It's easy to forget that there was a major feud between France and the USA as to researchers in which country had actually first discovered the HIV retrovirus - Dr.Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute or Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, USA, Eventually a deal was reached to share the huge royalties accruing from the results of the research. But in 2008 Montagnier and his colleague Dr. Barre Sinousi were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for having in fact been the first to isolate the virus.
Many science and medical commentators at the time felt this was an insult to Gallo and his team. The French had discovered it in samples of white blood cells extracted from the lymph nodes of Frederic Brugiere, a French fashion designer with AIDS, and this was published in the magazine Science (Vol. 220) on 20 May 1983. Gallo's team discovered it a year later. This was published in the same magazine on 4 May 1984 (Vol. 224). Yet in 2008 it had been forgotten that Gallo himself admitted that the virus he and his team had discovered actually came from cultures from Frederic Brugiere which the French had shared with him. A three-year Inquiry by the Federal Office of Research and Integrity set up by the Department of Health and Human Services found no evidence to support Dr. Gallo's claim that he was the original inventor of the widely used diagnostic blood test for AIDS.
The Inquiry leaves little question, however, that Pasteur scientists were first to discover the AIDS virus, to isolate it successfully from several AIDS patients, to describe it in a scientific article, and to use it to make a diagnostic blood test for antibodies to the AIDS virus. All this was reported at length.
After three years of investigations, the Federal Office of Research Integrity today found that Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the American co-discoverer of the cause of AIDS, had committed scientific misconduct. The investigators said he had "falsely reported" a critical fact in the scientific paper of 1984 in which he described isolating the virus that causes AIDS . . .
The report said Dr. Gallo intentionally misled scientific colleagues by saying he had grown an AIDS virus in his laboratory for study and that he had not grown or studied a similar French strain of the virus . . .
While searching for the cause of AIDS, Dr. Gallo had received a sample of a virus being studied by French researchers and had worked extensively with it to extend his own discoveries, the Federal report concluded.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/31/us/f ... virus.html
For those interested a detailed timeline of the AIDS crisis can be found here -
https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview ... s-timeline
Not many come out of it with much glory, apart from the doctors treating the HIV patients and the researchers at various institutes including the CDC. The French certainly were at fault for not testing the nation's blood supply and thereby condemning probably thousands to death, not least haemophiliacs.
In the USA, even after President Reagan had signed an Executive Order to set up the first Presidential Commission on AIDS, as late as 14 October 1987 the Democratic-controlled Senate passed the following resolution
by a 94-2 vote, the U.S. Senate adopted the Helms Amendment , which required federally financed educational materials about AIDS to stress sexual abstinence and forbade any material that “promoted” homosexuality or drug use
For younger readers interested in learning more about those early ghastly, uncertain, confusing years, I wholeheartedly recommend reading Randy Shilts' "And The Band Played On." Don't watch the TV mini-series which condenses it into a fraction of the book. A reporter, Shilts tells it graphically and grimly as it happened. Sadly he himself was to die of AIDS after the book was published.
It is vital that the world learns from the mistakes that were made during the AIDS pandemic. Another virus will no doubt appear with the potential to cause similar panic and death. It was first thought that SARS in 2003 might be the next one. Thankfully, that was controlled with a death toll of under 1,000. But another will appear.