1. Robert Gallo M.D. was born on March 23, 1937 in Waterbury, Connecticut. His parents, Francis Anton and Louise Mary Gallo, were both born and raised in Waterbury, where his father worked as a metallurgist. After high school, Gallo entered Providence College where he majored in biology. Upon graduation, he attended the Thomas Jefferson University School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
3. In 1965, Gallo joined the National Institutes of Health where he would work for the next thirty years. He began his career in the National Cancer Institute conducting research on leukocytes, which are types of white blood cells. In 1971, he became head of the new Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology. Gallo began to explore whether viruses could cause cancer. In particular, he began to research retroviruses. Once called RNA tumor viruses, retroviruses can convert RNA to DNA with the help of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase. Gallo next discovered a T-cell growth factor that would keep these white blood cells alive longer while outside of the body and give researchers more time to study them. This led to the discovery of a human retrovirus in 1981, the human T-cell leukemia virus, or HTLV-I.
4. In 1983, researchers at the Pasteur Institute in France isolate a retrovirus that they believe is related to the out break of AIDS. Its discoverer, Luc Montagnier, called the retorvirus LAV (lymphadenopathy-associated virus). Robert Gallo claimed to have discovered it called HTLV-3. It later became known as the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV. Some of the facts are not in dispute. Montagnier published a paper in Science, with Gallo's help, that implicated HIV as the cause of AIDS. It was not until 1984, when Gallo's lab published four papers in Science that persuasive evidence linked HIV to the disease. Montagnier and his team felt that Gallo inappropriately took credit for the discovery ("The other AIDS epidemic" 71).
One of Gallo's contempo...