Dr Robert Yarchoan

Audio Transcript

I remember after reading the Science galleys doing a rough mental calculation of the number of gays in the country and the percentage who were likely to be HIV-infected, and estimating that there were half a million to a million people infected with this lethal virus who did not know it. There was a weird feeling of having this cataclysmic information that the world was not aware of. I could not go out there and give a news conference saying that a lot of people are going to die and that it is a real crisis. But it was a very weird moment for me, feeling that I was privy to this information that had not perked through people’s consciousness yet. Then there were endless debates about how many of them would get sick and how many of those would die. Unfortunately, the more pessimistic views turned out to be correct.

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