Commentary on:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/health/hiv-patient-zero-geneticanalysis.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=firstcolumn-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
By James Edmondson
I really miss all of the creativity in NYC that was wiped out by the AIDS epidemic.
This article debunks the once-popular accusation that one flight attendant singlehandedly
introduced AIDS to the Western Hemisphere. The federal AIDS expert, Anthony Fauci, made
the narrow-minded assumption that very few people had HIV in Africa, without actually going
there to check it out. I think that all Western scientists underestimated just how sleazy sexual
practices can be in Africa and Haiti. Of course Prez Reagan thought that dying of AIDS was
divine retribution for immoral behavior, so his administration was notoriously slow to act.
When HIV hit The Village in the early 1980s, the nearest hospital was St. Vincents and the
second-nearest was NYU, where I was a medical student. NYU already had an unusual interest
in immune defenses, so the observation of a new immunodeficiency syndrome in our own back
yard raised quite a stir. The NYC public health lab was just a couple of blocks from NYU
Medical Center. Its fair to say that the discovery of HIV and the analysis of the virus and the
clinical syndrome of AIDS had a marked effect on all of us NYU medical students. The fact of
HIV and AIDS brought billions to virology and spurred the human genome project to sequence
the entire sequence of human DNA for $3 billion more. AIDS activists (Act Up, etc) stormed the
National Institutes of Health, only to learn that nobody had the technology needed to study the
virus. All biology researchers owe AIDS activists a huge debt of gratitude for putting molecular
biology into the public eye, testifying before Congress for increased NIH funding, and making
humble biologists into household names. I would estimate that AIDS increased the NIH budget
by perhaps $5 billion per year, ever since the mid-1990s.
Today, HIV is no longer the death sentence it was in the 1980s.