Society needed to be steeled not only for a new infectious disease among gay men but also among drug addicts who could spread it to their children. Such thinking, however, was simply too farfetched for a scientific community that, when it thought about gay cancer and gay pneumonia at all, was quite happy to keep the problems just that: gay. The academy would not accept Rubinstein’s abstract for presentation at the conference, and among immunologists, word quietly circulated that the Israeli researcher had gone a little batty.
