The identity of the AIDS-causing virus was finally revealed on March 20, 1983, when the French researcher Luc Montagnier, working with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, published a paper in Science magazine describing the isolation of a novel virus from the lymph nodes of several patients with AIDS. Over the next year, as the disease swept through Europe and America, killing thousands, virologists debated whether this virus was, indeed, the cause of AIDS. In 1984, biomedical researcher Robert Gallo’s lab at the National Cancer Institute settled the debate for good: the team published four papers in
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