Speaker 1: Pushkin. In the second half of the twentieth century, a
Speaker 1: group of scientists became obsessed with an obscure family of viruses.
Speaker 1: There weren't many people in the Obscure Virus Club. They
Speaker 1: all knew each other. The rest of the world rolled
Speaker 1: its eyes at them.
Speaker 2: Read the letter.
Speaker 3: Okay, dear Bob, I regret that your paper on the
Speaker 3: T cell retrovirus is not acceptable for publication in the
Speaker 3: Journal of Virology.
Speaker 1: Exhibit A in the archives of the Obscure Virus Club
Speaker 1: are rejection letter.
Speaker 3: I completely agree with reviewer number one. There's a little
Speaker 3: point in perpetuating this controversy about the presumed viral nature
Speaker 3: of this material.
Speaker 1: Not thank you very much. This is fascinating, but you're
Speaker 1: not quite there yet.
Speaker 2: Just no.
Speaker 3: I hope you'll understand. We can only accept definitive data
Speaker 3: to resolve this question. Therefore, I have no alternative but
Speaker 3: to reject this paper outright and advise you we cannot
Speaker 3: consider the present manuscript in any form.
Speaker 1: In any form. If you were in the Obscure Virus Club,
Speaker 1: you got this a lot. It didn't stop them, Thank god.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the
Speaker 1: final episode of season four, a season of Jesuits and
Speaker 1: lawyers and gangsters and disputatious musicians, iconoclass and skeptics, and
Speaker 1: I want to finish with the story of the Obscure
Speaker 1: Virus Club, maybe the biggest band of iconoclasts of all.
Speaker 1: This is a bedtime story for this season of Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: and as with any story, you have to wait till
Speaker 1: the very end to understand what it's all about. The
Speaker 1: Obscure Virus Club had adjunct members, honorary members, hangers on,
Speaker 1: but I want to focus on the three people at
Speaker 1: its core. Ludwig Gross, Howard Temmen, Robert Gallo. Bob Gallo
Speaker 1: is the only one still alive, eighty two years old,
Speaker 1: still at the office every day. He has pictures of
Speaker 1: his old compatriots on his walls.
Speaker 2: I think he sent this to me. Oh there he is, wife, Yeah,
Speaker 2: oh yeah. This is just, you know, unforgettable character. But
Speaker 2: that captures him, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: First Ludwig Gross, head of cancer research for the Veterans Administration.
Speaker 1: In the Bronx members asking him whether he wanted to
Speaker 1: get rich, Gross told him no, he had everything he
Speaker 1: needed and he counted it off. First, he had his car.
Speaker 1: He'd escaped Poland in his car after the Nazis invaded.
Speaker 2: He drove everywhere.
Speaker 3: When he came to see me at nih drop from
Speaker 3: New York Communion, his first experiments were in the backseat
Speaker 3: Trump what is called soa said number two, I have
Speaker 3: my television. I can see Perry Mason. He was a
Speaker 3: Craig Mason, adding number three, I had my work, and
Speaker 3: number four I had my wife.
Speaker 2: That's a load of bit Gross.
Speaker 1: At scientific meetings in the nineteen fifties, people wouldn't sit
Speaker 1: next to ludbit Gross. Everyone thought he was crazy. Next
Speaker 1: came the ringleader of the Obscure Virus Club, Howard Temmen,
Speaker 1: the remarkable Howard Tenmen.
Speaker 2: Really, wait, can you do the intention of this one?
Speaker 1: Man?
Speaker 3: I can do it right now if you get.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Vernon, where are the controls?
Speaker 4: You don't have any damn controls?
Speaker 3: And you're making too many things.
Speaker 2: With the hair like you the same hair.
Speaker 1: Nke Howard Temmen, Ludwig Gross, Robert Gallo. And what did
Speaker 1: they have in common?
Speaker 3: I mean, what's in common is we got pissed on.
Speaker 2: We all had our time of horror, I would.
Speaker 1: Say, three scientists shunned by their peers. That was the
Speaker 1: price of admission to the Obscure Virus Club. In nineteen eleven,
Speaker 1: a young physician named Francis Peyton Rouse set up a
Speaker 1: cancer research laboratory in New York at what is now
Speaker 1: Rockefeller University. A woman came to see Rouse. She had
Speaker 1: a poultry farm just outside the city, and she brought
Speaker 1: with her a hen with a large lump on its chest.
Speaker 1: The lump was cancer, a sarcoma that is a tumor
Speaker 1: of the connective tissue. We don't know why a cancer
Speaker 1: doctor would be curious about a dying chicken, but he was.
Speaker 1: Rous removed the tumor, grounded up, mixed it with saline solution,
Speaker 1: and injected the solution into healthy chickens. And what happened.
Speaker 1: The healthy chickens developed the same tumors. Rous was perplexed.
Speaker 1: Cancer is not supposed to be a communicable disease. It's
Speaker 1: caused by a malfunction of the genetic machinery inside a cell.
Speaker 1: It can't be passed from one person to another like
Speaker 1: the flu. But this is exactly what seemed to be happening.
Speaker 1: The chicken's tumor, Rouse concluded had to be caused by
Speaker 1: a virus. People didn't believe him. They said, well, maybe
Speaker 1: that tumor isn't really cancer, or so what this is
Speaker 1: just some weird thing that happens with chickens. Rouse got discouraged.
Speaker 1: He stopped working on viruses entirely. Years later, this same problem,
Speaker 1: whether cancer could bread like a virus, came to obsess
Speaker 1: Ludwig Gross. He worked with mice. Sometimes mice came down
Speaker 1: with leukemia, murine leukemia, which is a lot like human leukemia.
Speaker 1: Gross spread mice to show how the disease was communicated
Speaker 1: from one generation to the next. He became convinced that
Speaker 1: the leukemia was caused by a virus passed from mother
Speaker 1: to offspring. But the same thing happened. Other scientists didn't
Speaker 1: believe him. Here was this strange emigree in the bronx,
Speaker 1: imagining cancer causing viruses in mice. Why couldn't that just
Speaker 1: be a set of faulty genes being passed down.
Speaker 2: He proved it was viral disease.
Speaker 3: But everybody's ah, you know that his cages are filthy,
Speaker 3: and it has no technology whatsoever. It is you know,
Speaker 3: really what he's doing. You know, it was all bad mouth,
Speaker 3: completely essentially virtually destroyed.
Speaker 1: Gross finally won the Lasca Award, one of the most
Speaker 1: prestigious prizes in medicine, in nineteen seventy four when he
Speaker 1: was seventy. In the Obscure Virus Club, you often had
Speaker 1: to wait your entire career for validation. After Gross comes
Speaker 1: Howard Tenman, the remarkable Howard Temman. Timman was the second
Speaker 1: of three sons of a lawyer and an activist from Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: The biologist David Baltimore met Temmen when they were both
Speaker 1: part of the student summer program at the Jackson Laboratory
Speaker 1: in Maine.
Speaker 5: If you had a question or there was a lecture
Speaker 5: and you didn't understand something, you could.
Speaker 1: Go to Howard.
Speaker 5: And Howard knew everything. He was an amazing intellect, and
Speaker 5: so I spent the summer in a sense as his student.
Speaker 5: He was famous at Swarthmore actually because they said he
Speaker 5: had read every book in the library and they had
Speaker 5: to buy more for him. I mean, I wasn't the
Speaker 5: only one to notice that there was something very special
Speaker 5: about him.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of person he was. Tenman donated
Speaker 1: his bar Mitzvah money to a refugee camp. Years later,
Speaker 1: when he visited the Soviet Union, he smuggled in Hebrew
Speaker 1: prayer books. I met Temmen once when I was a
Speaker 1: cub reporter for the Washington Post. I happened to be
Speaker 1: in Madison, Wisconsin, at the University of Wisconsin, where he
Speaker 1: taught his whole career. I went to see him. I
Speaker 1: don't remember the specifics of what he talked about, and
Speaker 1: I've lost my notes. What I remember with absolute clarity
Speaker 1: is the feeling I had after leaving his office, which
Speaker 1: is that I had never met someone so completely in
Speaker 1: command of his own thinking. I've only ever gotten that
Speaker 1: sense of command of mastery from watching great athletes, never
Speaker 1: biologists with squeaky voices. Temmen's wife, Rayla says that when
Speaker 1: Temmen first got to Wisconsin, he would sit in on
Speaker 1: seminars in other departments.
Speaker 6: And as soon as he got here, he drew attention
Speaker 6: of people because he would sit up in the front
Speaker 6: and then he would ask the most pointed, brilliant, important
Speaker 6: questions of the speaker. So everyone said, well, who is he?
Speaker 6: Who is he?
Speaker 1: But once you met Howard Temmen, you remembered Howard temen.
Speaker 1: One of his former graduate students, Sandy Weller, says she
Speaker 1: could barely keep up with him.
Speaker 4: He rode his bike to work every day he took
Speaker 4: He never took the elevator. If he had to go
Speaker 4: to the ninth floor, he walked ninth floors, and several
Speaker 4: times he made me do that, or he just assumed
Speaker 4: I would do that with him if we were going
Speaker 4: up to the seminar on the ninth floor.
Speaker 1: Temman could have done anything, walked into any field in
Speaker 1: science and left his mark. But he became obsessed by
Speaker 1: the chicken tumor that Peyton Rouse had discovered fifty years earlier,
Speaker 1: now known as rous sarcoma virus.
Speaker 7: And so what I was interested in doing was understanding
Speaker 7: how that virus closes cancel.
Speaker 1: That's tenmen in an oral history taken a few years
Speaker 1: before his death in the nineteen fifties. You could not
Speaker 1: have picked a more obscure topic to study than a
Speaker 1: cancer virus. People were still avoiding Ludwig Gross at conferences.
Speaker 1: The University of Wisconsin had a virology position open at
Speaker 1: their cancer institute. No one wanted it.
Speaker 3: You said when you came to Wisconsin that the virology
Speaker 3: position had been offered to several people, and they hadn't
Speaker 3: been interested.
Speaker 2: How come these people had turned down the position.
Speaker 7: Viruses at that time were not considered very important in
Speaker 7: cancer research. They had always been a side show for
Speaker 7: cancer research.
Speaker 1: His first office at Wisconsin was in the basement next
Speaker 1: to the sump pump.
Speaker 7: And my office was in what had been a transfer room,
Speaker 7: a little isolated room about the size of just where
Speaker 7: you're sitting, a couple of square feet.
Speaker 1: But none of that mattered. Tenman was hooked. Raus's sarcoma
Speaker 1: was a weird, enthralling puzzle. He began to notice all
Speaker 1: kinds of anomalies. For example, sometimes the virus would mutate,
Speaker 1: it would take on a strange new shape, and then
Speaker 1: afterwards the cell it infected would take on the same
Speaker 1: strange shape, as if the virus weren't just occupying the
Speaker 1: cell it infected the way say a flu virus does.
Speaker 1: The flu just sits inside your cells, multiplying until your
Speaker 1: immune system drives it out. The flu is a squatter,
Speaker 1: but rous sarcoma seemed like it was conquering the cells
Speaker 1: it was infecting, inserting its own genetic information into the
Speaker 1: DNA of its host. How it did that made no sense.
Speaker 1: At the time, the field of genetics had something scientists
Speaker 1: called the central dogma. The central dogma held that genetic
Speaker 1: information only moved in one direction. DNA gave instructions to RNA,
Speaker 1: which then used those instructions to make proteins DNA to RNA.
Speaker 1: Rous sarcoma was an RNA virus. According to the central dogma,
Speaker 1: then it was impossible for it to insert its genetic
Speaker 1: information into the DNA of the cells that was infecting.
Speaker 1: RNA didn't move in that direction.
Speaker 5: We knew the basic lifestyle of most viruses, but now
Speaker 5: the cancer inducing viruses stood out as different than and
Speaker 5: hard to understand.
Speaker 1: David Baltimore again, what was different and hard to understand
Speaker 1: about them?
Speaker 5: Well, the fundamental thing was that they had RNA as
Speaker 5: their genome, and yet they were able to establish a
Speaker 5: permanent position inside the cell and run the cell. So
Speaker 5: he turned it from a normal cell to a cancer cell.
Speaker 5: And so here it was behaving a bit like DNA,
Speaker 5: and yet it was an RNA virus, and that didn't
Speaker 5: make sense. Howard had been driven by that question for
Speaker 5: ten years previously.
Speaker 1: David Baltimore watched his old friend Howard Temmen stand up
Speaker 1: at conferences and try to convince everyone else to take
Speaker 1: this weird anomaly seriously. Why did that question assume such
Speaker 1: importance for him.
Speaker 5: Well, because he was thinking twenty four hours a day
Speaker 5: about these viruses.
Speaker 1: As he obsessed over the puzzle of Rous's sarcoma, Temmen
Speaker 1: decided it could only mean one thing. The central dogma
Speaker 1: must be wrong. One of the fundamental facts about human
Speaker 1: genetics taught in every science textbook and every science classroom
Speaker 1: in the world, had to be in error. There must
Speaker 1: be a class of viruses like Rous's sarcoma virus that
Speaker 1: could somehow work backwards from RNA to DNA. It was
Speaker 1: as if he said, yes, the Earth rotates around the
Speaker 1: Sun in an anti clockwise manner, but the only explanation
Speaker 1: for what I'm seeing with Rous is that on occasion
Speaker 1: the Earth must stop and go clockwise.
Speaker 5: And then he spent about ten years at University of
Speaker 5: Wisconsin trying to find an experiment that would convince anybody
Speaker 5: else of that, and he couldn't.
Speaker 1: Temen had an intuition, a hunch, but no one was
Speaker 1: going to overturn the central dogma because some guy from
Speaker 1: Wisconsin had a hunch it wasn't right. Science is a
Speaker 1: social process. People within a field are in constant contact.
Speaker 1: They share notes, they gossip, They compete for the brightest
Speaker 1: graduate students, for grant money, for prizes. When you say
Speaker 1: something that the group doesn't believe, you pay a price.
Speaker 1: And with every year that passes with you saying one
Speaker 1: thing and the group saying another, the price gets higher.
Speaker 8: First of all, people thought he was crazy. I mean,
Speaker 8: he didn't prove his theory for six years after proposing it.
Speaker 1: Temen's former graduate student Sandy Weller.
Speaker 8: And that six years was a very difficult period for
Speaker 8: all of his students, and for him. He was a pariah.
Speaker 8: They thought his students were nuts for working with him.
Speaker 1: At one point, Howard Tenmen wrote Francis Krick, Sir Francis Krick,
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize winner of Watson and Krick, the co discoverers
Speaker 1: of DNA, the authors of the central dogma itself. Temmen
Speaker 1: writes Krick a letter gently suggesting that an amendment to
Speaker 1: the Central Dogma might be in order.
Speaker 8: Quick writes back, very condescending, arrogant letter. Well, I'm sure
Speaker 8: you think this is true, but you must realize you're wrong,
Speaker 8: And to talk like that to Howard, to me, that's
Speaker 8: just such.
Speaker 1: A Most people would have given up, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: because he's Howard Temman.
Speaker 9: The word that it comes to mind is righteous, which
Speaker 9: has a negative of down to it. I don't mean
Speaker 9: to be negative.
Speaker 1: This is Timens's daughter, Miriam.
Speaker 9: But he had his strong moral compass and was incredibly,
Speaker 9: incredibly confident person was blessed with that and so was
Speaker 9: not shy about speaking his mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where do you think that?
Speaker 1: What was the source of his confidence?
Speaker 9: That's what I asked my uncle Michael Temman the source
Speaker 9: of his stick with itness was And his answer was, well,
Speaker 9: he knew.
Speaker 4: He was right.
Speaker 1: And then one day in nineteen seventy, he came home
Speaker 1: to his wife, Raila, full of excitement.
Speaker 6: He was going to be away on our anniversary, which
Speaker 6: was May twenty seventh, and he was explaining why he
Speaker 6: had to leave and that we would celebrate later. I said, well,
Speaker 6: that's fine, that's fine, and he said that actually he
Speaker 6: had something that was a bombshell that he was going
Speaker 6: to announce at the meeting, but he couldn't tell me
Speaker 6: what it was.
Speaker 1: She said, let me guess you found it. He nodded.
Speaker 1: After years of trying, Temmen had located the part of
Speaker 1: the virus that enabled it to work backwards, and by
Speaker 1: an incredible stroke, his old friend David Baltimore had found
Speaker 1: it too. By then, Baltimore had fashioned his own equally
Speaker 1: brilliant career. At almost exactly the same moment, the two
Speaker 1: old friends independently discover a little enzyme looking in a
Speaker 1: distant corner of this strange class of RNA viruses an interpreter,
Speaker 1: something that speaks RNA and can translate into DNA, so
Speaker 1: that the virus had a mechanism for inserting its own
Speaker 1: genetic information into the cells it infected. Temmen finds the
Speaker 1: enzyme in rous sarcoma virus. Baltimore went looking for it
Speaker 1: in mouse leukemia virus, the samevirus that had haunted Ludwig
Speaker 1: gross Temen and Baltimore call it reverse transcript tase, and
Speaker 1: the class of viruses that had obsessed them all for
Speaker 1: so long now had a name retroviruses, because by virtue
Speaker 1: of their onboard translator, they had the ability to work
Speaker 1: in reverse. How hard was it to find this particular enzyme?
Speaker 3: Is that?
Speaker 1: Is it trivial?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 1: It's really the notion of.
Speaker 5: Two days of experiments. Two days.
Speaker 1: So it's just the idea of knowing where to look
Speaker 1: and what to look for, and what to look for.
Speaker 1: You have to design, very specifically design your search so
Speaker 1: that it will show up this enzyme. If you don't
Speaker 1: look in exactly the right way, you're not going to
Speaker 1: spot it right. Just like that, the great puzzle was resolved.
Speaker 5: When I got to the point where I knew that
Speaker 5: the enzyme was in the virus particle. The first thing
Speaker 5: I did was to call Howard and say, I want
Speaker 5: to tell you about this.
Speaker 1: How did he respond?
Speaker 5: He responded by saying, we're doing those experiments too.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy, Baltimore and Tenmen jointly publish a famous
Speaker 1: series of papers in the prestigious journal Nature. Five years later,
Speaker 1: they were awarded the Nobel Prize along with their old teacher.
Speaker 1: We're not odel Becco. Temmen trades in his two first
Speaker 1: class tickets to Sweden for coach seats so he can
Speaker 1: take along as two daughters.
Speaker 9: Well it's always seven. When he got the Nobel Prize,
Speaker 9: and one of the things I remember is that his
Speaker 9: pants were too long and they were sort of all
Speaker 9: bunched around the bottom.
Speaker 2: Of his talks at the ceremony. Yes, did you go
Speaker 2: to the ceremony? Yes, oh you did.
Speaker 9: Yes, I kind of remember, meaning the king, and I
Speaker 9: definitely remember a banquet, very very fancy in this enormous
Speaker 9: wide staircase where the laureates came down and their spouses
Speaker 9: all paired with somebody else. So my father had a
Speaker 9: I believe a Danish princess on her arm, if I'm
Speaker 9: remembering correctly, in a long pink dress. I remember that.
Speaker 9: And my mother was escorted by some lesser prince person
Speaker 9: and the waiters, you know, all in this procession with
Speaker 9: the most beautiful food.
Speaker 1: It was the seventy fifth anniversary of the Nobel Prize,
Speaker 1: so all previous laureates were invited. There was a huge
Speaker 1: banquet in the Golden Hall. By tradition, one representative from
Speaker 1: each set of new laureates was allowed to speak. Temen
Speaker 1: was chosen. He stood up with his baggy tuxedo trousers
Speaker 1: and his squeaky.
Speaker 6: Voice, and he went up to the microphone in front
Speaker 6: of these twelve hundred people and thanked them very very
Speaker 6: much for the prize you have given us. For cancer research.
Speaker 1: His wife, Reyla was sitting in the audience with their daughters,
Speaker 1: and then Temen said, here, we are being rewarded for
Speaker 1: our work in understanding cancer, and you're all smoking.
Speaker 6: The King was smoking, the Queen was smoking. Everybody there
Speaker 6: was smoking. So they were just a gaus that he
Speaker 6: would get up and say that hat in front of
Speaker 6: all the royalty.
Speaker 1: Did they put out their cigarettes?
Speaker 9: Uh?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think many of them did, because I was
Speaker 6: down in the floor on the table. I was sitting
Speaker 6: next to the Prince of Denmark, was my partner that night,
Speaker 6: and I looked and they people just looked shocked when
Speaker 6: he said it. I remember the look on the faces.
Speaker 6: And then they stubbed out the cigarettes.
Speaker 1: The story of the Obscure Virus Club could end here,
Speaker 1: Baltimore and Temen getting their medals from the King of Sweden,
Speaker 1: then Temen calling out the whole crew for their hypocrisy.
Speaker 1: Happy ending, But there's a whole other chapter to come.
Speaker 1: When David Baltimore and Howard Tenman discovered reverse transcript tastes
Speaker 1: and shattered the central dogma, Bob Gallo, the third charter
Speaker 1: member of the Obscure Virus Club, was still in his
Speaker 1: early thirties, the son of Italian working class immigrants, Lean, ambitious,
Speaker 1: raw a rising star at the National Cancer Institute. He
Speaker 1: went to a scientific conference in Paris, was stuck in
Speaker 1: a cab when he looked out the window and saw
Speaker 1: Howard Tamman.
Speaker 2: He's looking on the streets in Paris like a law soul.
Speaker 3: November of nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: Now a hero, Howard the hero.
Speaker 1: Howard Tamman, the hero walking down of Paris street.
Speaker 3: Had window shopping or something by himself excus different, Yeah.
Speaker 4: How wre you are?
Speaker 2: I said, yes, there you are.
Speaker 1: I think sometimes we overestimate the importance of ideas and science. Yes,
Speaker 1: you read a paper in Nature and it changes the
Speaker 1: way you think about the central dogma. But what is
Speaker 1: it that really changes the way you think about the
Speaker 1: central dogma when you meet the person who challenged the
Speaker 1: central dogma, and because that person is so remarkable, you realize, oh,
Speaker 1: I want to be like that. Bob Gallo met Howard
Speaker 1: Teman and decided then and there to join the Obscure
Speaker 1: Virus Club.
Speaker 3: He was a hero to me. You know, when I
Speaker 3: was a child, it was Jodamajo. Okay, how adults hard
Speaker 3: of it, so, you know, even not that much older
Speaker 3: than me, it's a bit decade or so. But no,
Speaker 3: I couldn't identify with him like that. I just appreciated
Speaker 3: him a lot. I was just fascinated by him. I
Speaker 3: was just taken in by it. And I just said,
Speaker 3: you know, you know, listen to theiry goddamn thing this
Speaker 3: guy says.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: Gallow's special was leukemia, cancer of the blood cells, and
Speaker 1: what drew him to retroviruses was the fact that so
Speaker 1: many of them were leukemia's, Ludwig Gross's mouse leukemia being
Speaker 1: the first and most famous, but soon people found others
Speaker 1: bovine leukemia, feline leukemia, gibbon ape leukemia, plus chicken and mouse,
Speaker 1: so five different animal systems, all infectious viruses. What no
Speaker 1: one could find was a human retrovirus. There was a
Speaker 1: growing feeling that they simply didn't exist, that maybe humans
Speaker 1: were somehow protected against this kind of infection, but Gallo
Speaker 1: didn't buy it. There had to be one. He decided
Speaker 1: to focus on a specific subset of leukemia leukemia that
Speaker 1: affected the blood cells known as tea cells. At the time,
Speaker 1: no one knew how to grow tea cells in the laboratory,
Speaker 1: and if you couldn't grow tea cells, you couldn't find
Speaker 1: or study anything that infected them. Gallo's lab figured out
Speaker 1: how to grow tea cell. Then he began searching, and
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy nine he found it in the blood
Speaker 1: of a twenty eight year old African American from Mobile, Alabama.
Speaker 1: Gallo called what he found human t lymphotropic virus ie
Speaker 1: HTLV one. It turned out the man's whole family had
Speaker 1: leukemia two. Gallo then found a man in the Merchant
Speaker 1: Marines with a history of sexual contacts in Japan and
Speaker 1: the Caribbean. Same thing, leukemia and a weakened immune system.
Speaker 1: In his blood, Gallo could see traces of a virus
Speaker 1: with that tell tale bit of reverse transcriptase, A human
Speaker 1: retrovirus spread by mother to child sexual contact and blood
Speaker 1: to blood transmission, previously unknown, most definitely obscure. Gallo submitted
Speaker 1: his findings to the Journal of Virology, the leading scientific
Speaker 1: journal in the field, and what happened the same thing
Speaker 1: that happened to Howard Temmen and Ludwig Gross. The world
Speaker 1: wasn't ready to accept the idea of a human retrovirus.
Speaker 1: The paper was rejected Gallo keeps that letter on his wall.
Speaker 3: Dear Bob, I regret that your paper on the T
Speaker 3: cell retrovirus is not acceptable for publication in the Journal
Speaker 3: of Virology. There's little point in perpetuating this controversy about
Speaker 3: the presumed viral nature of this material.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness atit. Wait it, give me the date.
Speaker 3: September fifteen, nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: September fifteenth, nineteen eighty. That's the key fact, because what's
Speaker 1: happening in the fall of nineteen eighty.
Speaker 3: It's no It kills and it's spreading.
Speaker 1: Young previously healthy men were starting to die of a
Speaker 1: mysterious disease.
Speaker 5: As a disease that has medical science baffle.
Speaker 1: If you did not live through the early days of
Speaker 1: the AIDS epidemic, you have no idea what it was like.
Speaker 1: It leveled the gay communities of major cities around the world.
Speaker 1: People were wasting away, their skin, disfigured by strange lesions.
Speaker 1: Preachers stood up and denounced homosexuality from their pulpits. Doctors
Speaker 1: refused to treat gay patients. Public health officials started talking
Speaker 1: about quarantines in those early years. I once heard a
Speaker 1: presentation at a scientific conference from a demographer trying to
Speaker 1: figure out if AIDS could cause the population explosion in
Speaker 1: Africa to go into reverse. No one knew what it
Speaker 1: was or how it spread. It was a mystery except
Speaker 1: to the Obscure Virus Club, who thought it looked a
Speaker 1: lot like the leukemia viruses they had been studying for years.
Speaker 1: At what point in this process did you say, I
Speaker 1: think it's a retrovirus.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't have gone involved in it involved or didn't think
Speaker 3: it was a retrovirus. So by definition, the day I
Speaker 3: got in it, I'm thinking it's a retrovirus.
Speaker 1: Paper by Bob Gallo, rejected by the Journal of Virology
Speaker 1: in September of nineteen eighty was about human t lymphotropic
Speaker 1: virus IE htlv one and the possibility that this strange
Speaker 1: new retrovirus had found its way into humans. Now a
Speaker 1: year later, Bob Gallo looked at AIDS and thought it
Speaker 1: was behaving a lot like a cousin of htlv one.
Speaker 2: But while what led you to suspect it was a retrovirus?
Speaker 3: Our experience with htlv one and filelogumnia virus. What is
Speaker 3: that experience? Blood sex more than the child.
Speaker 1: It infected T cells? Check it caused immune dysfunction. Check
Speaker 1: it spread from mother to child, Check it spread through
Speaker 1: blood to blood contact or sexual transmission. Check. By nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, Gallow's lab had isolated and described the AIDS
Speaker 1: virus and figured out how to grow it in the laboratory.
Speaker 1: By nineteen eighty five, they had developed a test for it.
Speaker 1: By nineteen ninety five, there was a class of drugs
Speaker 1: available to treat HIV. That meant the virus was no
Speaker 1: longer a death sentence. That is an astonishingly short amount
Speaker 1: of time to detect, understand, and treat a new disease.
Speaker 1: And why was the progress so fast? Because we had
Speaker 1: a head start In the mountains that have been said
Speaker 1: and written about AIDS, The usual tone is one of
Speaker 1: horror at the indifference and incompetence and resistance that greeted
Speaker 1: the epidemic. All of that is true. But you can
Speaker 1: also make the case that we got lucky, not lucky
Speaker 1: in some ephemeral way, but massively, unequivocally, epically lucky. Lucky
Speaker 1: because Ludwig Gross insisted, doggedly, year after year that a
Speaker 1: virus could cause cancer. Because Howard Temen insisted that the
Speaker 1: central dogma was wrong, because Temin and Baltimore found a
Speaker 1: crucial little enzyme called reverse transcriptase, because Bob Gallo got
Speaker 1: it into his head that if there were mice retroviruses
Speaker 1: and chicken retroviruses and cat retroviruses, there had to be
Speaker 1: human retroviruses. And then he found a human retrovirus and
Speaker 1: learned how it worked, and learned to isolate it and
Speaker 1: grow it in the laboratory, and every one of those
Speaker 1: lessons turned out to be perfect preparation for the most
Speaker 1: terrifying retrovirus ever known. If HIV arrives as a force
Speaker 1: ten years earlier, what happens scientifically, medically disaster. This is
Speaker 1: David Baltimore again.
Speaker 5: The worst thing that can happen, and it was proved
Speaker 5: in the HIV epidemic, is not to know what's causing
Speaker 5: a disease, because that gives liberty to fantasy.
Speaker 1: We could know it was in infections and note was
Speaker 1: a virus, but not be able to.
Speaker 5: We couldn't find it, couldn't find it.
Speaker 1: Remember what David Baltimore said of the experiment in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy that led him to reverse transcriptase. It took two days.
Speaker 1: It was a trivial thing, but only because he knew
Speaker 1: what he was looking for. If you're faced with a
Speaker 1: retrovirus and you don't know what you're looking for, you're lost.
Speaker 1: You can't find it unless you know it's this particular
Speaker 1: class of right.
Speaker 5: It was the search for reverse transcriptase in the virus
Speaker 5: particles that opened up the knowledge that it was a
Speaker 5: virus that was causing the disease.
Speaker 1: The world may not have been ready for HIV, but
Speaker 1: the obscure virus club was. Ludwig Gross died in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine at the age of ninety five of stomach
Speaker 1: cancer caused by infection with the bacterium go back to Pylori,
Speaker 1: which he himself had researched. Howard Temmen died five years earlier,
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety four, at the age of fifty nine,
Speaker 1: of lung cancer, the obscure kind you can get even
Speaker 1: if you've never smoked. Bob Gallo is still very much alive,
Speaker 1: with pictures of his old friends on the walls of
Speaker 1: his office.
Speaker 3: Oh there he is wife, Yeah, oh yeah, this is
Speaker 3: just this is not long before he died.
Speaker 1: Oh he's so young. It was so sad.
Speaker 3: It's awful.
Speaker 1: At Temmen's memorial service, Gallo told the story of his
Speaker 1: first encounter with his friend years before. In Paris. I
Speaker 1: found a copy of his eulogy. It's like the beginning
Speaker 1: of a love story. I was in a traffic stall
Speaker 1: taxi with a few others and we saw Howard walking alone,
Speaker 1: and he was poking his nose in and out of
Speaker 1: the store windows. He was smiling, he was looking quizzical.
Speaker 1: He was the picture of happy boyhood. Curiosity retained in
Speaker 1: a man. I think maybe you've been inside of it
Speaker 1: so long, maybe you miss how astonishing it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true, that's true. My wife would put it
Speaker 3: in the mystery, so, you know, into something more powerful
Speaker 3: than you would be, or anything else or luck. What
Speaker 3: if Temen and Baltimore didn't discover reverse transcript takes, there
Speaker 3: is no field. I start with that too.
Speaker 1: I would start here. What if any of these people,
Speaker 1: Peyton Rouse, Ludwig Gross, Howard, tim and Robert Gallo, in
Speaker 1: their pursuit of truth, had been motivated by the expectation
Speaker 1: of reward, where would we be or if they listened
Speaker 1: to what others said as opposed to trusting in what
Speaker 1: their own experiments revealed, or if they had only been
Speaker 1: willing to wander five years in the wilderness instead of ten.
Speaker 1: Many of the stories in this season of Revisionist History
Speaker 1: have come down to the same issue. How we should
Speaker 1: act in the world in novel and difficult circumstances. How
Speaker 1: we should think about what matters for a profession, or
Speaker 1: think about those who choose a crooked path, or dissent
Speaker 1: from orthodoxy, or borrow the traditions of others, or engage
Speaker 1: with someone loathsome I could go on, but if you
Speaker 1: are looking for one example to be your guide, start
Speaker 1: with this one. The grace and persistence of Howard Temmen
Speaker 1: and the Obscure Virus Club. Thank you for listening to
Speaker 1: Season four of Revisionist History. Every week on Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: I say the names of the people behind the Revisionist
Speaker 1: History podcast, and for this episode, I I wanted to
Speaker 1: let you hear them say their names for themselves. This
Speaker 1: is my team. Nothing would happen without them. Mia Lobel,
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith.
Speaker 6: Julia Barton, Flonon Williams, Camille Baptista, Luis Guerra.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Carl Megliori, Heather Fain, Maggie Taylor, Beth Johnson,
Speaker 1: Maya Knigg, and Jacob Weisberg l hefe By the way,
Speaker 1: you can hear a longer version of my interview with
Speaker 1: David Baltimore on the Solvable podcast, which Pushkin produces with
Speaker 1: the Rockefeller Foundation. Revisionist History is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 5: Three