“This time I went to the boss and told him, I don’t think I am made for a career here, I don’t think I’m good enough… My boss said ‘Get your ass back in the lab and go to work and stop this crying business’. And that was a lesson, so I did.”
Dr. Gallo, 2026 on Virology Unmasked
Dr. Gallo and his son, Rob, in 1964Dr. Gallo Today
Dr. Robert Gallo is best known for being the co-discoverer of HIV, the virus which causes AIDS. In addition to HIV, Dr. Gallo discovered two other retroviruses, HTLV-1 and HTLV-2. Viruses need other cells to replicate because they must use the machinery of host cells; they do not have the necessary machinery on their own. Retroviruses are special viruses which replicate by adding their own genetic material to the genome for the cells they infect. The genome is the blueprint for new cells, so once a virus becomes part of the blueprint, all new cells that came from the infected cell are contain the virus genetic material too. Retroviruses are very prone to making mistakes when they replicate, which makes them much harder to treat or cure. This is part of why HIV does not have a vaccine or a cure; the virus keeps changing so our treatments have to change constantly too. The other big problem is that once a retrovirus sneaks into the human cells, they can stay quiet or ‘latent’ . When someone is treated for HIV, you do not find HIV in their blood because the medicine, antiretroviral therapy (ART), stops the virus from replicating . But just because the virus does not replicate, it does not mean it goes away. When ART stops, the virus can replicate again and the virus will come back throughout the body. Dr. Gallo’s retrovirus work revolutionized science through discovering new viruses and new techniques to test and grow viruses.
Discovered HTLV-1 (human T-lymphotropic virus 1), the first human retrovirus
This virus causes adult leukemia and infects 4-10 million people
Discovered interleukin-2 (Il-2)
IL-2 stimulates T cells , the cells that HIV infects, and this activation allows T cells to better replicate in the lab and allows infected T cells produce more virus.
“We need media to be there not in pandemics, we don’t need them in pandemics. We need them to be there in between and we need them to be there all the time… After a generation, always, we forget”
Page by Molly Cavanaugh, podcast edited by Larissa Thackray
