Speaker 1: Pushkin. In the second half of the twentieth century, a
Speaker 1: group of scientists became obsessed with an obscure family of viruses.
Speaker 1: There weren't many people in the Obscure Virus Club. They
Speaker 1: all knew each other. The rest of the world rolled
Speaker 1: its eyes at them. Read the letter. Okay, dear Bob,
Speaker 1: I regret that your paper on the tsol retrovirus is
Speaker 1: not acceptable for publication in the Journal of Virology. Exhibit
Speaker 1: A in the archives of the Obscure Virus Club are
Speaker 1: rejection letter. I completely agree with reviewer number one. There's
Speaker 1: little point in perpetuating this controversy about the presumed viral
Speaker 1: nature of this material. Not thank you very much. This
Speaker 1: is fascinating, but you're not quite there yet. Just no.
Speaker 1: I hope you understand. We can only accept definitive data
Speaker 1: to resolve this question. Therefore, I have no alternative but
Speaker 1: to reject this paper outright on advise you we cannot
Speaker 1: consider the present manuscript in any form, in any form.
Speaker 1: If you were in the Obscure Virus Club, you got
Speaker 1: this a lot. It didn't stop them, thank god. My
Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to revisionist history. My
Speaker 1: podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the final
Speaker 1: episode of season four, a season of Jesuits and lawyers
Speaker 1: and gangsters and disputatious musicians, iconoclass and skeptics, and I
Speaker 1: want to finish with the story of the Obscure Virus Club,
Speaker 1: maybe the biggest band of Iconoclass of all. This is
Speaker 1: a bedtime story for this season of revisionist history, and
Speaker 1: as with any story, you have to wait till the
Speaker 1: very end to understand what it's all about. The Obscure
Speaker 1: Virus Club had adjunct members, honorary members, hangers on, but
Speaker 1: I want to focus on the three people at its core.
Speaker 1: Ludvig Gross, Howard Temman, Robert Gallo. Bob Gallo is the
Speaker 1: only one still alive, eighty two years old, still at
Speaker 1: the office every day. He has pictures of his old
Speaker 1: compatriots on his walls. I think he sent this to me.
Speaker 1: Oh there his wife. Yeah. This is just, you know,
Speaker 1: unforgettable character, but that captures him, you know. Yeah. First,
Speaker 1: Ludvig Gross, head of cancer research for the Veterans Administration
Speaker 1: in the Bronx gallow members asking him whether he wanted
Speaker 1: to get rich. Gross told him no, He had everything
Speaker 1: he needed, and he counted it off. First, he had
Speaker 1: his car. He had escape Poland in his car after
Speaker 1: the Nazis invaded. He drove everywhere. When he came to
Speaker 1: see me at Niage drove from New York Communion. His
Speaker 1: first experiments were in the backseat. Trump what's called? Said?
Speaker 1: Number two, I have my television that I can see
Speaker 1: Perry Mason. He was a Perry Mason, adding number three,
Speaker 1: I had my work, and number four I had my wife.
Speaker 1: That's that's Ludvig grows. At scientific meetings in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: people wouldn't sit next to Ludvig Gross. Everyone thought he
Speaker 1: was crazy. Next came the ringleader of the Obscure Virus Club,
Speaker 1: Howard Tammon. They're remarkable, Howard Tammon, Wait, can you do
Speaker 1: the inttention of this? I can do it right now.
Speaker 1: But he didn't get sold Vernon, where are the controls?
Speaker 1: You don't have any damned controls. And you're making too
Speaker 1: many queens with the hair like you, the same hair,
Speaker 1: Dow Howard Temman, Ludwig Gross, Robert Gallo. And what did
Speaker 1: they have in common? I mean, what's in common? We
Speaker 1: got pissed on. We all had our time of horror,
Speaker 1: I would say, three scientists shunned by their peers. That
Speaker 1: was the price of admission to the Obscure Virus Club.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eleven, a young physician named Francis Peyton Rouse
Speaker 1: set up a cancer research laboratory in New York at
Speaker 1: what is now Rockefeller University. A woman came to see Rouse.
Speaker 1: She had a poultry farm just outside the city, and
Speaker 1: she brought with her a hen with a large lump
Speaker 1: on its chest. The lump was cancer, a sarcoma that
Speaker 1: is a of the connective tissue. We don't know why
Speaker 1: a cancer doctor would be curious about a dying chicken,
Speaker 1: but he was. Rouse removed the tumor, grounded up, mixed
Speaker 1: it with saline solution, and injected the solution into healthy chickens.
Speaker 1: And what happened. The healthy chickens developed the same tumors.
Speaker 1: Ross was perplexed. Cancer is not supposed to be a
Speaker 1: communicable disease. It's caused by a malfunction of the genetic
Speaker 1: machinery inside a cell. It can't be passed from one
Speaker 1: person to another like the flu. But this is exactly
Speaker 1: what seemed to be happening. The chickens tumor. Rouse concluded
Speaker 1: had to be caused by a virus. People didn't believe him.
Speaker 1: They said, well, maybe that tumor isn't really cancer or
Speaker 1: so what this is just some weird thing that happens
Speaker 1: with chickens. Rouse got discouraged. He stopped working on viruses entirely.
Speaker 1: Years later, this same problem, whether cancer could spread like
Speaker 1: a virus, came to obsess Ludwig Gross. He worked with mice.
Speaker 1: Sometimes mice came down with leukemia murine leukemia, which is
Speaker 1: a lot like human leukemia. Gross bread mice to show
Speaker 1: how the disease was communicated from one generation to the next.
Speaker 1: He became convinced that the leukemia was caused by a
Speaker 1: virus passed from mother to offspring. But the same thing happened.
Speaker 1: Other scientists didn't believe him. Here was this strange emigree
Speaker 1: in the bronx imagining cancer causing viruses in mice. Why
Speaker 1: couldn't that just be a set of faulty genes being
Speaker 1: passed down? He proved it was viral disease. Everybody's ah,
Speaker 1: you know that its cages or filthy and in his
Speaker 1: no technology whatsoever don't you know really what he's doing.
Speaker 1: You know, there was all bad bad mouth, completely essentially
Speaker 1: virtually destroyed. Gross finally won the Lascar Award, one of
Speaker 1: the most prestigious prizes in medicine, in nineteen seventy four
Speaker 1: when he was seventy. In the Obscure Virus Club, you
Speaker 1: often had to wait your entire career for validation. After
Speaker 1: Gross comes Howard Timmon, the remarkable Howard Timmon. Timmon was
Speaker 1: the second of three sons of a lawyer and an
Speaker 1: activist from Philadelphia. The biologist David Baltimore met Timmon when
Speaker 1: they were both part of the student summer program at
Speaker 1: the Jackson Laboratory in Maine. If you had a question,
Speaker 1: or there was a lecture, you didn't understand something, you
Speaker 1: could go to Howard. And Howard knew everything. He was
Speaker 1: an amazing intellect, and so I spent the summer in
Speaker 1: a sense as his student. He was famous at Swarthmore
Speaker 1: actually because they said he had read every book in
Speaker 1: the library and they had to buy more for him.
Speaker 1: I mean, I wasn't the only one to notice that
Speaker 1: there was something very special about him. This is the
Speaker 1: kind of person he was. Timman donated did his bar
Speaker 1: Mitzpah money to a refugee camp. Years later, when he
Speaker 1: visited the Soviet Union, he smuggled in Hebrew prayer books.
Speaker 1: I met Timmon once when I was a cub reporter
Speaker 1: for the Washington Post. I happened to be in Madison, Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: at the University of Wisconsin, where he taught his whole career.
Speaker 1: I went to see him. I don't remember the specifics
Speaker 1: of what he talked about, and I've lost my notes.
Speaker 1: What I remember with absolute clarity is the feeling I
Speaker 1: had after leaving his office, which is that I had
Speaker 1: never met someone so completely in command of his own thinking.
Speaker 1: I've only ever gotten that sense of command of mastery
Speaker 1: from watching great athletes, never biologists. Was squeaky voices. Timman's wife, Raeli,
Speaker 1: says that when Timman first got to Wisconsin, he would
Speaker 1: sit in on seminars in other departments, and as soon
Speaker 1: as he got here, he drew attention of people because
Speaker 1: he would sit up in the front and then he
Speaker 1: would ask the most pointed, brilliant, important questions of the speaker.
Speaker 1: So everyone said, well, who is he? Who is he?
Speaker 1: But once you met Howard Timmon, you remembered Howard Timmon.
Speaker 1: One of his former graduate students, Sandy Weller, says she
Speaker 1: could barely keep up with him. He wrote his bike
Speaker 1: to work every day. He never took the elevator. If
Speaker 1: he had to go to the ninth floor, he walked
Speaker 1: nine floors, and several times he made me do that,
Speaker 1: or he just assumed I would do that with him
Speaker 1: if we were going up to the seminar on the
Speaker 1: ninth floor. Timman could have done anything, walked into any
Speaker 1: field in science and left his mark. But he became
Speaker 1: obsessed by the chicken tumor that Peyton Rouse had discovered
Speaker 1: fifty years earlier, now known as Rouse sarcomavirus. And so
Speaker 1: what I was interested in doing was understanding how that
Speaker 1: virus closes can sue. That's Timman in an oral history
Speaker 1: taken a few years before his day. In the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: You could not have picked a more obscure topic to
Speaker 1: study than a cancer virus. People were still avoiding Ludwig
Speaker 1: Grossu conferences. The University of Wisconsin had a virology position
Speaker 1: open at their cancer institute. No one wanted it. You
Speaker 1: said when you came to Wisconsin that the virology position
Speaker 1: had been offered to several people and they hadn't been interested.
Speaker 1: How come these people had turned down the position. Viruses
Speaker 1: at that time were not considered very important in cancer research.
Speaker 1: They had always been a side show for cancer research.
Speaker 1: His first office at Wisconsin was in the basement next
Speaker 1: to the sump pump, and my office was in what
Speaker 1: had been a transfer room, a little isolated room about
Speaker 1: the size of just where you're sitting, a couple of
Speaker 1: square feet. But none of that mattered. Timan was hooked.
Speaker 1: Rous sarcoma was a weird, enthralling puzzle. He began to
Speaker 1: notice all kinds of anomalies. For example, sometimes the virus
Speaker 1: would mutate, it would take on a strange new shape,
Speaker 1: and then afterwards the cell it infected would take on
Speaker 1: the same strange shape, as if the virus weren't just
Speaker 1: occupying the cell it infected, the way say a flu
Speaker 1: virus does. The flu just sits inside your cells, multiplying
Speaker 1: until your immune system drives it out. The flu is
Speaker 1: a squatter, but rous sarcoma seemed like it was conquering
Speaker 1: the cells it was infecting, inserting its own genetic information
Speaker 1: into the DNA of its host. How it did that
Speaker 1: made no sense. At the time, the field of genetics
Speaker 1: had something scientists called the central dogma. The central dogma
Speaker 1: held that genetic information only moved in one direction. DNA
Speaker 1: gave instructions to RNA, which then used those instructions to
Speaker 1: proteins DNA to RNA. Russ sarcoma was an RNA virus.
Speaker 1: According to the central dogma, then it was impossible for
Speaker 1: it to insert its genetic information into the DNA of
Speaker 1: the cells that was infecting. RNA didn't move in that direction.
Speaker 1: We knew the basic lifestyle of most viruses, but now
Speaker 1: the cancer inducing viruses stood out as different then and
Speaker 1: hard to understand. David Baltimore again, what was different and
Speaker 1: hard to understand about them? Well, the fundamental thing was
Speaker 1: that they had RNA as their genome, and yet they
Speaker 1: were able to establish a permanent position inside the cell
Speaker 1: and run the cell. So he turned it from a
Speaker 1: normal cell to a cancer cell. And so here it
Speaker 1: was behaving a bit like DNA, and yet it was
Speaker 1: an RNA virus, and that didn't make sense. Howard had
Speaker 1: been driven by that question for ten years previously. David
Speaker 1: Baltimore watched his old friend Howard Teman stand up at
Speaker 1: conferences and try to convince everyone else to take this
Speaker 1: weird anomaly seriously. Why did that question assume such importance
Speaker 1: for him, Well, because he was thinking twenty four hours
Speaker 1: a day about these viruses. As he obsessed over the
Speaker 1: puzzle of rouss sarcoma, Teman decided it could only mean
Speaker 1: one thing. The central dogma must be wrong. One of
Speaker 1: the fundamental facts about human genetics taught in every science
Speaker 1: textbook and every science classroom in the world, had to
Speaker 1: be in error. There must be a class of viruses
Speaker 1: like rous sarcoma virus that could somehow work backwards from
Speaker 1: RNA to DNA. It was as if he said, yes,
Speaker 1: the Earth rotates around the Sun in an anticlockwise manner,
Speaker 1: but the only explanation for what I'm seeing with rousse
Speaker 1: is that on occasion the Earth stop and go clockwise.
Speaker 1: And then he spent about ten years at University of
Speaker 1: Wisconsin trying to find an experiment that would convince anybody else,
Speaker 1: and he couldn't. Tamman had an intuition, a hunch, but
Speaker 1: no one was going to overturn the central dogma. Because
Speaker 1: some guy from Wisconsin had a hunch it wasn't right.
Speaker 1: Science is a social process. People within a field are
Speaker 1: in constant contact. They share notes, they gossip, they compete
Speaker 1: for the brightest graduate students, for grant money, for prizes.
Speaker 1: When you say something that the group doesn't believe, you
Speaker 1: pay a price. And with every year that passes, with
Speaker 1: you saying one thing and the group saying another, the
Speaker 1: price gets higher. First of all, people thought it was crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean, he didn't prove his theory for six years
Speaker 1: after proposing it. Timman's former graduate student Sandy Weller, and
Speaker 1: that six years was a very difficult period for all
Speaker 1: of his students, and for him. He was a pariah.
Speaker 1: They thought his students were nuts for working with him.
Speaker 1: At one point, Howard Timman wrote Francis Krick, Sir Francis Crick,
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize winner of Watson and Crick, the co discoverers
Speaker 1: of DNA, the authors of the central dogma itself. Timman
Speaker 1: writes Krick a letter gently suggesting that an amendment to
Speaker 1: the Central Dogma might be in order. Krick writes back,
Speaker 1: very condescending, arrogant letter. Well, I'm sure you think this
Speaker 1: is true, but you must realize you're wrong. And to
Speaker 1: talk like that to Howard, to me, that's just such
Speaker 1: a Most people would have given up, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: because he's Howard Timman. The word that it comes to
Speaker 1: mind is righteous, which has a negative of down to it.
Speaker 1: I don't mean to be negative. This is Timmon's daughter, Miriam.
Speaker 1: But he had a strong moral compass and was incredibly,
Speaker 1: incredibly confident person, was blessed with ad and so was
Speaker 1: not shy about speaking his mind. Yeah, where do you
Speaker 1: think that? What was the source of his confidence? That's
Speaker 1: what I asked my uncle Michael Timman the source of
Speaker 1: his stick with fitness was And his answer was, well,
Speaker 1: he knew he was right. And then one day in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, he came home to his wife, rhyla full
Speaker 1: of excitement. He was going to be away on our anniversary,
Speaker 1: which was May twenty seventh, and he was explaining why
Speaker 1: he had to leave and that we would celebrate later.
Speaker 1: I said, well, that's fine, that's fine, and he said
Speaker 1: that actually he had something that was a bombshell that
Speaker 1: he was going to announce at the meeting, but he
Speaker 1: couldn't tell me what it was. She said, let me
Speaker 1: guess you found it. He nodded. After years of trying,
Speaker 1: Timon had located the part of the virus that enabled
Speaker 1: it to work backwards, and by an incredible stroke, his
Speaker 1: old friend David Baltimore had found it too. By then,
Speaker 1: Baltimore had fashioned his own equally brilliant career. At almost
Speaker 1: exactly the same moment, the two old friends independently discover
Speaker 1: a little enzyme looking in a distant corner of this
Speaker 1: strange class of RNA viruses, an interpreter, something that speaks
Speaker 1: RNA and can translate into DNA, so that the virus
Speaker 1: had a mechanism for inserting its own genetic information into
Speaker 1: the cells it infected. Timon finds the enzyme in rous sarcomavirus.
Speaker 1: Baltimore went looking for it in mouse leukemia virus, the
Speaker 1: same virus that had haunted Ludwig gross Teman and Baltimore
Speaker 1: call it reverse transcript taste, and the class of viruses
Speaker 1: that had obsessed them all for so long now had
Speaker 1: a name retroviruses, because by virtue of their onboard translator,
Speaker 1: they had the ability to work in reverse. How hard
Speaker 1: was it to find this particular enzyme? Is that? Is
Speaker 1: it trivial? Oh? Really, it's really the notion of two
Speaker 1: days of experiments. Two days. So it's just the idea
Speaker 1: of knowing where to look and what to look for,
Speaker 1: and what to look for right. You have to design,
Speaker 1: very specifically design your search so that it will show
Speaker 1: up this enzyme right. If you don't looking exactly the
Speaker 1: right way, you're not going to spot it right. Just
Speaker 1: like that, the great puzzle was resolved. When I got
Speaker 1: to the point where I knew that the enzyme was
Speaker 1: in ivirus particle. The first thing I did was to
Speaker 1: call Howard and say, I want to tell you about this.
Speaker 1: Where did he How did he respond? He responded by saying,
Speaker 1: we're doing those experiments too. In nineteen seventy, Baltimore and
Speaker 1: Timmon jointly publish a famous series of papers in the
Speaker 1: prestigious journal Nature. Five years later, they were awarded the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize along with their old teacher. We're not Odell Bacco.
Speaker 1: Timon trades in his two first class tickets to Sweden
Speaker 1: for coach seats so he can take along his two daughters.
Speaker 1: Well it's always seven. When he got the Nobel Prize,
Speaker 1: and one of the things I remember that his pants
Speaker 1: were too long and they were sort of all bunched
Speaker 1: around the bottom of his talks at the ceremony. Yes,
Speaker 1: did you go to the ceremony? Yes, oh you did. Yes,
Speaker 1: I kind of remember, meaning the king, and I definitely
Speaker 1: remember a banquet. I'm very, very fancy in this enormous
Speaker 1: wide staircase where the laureates came down and their spouses
Speaker 1: all paired with somebody else. So my father had a
Speaker 1: I believe a Danish princess on her arm, if I'm
Speaker 1: remembering correctly, in a long pink dress. I remember that.
Speaker 1: And my mother was escorted by some lesser prince person
Speaker 1: and the waiters, you know, all in this procession with
Speaker 1: the most beautiful food. It was the seventy fifth anniversary
Speaker 1: of the Nobel Prize, so all previous laureates were invited.
Speaker 1: There was a huge banquet in the Golden Hall. By tradition,
Speaker 1: one representative from each set of new laureates was allowed
Speaker 1: to speak. Timan was chosen. He stood up with his
Speaker 1: baggy tuxedo trousers and his squeaky voice, and he went
Speaker 1: up to the microphone in front of these twelve hundred
Speaker 1: people and thanked them very very much for the prize
Speaker 1: you have given US for cancer research. His wife Rhela
Speaker 1: was sitting in the audience with their daughters, and then
Speaker 1: Timan said, here, we are being rewarded for our work
Speaker 1: in understanding cancer, and you're all smoking. The King was smoking,
Speaker 1: the Queen was smoking. Everybody there was smoking. So they
Speaker 1: were just a guess that he would get up and
Speaker 1: say that in front of all the royalty. Did they
Speaker 1: put out their cigarettes? Yeah? I think many of them did,
Speaker 1: because I was down in the floor and the table
Speaker 1: I was sitting next to the Prince of Denmark was
Speaker 1: my partner that night, and I looked and they people
Speaker 1: just looked shocked when he said it. I remember the
Speaker 1: look on the faces. And then they stubbed out the cigarettes.
Speaker 1: The story of the Obscure Virus Club could end here
Speaker 1: Baltimore and Timon getting their medals from the King of Sweden,
Speaker 1: then Timmon calling out the whole crew for their hypocrisy.
Speaker 1: Happy ending, But there's a whole other chapter to come.
Speaker 1: When David Baltimore and Howard Timman discovered reverse transcriptas and
Speaker 1: shattered the central dogma, Bob Gallow, the third charter member
Speaker 1: of the Obscure Virus Club, was still in his early thirties,
Speaker 1: the son of Italian working class immigrants, Lean, ambitious, raw
Speaker 1: a rising star at the National Cancer Institute. He went
Speaker 1: to a scientific conference in Paris, was stuck in a
Speaker 1: cab when he looked at the window and saw Howard Tamman.
Speaker 1: He's looking in the streets in Paris like a law
Speaker 1: sole November nineteen seventies. Now a hero, Howard the hero.
Speaker 1: Howard Tamman, the hero walking down a Paris street, hadn't
Speaker 1: want a window shopping or something by himself that he
Speaker 1: seems different. Yeah, where you are? I said, yes, there
Speaker 1: you are. I think sometimes we overestimate the importance of
Speaker 1: ideas and science. Yes, you read a paper in Nature
Speaker 1: and it changes the way you think about the central dogma.
Speaker 1: But what is it that really changes the way you
Speaker 1: think about the central dogma when you meet the person
Speaker 1: who challenged the central dogma, and because that person is
Speaker 1: so remarkable, you realize, oh, I want to be like that.
Speaker 1: Bob Gallo met Howard Teman and decided then and there
Speaker 1: to join the Obscure Virus Club. He was a hero
Speaker 1: to me. You know, when I was a child, it
Speaker 1: was Joda Manjo okay, But I was adult art of it, so,
Speaker 1: you know, even not that much older than you know,
Speaker 1: it's a bit decade or so. But no, it's I
Speaker 1: couldn't identify with him like that. I just appreciated him
Speaker 1: a lot. I was just fascinated by him. I was
Speaker 1: just taken in by it. And I just said, you know,
Speaker 1: I listen the very god damn things guy says. You know.
Speaker 1: Gallows special was leukemia, cancer of the blood cells, and
Speaker 1: what drew him to retroviruses was the fact that so
Speaker 1: many of them were leukemias, Ludwig Gross's mouse leukemia being
Speaker 1: the first and most famous, but soon people found others
Speaker 1: bovine leukemia, feline leukemia, gibbon ape leukemia, plus chicken and mouse,
Speaker 1: so five different animal systems, all infectious viruses. What no
Speaker 1: one could find was a human retrovirus. There was a
Speaker 1: growing feeling that they simply didn't exist, that baby humans
Speaker 1: were somehow protected against this kind of infection, but Gallo
Speaker 1: didn't buy it. There had to be one. He decided
Speaker 1: to focus on a specific subset of leukemia leukemia that
Speaker 1: affected the blood cells known as T cells. At the time,
Speaker 1: no one knew how to grow T cells in the
Speaker 1: laboratory and if you couldn't grow tea cells, you couldn't
Speaker 1: find or study anything that infected them. Gallo's lab figured
Speaker 1: out how to grow T cell. Then he began searching,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen seventy nine he found it in the
Speaker 1: blood of a twenty eight year old African American from Mobile, Alabama.
Speaker 1: Gallo called what he found human t lymphotropic virus one
Speaker 1: HTLV one. It turned out the man's whole family had
Speaker 1: leukemia two. Gallo then found a man in the Merchant
Speaker 1: Marines with a history of sexual contacts in Japan and
Speaker 1: the Caribbean. Same thing, leukemia and a weak in immune system.
Speaker 1: In his blood, Gallo could see traces of a virus
Speaker 1: with that tell tale bit of reverse transcriptase. A human
Speaker 1: retrovirus spread by mother to child sexual contact and blood
Speaker 1: to blood transmission, previously unknown, most definitely obscure. Gallow submitted
Speaker 1: his findings to the Journal of Virology, the leading scientific
Speaker 1: journal in the field, and what happened, the same thing
Speaker 1: that happened to Howard Temmin and Ludwig Gross. The world
Speaker 1: wasn't ready to accept the idea of a human retrovirus.
Speaker 1: The paper was rejected. Gallow keeps that letter on his wall.
Speaker 1: Dear Bob, I regret that your paper on the T
Speaker 1: cell retrovirus is not acceptable for publication in the Journal
Speaker 1: of Virology. There's little point in perpetuating this controversy about
Speaker 1: the presumed viral nature of this material. Oh my goodness. Edit.
Speaker 1: Wait if you give me the date September fifteen, nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: September fifteenth, nineteen eighty, that's the key fact, because what's
Speaker 1: happening in the fall of nineteen eighty it's no It
Speaker 1: kills and its spreading young. Previously healthy men were starting
Speaker 1: to die of a mysterious disease A It's a disease
Speaker 1: that has medical science baffled. If you did not live
Speaker 1: through the early days of the AIDS epidemic, you have
Speaker 1: no idea what it was like. It leveled the gay
Speaker 1: communities of major cities around the world. People were wasting away,
Speaker 1: their skin, disfigured by strange lesions. Preachers stood up and
Speaker 1: denounced homosexuality from their pulpits, doctors refused to treat gay patients.
Speaker 1: Public health officials started talking about quarantines in those early years.
Speaker 1: I once heard a presentation at a scientific conference from
Speaker 1: a demographer trying to figure out if AIDS could cause
Speaker 1: the population explosion in Africa to go into reverse. No
Speaker 1: one knew what it was or how it spread. It
Speaker 1: was a mystery except to the Obscure Virus Club, who
Speaker 1: thought it looked a lot like the leukemia virus, as
Speaker 1: they had been studying for years. At what point in
Speaker 1: this process did you say, I think it's a retrovirus,
Speaker 1: wouldn't have gone involved in it evolved, or didn't think
Speaker 1: it was a retrovirus by definition? The day I got
Speaker 1: in it, I'm thinking it's a retrovirus. The Pain by
Speaker 1: Bob Gallow, rejected by the Journal of Virology in September
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty, was about human t lymphotropic virus one
Speaker 1: htlv one and the possibility that this strange new retrovirus
Speaker 1: had found its way into humans. Now a year later,
Speaker 1: Bob Gallow looked at AIDS and thought it was behaving
Speaker 1: a lot like a cousin of htlv one. But while
Speaker 1: it's what led you to suspect it was a retrovirus,
Speaker 1: our experience with htlv one and the Leno guinea virus,
Speaker 1: what is that experience? Blood sex, mother to child, it
Speaker 1: infected T cells, check it caused immune dysfunction. Check it
Speaker 1: spread from mother to child, Check it spread through blood
Speaker 1: to blood contact or sexual transmission. Check. By nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: Gallow's lab had isolated and described the AIDS virus and
Speaker 1: figured out how to grow it in the laboratory. By
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five, they had developed a test for it.
Speaker 1: By nineteen ninety five, there was a class of drugs
Speaker 1: available to treat HIV. That meant the virus was no
Speaker 1: longer a death sentence. That is an astonishingly short amount
Speaker 1: of time to detect, understand, and treat a new disease.
Speaker 1: And why was the progress so fast? Because we had
Speaker 1: a headstart In the mountains that have been said and
Speaker 1: written about AIDS, The usual tone is one of horror
Speaker 1: at the indifference and incompetence and resistance that greeted the epidemic.
Speaker 1: All of that is true. But you can also make
Speaker 1: the case that we got lucky, not lucky in some
Speaker 1: ephemeral way, but massively, unequivocally, epically lucky lucky because Ludwig
Speaker 1: Gross insisted, doggedly, year after year that a virus could
Speaker 1: cause cancer. Because Howard Temman insisted that the central dogma
Speaker 1: was wrong, because Teman and Baltimore found a crucial little
Speaker 1: enzyme called reverse transcriptase. Because Bob Gallow got it into
Speaker 1: his head that if they were mice retroviruses and chicken
Speaker 1: retroviruses and cat retroviruses, there had to be human retroviruses.
Speaker 1: And then he found a human retrovirus and learned how
Speaker 1: it worked, and learned to isolate it and grow it
Speaker 1: in the laboratory, and every one of those lessons turned
Speaker 1: out to be perfect preparation for the most terrifying retrovirus
Speaker 1: ever known. If HIV arrives as a force ten years earlier,
Speaker 1: what happens scientifically, medically disaster. This is David Baltimore again.
Speaker 1: The worst thing that can happen, and it was proved
Speaker 1: in the HIV epidemic, is not to know what's causing
Speaker 1: a disease, because that gives liberty to fantasy. We could
Speaker 1: know it was in infections and know it was a virus,
Speaker 1: but not be able to We couldn't find it, couldn't
Speaker 1: find it. Remember what David Baltimore said of the experiment
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy that led him to reverse transcriptase. It
Speaker 1: took two days. It was a trivial thing, but only
Speaker 1: because he knew what he was looking for. If you're
Speaker 1: faced with a retrovirus and you don't know what you're
Speaker 1: looking for, you're lost. You can't find it unless you
Speaker 1: know it's this particular class of right. It was the
Speaker 1: search for reverse transcriptase in the virus particles that opened
Speaker 1: up the knowledge that it was a virus that was
Speaker 1: causing the disease. The world may not have been ready
Speaker 1: for HIV, but the obscure virus club was. Ludwig Gross
Speaker 1: died in nineteen ninety nine at the age of ninety
Speaker 1: five of stomach cancer caused by infection with the bacterium
Speaker 1: elico backter pylori, which he himself had researched. Howard Tamman
Speaker 1: died five years earlier, in nineteen ninety four, at the
Speaker 1: age of fifty nine, of lung cancer. The obscure kinds
Speaker 1: you can get even if you've never smoked. Bob Gallo
Speaker 1: is still very much alive, with pictures of his old
Speaker 1: friends on the walls of his office. Oh there he
Speaker 1: his wife. Yeah, this is this is not long before
Speaker 1: he died. Oh he's so young. It was so sad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's awful. At Tamman's memorial service, Gallo told the story
Speaker 1: of his first encounter with his friend years before. In Paris.
Speaker 1: I found a copy of his eulogy. It's like the
Speaker 1: beginning of a love story. I was in a traffic
Speaker 1: stalled taxi with a few others and we saw Howard
Speaker 1: walking alone, and he was poking his nose in and
Speaker 1: out of the store windows. He was smiling, he was
Speaker 1: looking quizzical. He was the picture of happy boyhood curiosity
Speaker 1: retained in a man. I think maybe you've been inside
Speaker 1: of it so long, maybe you miss how astonishing it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true, that's true. My wife would put it in
Speaker 1: the mystery, so, you know, into something more powerful than
Speaker 1: you would be or anything else. Or look, what if
Speaker 1: dem And in Baltimore didn't discover reverse has skiptaes there
Speaker 1: is no field. I would start with that too. I
Speaker 1: would start here. What if any of these people, Peyton Rouse,
Speaker 1: Ludwig Gross, Howard, tim and Robert Gallo, in their pursuit
Speaker 1: of truth, had been motivated by the expectation of reward,
Speaker 1: where would we be or if they listened to what
Speaker 1: others said as opposed to trusting in what their own
Speaker 1: experiments revealed, or if they had only been willing to
Speaker 1: wander five years in the wilderness instead of ten. Many
Speaker 1: of the stories in this season and Revisionist History have
Speaker 1: come down to the same issue. How we should act
Speaker 1: in the world in novel and difficult circumstances. How we
Speaker 1: should think about what matters for a profession, or think
Speaker 1: about those who choose a crooked path or descent from orthodoxy,
Speaker 1: or borrow the traditions of others, or engage with someone
Speaker 1: loathsome I could go on, but if you are looking
Speaker 1: for one example to be your guide, start with this one.
Speaker 1: The grace and persistence of Howard Temmin and the Obscure
Speaker 1: Virus Club. Thank you for listening to Season four of
Speaker 1: Revisionist History. Every week on Revisionist History, I say the
Speaker 1: names of the people behind the Revisionist History podcast, and
Speaker 1: for this episode, I wanted to let you hear them
Speaker 1: say their names for themselves. This is my team. Nothing
Speaker 1: would happen without them. Mia Lobell, Jacob Smith, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Flawan Williams, Camille Baptista, Luis GERA special thanks to Carli Megliori,
Speaker 1: Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Beth Johnson, Maya Kanig, and Jacob
Speaker 1: Weisberg l Heffe. By the way, you can hear a
Speaker 1: longer version of my interview with David Baltimore on the
Speaker 1: Solvable podcast, which Pushkin produces with the Rockefeller Foundation. Revisionist
Speaker 1: History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.