How did you learn about AIDS?
My interest was drawn to it by an epidemiologist named James Curran of CDC, the Center for Disease Control, in Atlanta, Georgia, when he gave a convincing lecture at the National Institutes of Health. I was in the Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. And at first when he came, he talked about this new epidemic... well it didn't seem very important, a few cases. When he came back a second time, I heard him give a full lecture and it was clear that it was very important and getting worse. It was also clear in his talk that he was thinking of an infectious agent, though there were other ideas as to what might be going on, including chemicals. And I also think that Curran probably believed it was viral. And I was working in virology, and he made the statement, "Where are the virologists?" like that help was needed, and I began thinking about it. And as I thought about it and returned to my laboratory, I recalled that the characteristics of the disease were that a very particular kind of blood cell, one of our key immune cells that is governing a large part of our immune system, appeared to be slowly disappearing in these patients. And that's a cell we call the T helper cell, now better known as the CD4+ T cell.
