And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

by Randy Shilts

The lack of trained retrovirologists and money for retrovirology labs also proved an impenetrable barrier to drug testing. To determine whether an anti-viral drug was any good at halting viral replication, scientists needed to perform viral isolations on every patient. The cost of one such isolation was $700. Even the NCI, which had the largest budget of any medical research institution in the world, found the cost of extensive drug testing and viral isolations to be prohibitive. Even if the money did exist, there were few facilities capable of performing the isolations and few retrovirologists to do the work. In New York City, for example, there was only one laboratory capable of performing the LAV viral isolations. The lack of such laboratories was a legacy of the cutbacks of the first years of the Reagan administration. In the early 1980s, when retrovirology grants dried up, scientists simply stopped learning how to be retrovirologists.