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I could not conceive of any other data that we would need
in order to say that the virus was the cause of AIDS. What other data
were there? To try putting it into an animal and seeing if the animal
got AIDS? Something that many people do not appreciate is that viruses
are often species specific. In fact, they usually are. Sometimes you get
the right result. Take gibbon ape leukemia virus. You can put it in a
young gibbon and it produces leukemia, and so everything seems to fit
fine; but if you are a human, you cannot put the virus in a human so you
go into another species. If gibbon ape leukemia virus is put into another
monkey, it does not infect at all or, if it does, it does not produce
leukemia. On the contrary, Herpes saimiri in its native species produces
nothing. But if you put it into some other monkey–I cannot remember
the type–you can produce a lymphoma. Doing that kind of experiment–putting
a virus into another species–is not necessarily meaningful and many
people do not understand that about viruses. I did not see what else could
be done. What else was there to do to establish etiology until you saw
more people dying? We felt that the blood test was, in fact, an emergency,
and to say that this was the etiology of AIDS was the right thing, and
that it was urgent to do so. |
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