12 Facts About Robert Gallo

1.

Robert Charles Gallo is an American biomedical researcher.

2.

Robert Gallo is best known for his role in establishing the human immunodeficiency virus as the infectious agent responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome and in the development of the HIV blood test, and he has been a major contributor to subsequent HIV research.

3.

Robert Gallo is a co-founder of biotechnology company Profectus BioSciences, Inc and co-founder and scientific director of the Global Virus Network.

4.

Robert Gallo was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, to a working-class family of Italian descent.

5.

Robert Gallo earned a BS degree in Biology in 1959 from Providence College and received an MD from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1963.

6.

In 1976, Doris Morgan, a first year post-doctoral fellow in Robert Gallo's lab, was asked by Robert Gallo to examine culture fluid of activated lymphocytes for the possible production of growth factors.

7.

The Robert Gallo group identified this as T-cell growth factor.

8.

In 1991, following years of controversy surrounding a 1987 out of court settlement between the National Institutes of Health and France's Pasteur Institute, Robert Gallo admitted the virus he claimed to have discovered in 1984 was in reality a virus sent to him from France the year before, putting an end to a six-year effort by Robert Gallo and his employer, the National Institutes of Health, to claim the AIDS virus as an independent discovery.

9.

On request, Montagnier's group had sent a sample of this culture to Robert Gallo, not knowing it contained two viruses.

10.

Montagnier and Robert Gallo resumed collaborating with each other again for a chronology that appeared in Nature in 1987.

11.

Harald zur Hausen shared the Prize for his discovery that human papilloma viruses lead to cervical cancer, but Robert Gallo was left out.

12.

Robert Gallo said that it was "a disappointment" that he was not named a co-recipient.