The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

In the end, though, Spiegelman’s effort turned out to be systematically flawed. In his frenzied hunt for human cancer retroviruses, Spiegelman had pushed the virus-detection test so hard that he saw viruses or traces of viruses that did not exist. When other labs around the nation tried to replicate the work in the mid-1970s, Spiegelman’s viruses were nowhere to be found. Only one human cancer, it turned out, was caused by a human retrovirus—a rare leukemia endemic in some parts of the Caribbean. “The hoped-for human virus slipped quietly away into the night,” Weinberg wrote. “The hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the SVCP… could not make it happen. The rocket never left its launching pad.” Spiegelman’s conjecture about human retroviruses was half-right and half-wrong: he was looking for the right kind of virus but in the wrong kind of cell. Retroviruses would turn out to be the cause of a different disease—not cancer. Spiegelman died in 1983 of pancreatic cancer, having heard of a strange illness erupting among gay men and blood-transfusion recipients in New York and San Francisco. One year after Sol Spiegelman’s death in New York, the cause of that disease was finally identified. It was a human retrovirus called HIV.