Word: shaw
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...wasn't the only scientist who had observed this. Another team, headed by George Shaw, had seen the same spike in HIV particles followed by a precipitous drop. The two researchers learned of each other's work and decided to co-publish their findings in a 1991 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. It was the beginning of a friendly but no less keen competition between the scientists...
...Shaw had proved that there are high levels of virus in the first few weeks of infection. Ho and Schooley had already shown that there is a lot more virus in the end stages of AIDS than anyone had thought possible. The next question was obvious: What is going on during those middle years, when patients are still in relatively good health? Ho suspected that the answer could dramatically change the way doctors treated their HIV-positive patients...
...blood tests indicated that the viral load was close to zero throughout the middle years, though it would gradually increase as time went by. Both Ho and Shaw realized, however, that zero doesn't always equal zero in the world of HIV. For one thing, the virus might be hiding out in the lymph nodes, where it could be producing thousands or even millions of copies of itself every day. As long as the immune system cleared those infectious particles as quickly as they formed, blood tests would show no change in viral load. "It's like a person running...
...even the greatest marathoner could keep up that pace forever. If the virus reproduced very quickly, it would eventually exhaust the body's defenses. At least that's what Ho and Shaw thought. The trick to proving their idea was to find some way to suddenly stop the treadmill. If you did that to a jogger, he would lurch forward. Similarly, if you stopped HIV's cycle of reproduction in the blood, the immune system should suddenly rebound. By measuring that rebound, the scientists hoped to figure out just how rapidly the virus had been reproducing...
...weeks was all that Ho and Shaw needed to conduct their rebound experiments. The two laboratories raced to find the answer...