Robert Gallo

Robert Gallo is an American biomedical researcher whose work helped establish HIV as the cause of AIDS and led to an early blood test for the virus.

Luc Montagnier: French virologist who co-discovered HIV and shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Montagnier’s team isolated the virus before Gallo’s group, setting the stage for their later credit dispute.
Human T-lymphotropic virus: A family of retroviruses that infect T lymphocytes and can cause human disease. Gallo’s prior work on this virus family supplied methods and clues for recognizing HIV.
National Cancer Institute: A U.S. federal institute that conducts and supports cancer research. Gallo led its Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology during the discovery of HIV.
HIV/AIDS pandemic: The global epidemic of HIV infection and AIDS that began in the late twentieth century. The discovery and testing advances associated with Gallo shaped responses to this worldwide crisis.
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi: French virologist who co-discovered HIV at the Pasteur Institute. Her work with Montagnier produced the initial HIV isolate that Gallo’s group independently confirmed.
Interleukin-2: A cytokine that stimulates the growth and activity of T cells. Using interleukin-2 helped Gallo’s group keep HIV-infected T cells growing in culture.
Retrovirus: A virus that uses reverse transcriptase to copy its RNA genome into DNA inside a host cell. Gallo’s long-standing focus on retroviruses framed his search for the cause of AIDS.
Blood donation: The voluntary collection of blood for transfusion or manufacture of medical products. HIV screening of donated blood reduced the risk of transfusion-related transmission.
Harold Varmus: American virologist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize for discoveries about retroviral oncogenes. Varmus’s research helped shape the retrovirus biology central to Gallo’s laboratory.
Reverse transcriptase: An enzyme that copies RNA into DNA, characteristic of retroviruses. Detecting this enzyme helped identify the virus Gallo’s group linked to AIDS.

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