Word: gallos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last year, after months of feuding, the Pasteur team, headed by Dr. Luc Montagnier, filed two legal actions in the U.S. The first challenged a patent on the blood test awarded to Dr. Robert Gallo and his colleagues. The second charged Gallo with breach of contract for allegedly using for commercial purposes samples of virus sent to him by the French. Gallo had agreed to use the samples for research purposes only...
...Moreover, the Patent Office recognized the French as the "senior party," since their patent application was filed seven months earlier than the NIH application. Now, says Charles Lipsey, a patent attorney for Pasteur, "the burden of proving that they invented the test first is going to rest on Dr. Gallo...
...close timing of the two announcements was no accident. A heated rivalry has raged between French and American researchers for two years; Montagnier and Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute each claims to have been the first to discover the AIDS virus. Bickering aside, both new findings help confirm the theory that the AIDS virus evolved from a microbe that commonly infects African green monkeys, apparently causing them no harm. Essex's team identified the monkey virus last year and speculated that it had first spread to humans who ate monkey meat or were bitten by the animals...
...news of an apparently harmless relative of the AIDS virus was greeted with enthusiasm by other scientists. "The best thing about Max's virus," says Gallo, "is that we can learn why one is pathogenic and the other isn't." By identifying which component of the AIDS virus is responsible for its deadly effects, researchers may be able to develop new drugs that specifically inhibit it. They may also be able to alter the virus genetically to remove its harmful traits, leaving a benign version that could serve as a vaccine...
Late last week research teams in both Gallo's and Haseltine's laboratories revealed that they had already succeeded in tinkering with the AIDS virus and rendering it inactive. They did so by snipping out a gene that enables the virus to replicate with remarkable speed. Without the gene, the viruses "don't kill T cells and don't reproduce anymore," says Haseltine. The "dead-ended" virus, he notes, could serve as a prototype for a vaccine...