The discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is full of dramatic twists, scientific rivalries and great discoveries. I invite you to immerse yourself in this exciting story in the following lines and get to know the characters who marked a before and after in one of the most important moments in the history of 20th century medicine. Let’s imagine an espionage thriller, but in Instead of secret agents, we have brilliant scientists racing against the clock to reveal the mystery of a disease that devastates the world. This is how we could describe the race that was unleashed to discover the HIV virus. In the 1980s, a new and mysterious disease began to wreak havoc, first in the homosexual community in the United States, and then throughout the world. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was spreading rapidly, leaving a trail of death and desolation in its wake. The scientific community launched a frantic search to identify the causative agent of this terrible disease and put a stop to the epidemic. In this exciting race, two teams of researchers stood out above the rest: a French team and another American. The French scientists were led by Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and were the first to isolate a retrovirus which they called LAV (Lymphadenopathy-associated virus), which would later be identified as HIV. For their part The American team was led by Robert Gallo, at the National Institutes of Health of the United States, and was able to isolate a similar retrovirus, which they called HTLV-III. The controversy: who was the first?The question of who was the first to discover HIV triggered one of the greatest scientific controversies in the history of recent medicine. Both teams claimed to have been the ones who deserved the revenue from the discovery. At first it was an exchange of accusations, but soon the rivalry gave rise to a battle that went outside the laboratories and reached higher levels, the courts. From the beginning, there were signs that something didn’t add up to Gallo’s version of events. His team had isolated a virus, HTLV-III, which they claimed caused AIDS, but the dates and details of their experiments raised many doubts, too many, in the scientific community. The controversy intensified when it was discovered that samples of Blood from Montagnier’s team had been sent to Gallo’s laboratory. This raised the possibility that the virus isolated by Gallo was actually a variant of the LAV virus, previously identified by the French scientist. In the face of growing pressure from the scientific community and public opinion, an international commission was established to investigate what should be true in accusations of scientific plagiarism. The commission concluded that, although both teams had made significant contributions to the discovery of HIV, the virus isolated by Gallo was genetically very similar to Montagnier’s LAV. The investigation later revealed that Gallo and his team had deliberately changed the dates of their experiments to present his results as if they had been obtained before those of Montagnier. This manipulation of data constituted a serious lack of scientific ethics. The commission’s findings had important consequences: Gallo’s reputation was seriously damaged and his credibility as a scientist was compromised; Various legal actions were initiated, both in the United States and in France, related to the virus patents and accusations of plagiarism. MORE INFORMATION news Yes Jeremy DeSilva, anthropologist: «Humans are slow and weak. Only altruism prevented our extinction» news Yes They create the first plastic that completely decomposes in seawater in just a few hoursNow, this controversy and its outcome were not in vain, they promoted the need to establish more rigorous regulations so that in the In the future, scientific integrity could be guaranteed and cases of plagiarism avoided.
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