A TEAM EFFORT

LUC MONTAGNIER

Paris in the early 1980s turned out to be the perfect place to study AIDS. The patients were men, women, European, African. So few were homosexual that French doctors were not that distracted by the idea that this was a "gay plague." To them, it was merely a sexually transmitted disease. So they turned to Dr. Montagnier, a noted virologist at the Pasteur Institute, to find the cause. By 1983 his team had isolated a new human retrovirus. Their results, published in Science, were largely ignored. Then, in 1984, Dr. Robert Gallo announced that he had discovered the virus. Only after a bitter legal battle did the two scientists agree to share credit for the discovery. Today Montagnier promotes AIDS research and treatment centers in Africa.

MARY GUINAN

Chronically understaffed and underfunded, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control was the first branch of the medical establishment to take AIDS seriously. Doing basic shoe-leather epidemiology, the CDC staff followed every clue that might lead them to the source of contagion. No one worked harder than Dr. Guinan, an expert on sexually transmitted diseases, who interviewed dozens of men, women, drug addicts and prisoners, asking the most personal questions about their sex lives. Their stories convinced her that the infection was transmitted sexually and intravenously, and she immediately set about trying to sound the alarm.

Today Guinan is chief of the Urban Health Research Centers at CDC, where she still stresses prevention. "People have to understand that the more sex partners they have, the more they will be at risk," she says. "But they don't want to hear that."

ROBERT GALLO

Famous for his temper and contempt for authority, Dr. Gallo has weathered his share of scientific catfights. A brilliant scientist, he is the author or co-author of more than 1,000 scientific papers and one of the world's most frequently cited researchers. In the 1970s, while at the National Cancer Institute, he discovered the immune-boosting molecule interleukin-2 and isolated the first cancer-causing retroviruses in humans.

He has made important contributions to AIDS research--coaxing HIV to grow in the lab, proving convincingly that it causes AIDS, developing an HIV-antibody test, identifying proteins that seem to protect some people from AIDS--although it took a decade for the controversy surrounding his role as co-discoverer of the virus to dissipate. After he was officially cleared of charges of scientific misconduct in 1993, Gallo left the NCI to set up his own virology institute at the University of Maryland.

PAUL VOLBERDING

While virologists have concentrated on attacking HIV, physicians like Dr. Volberding have focused on the immediate task of treating or even preventing the opportunistic infections that make the late stages of AIDS so painful. Volberding, now director of the University of California, San Francisco, Center for AIDS Research and the AIDS Program at San Francisco General Hospital, trained as an oncologist. When gay men began coming down with a rare cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma, he was one of the first to call attention to the problem. But he is best known for his work with the antiviral drug azt. In the late 1980s he led several trials that indicated the drug could delay the onset of symptoms. Later studies showed the reprieve is short-lived. Undeterred, Volberding, like Ho, has started a trial using combination therapy in patients who have just been infected.

PETER PIOT

Dr. Piot was practicing medicine in Antwerp in the late 1970s, when he starting seeing a new kind of patient. Wealthy men and women from Central Africa, dozens of them, were coming in with a strange wasting syndrome that was invariably fatal. It wasn't until 1981, when he attended a scientific meeting in the U.S., that Piot realized that what had been spreading in Africa for the past decade was in fact AIDS.

Getting anyone to believe him was another matter. Many U.S. researchers were still insisting that AIDS was a gay disease. But Piot persuaded some scientists from the CDC to go to Zaire with him. Their investigation proved that HIV in Africa is most often spread through heterosexual contact, that women can pass the virus to their unborn children and that syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases help spread AIDS. Today, as head of the U.N. AIDS efforts, Piot promotes prevention programs and lobbies drug companies to develop a vaccine.

IRVING SIGAL

Drug companies excel at transforming other scientists' basic research into their own products. Few firms have been as aggressive as Merck in taking on the fundamental questions of biochemistry. In 1986 Sigal convinced his superiors at Merck that they should target an obscure protein called protease that HIV uses to copy itself.

Sigal and his colleagues showed that the protease was essential to the viral life cycle. They became adept at manufacturing it in the lab, and pieced together its molecular structure, a key to determining what sorts of agents might block its action.

Sigal's work set the stage for the development in the early 1990s of the first protease inhibitors. Tragically, he did not live to witness their success. On Dec. 21, 1988, he and 269 others were killed on Pan Am Flight 103 when a terrorist bomb exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. He was 35.

DANI BOLOGNESI

Duke University's Bolognesi spent much of the 1960s and '70s studying one of the most obscure microbes known to science--a retrovirus that causes cancer in mice. He knew there would never be any commercial benefits from his work, but he thought it might someday help researchers develop treatments for cancer in people.

He was only partly right. When scientists showed in the mid-1980s that AIDS is caused by a retrovirus, Bolognesi's research suddenly became indispensable to the efforts to develop a vaccine against HIV.

Unfortunately, scientists still don't understand what an HIV vaccine must do to confer immunity. Bolognesi hopes to develop a kind of booster shot that, although it might be less than 100% protective, could help the immune system hold the virus at bay until a truly effective vaccine is discovered.

FLOSSIE WONG-STAAL

Working in Gallo's lab at the National Institutes of Health in the late 1980s, Wong-Staal discovered why HIV is so deadly. It is an extremely changeable virus that rarely makes a perfect copy of itself. Among the resulting mutants are viruses that can resist drugs and render conventional vaccines worthless.

These findings led Wong-Staal to shift her focus from directly attacking the virus to bolstering the immune system with the tools of gene therapy. In 1990 she left Gallo's lab to head the Center for AIDS Research at the University of California at San Diego. Although it may take years, she believes that gene therapy--with its promise of cheaper drugs and milder side effects--could provide the best AIDS treatment of all.