Robert Gallo

Robert Charles Gallo (born March 23, 1937) is an American biomedical researcher best known for his role in establishing the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the infectious agent responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and in the development of the HIV blood test. He has been a major contributor to subsequent HIV research. Gallo is the director and co-founder of the Institute of Human Virology (IHV) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, established in 1996 in partnership with the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore. In 2011, he was named the first Homer & Martha Gudelsky Distinguished Professor in Medicine. He also co-founded the biotechnology company Profectus BioSciences, Inc. and the Global Virus Network (GVN), where he serves as scientific director. From 1980 to 1990, Gallo was the most cited scientist in the world according to the Institute for Scientific Information, and he ranked third globally for scientific impact from 1983 to 2002, having published over 1,300 papers. His career was shaped by his sister’s early death from leukemia, which initially focused his research. In the 1970s, his laboratory discovered T-cell growth factor, later renamed interleukin-2 (IL-2), a breakthrough that enabled the growth of T lymphocytes in culture and opened new avenues in immunology. This work led to the isolation of the first human retrovirus, human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV), for which Gallo received a Lasker Award in 1982. In 1984, he and his collaborators published papers demonstrating that a retrovirus they called HTLV-III caused AIDS, though a French team had described a similar virus, LAV, the previous year. Gallo received a second Lasker Award in 1986 for determining that HIV-1 causes AIDS, making him the only two-time recipient of the award. In 1986, his group also discovered human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6). In 1991, following a settlement between the National Institutes of Health and France’s Pasteur Institute, Gallo admitted that the virus he claimed to have discovered in 1984 was actually sent to him from France the year before. The Office of Research Integrity initially found him guilty of research misconduct in 1992, but dropped the allegations in late 1993 based on new standards.