Hope for a breakthrough in AIDS research

In 1987, two medical researchers, Anthony Fauci and Cliff Lane, conducted the first clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine. They took the envelope that surrounds the virus and simply injected it into study participants, hoping to get an immune response — an approach that had worked on hepatitis B. It failed on AIDS. Thus began one of history’s most consequential scientific detective stories. AIDS, it turns out, is very different from its viral relatives. Polio, for example, infects quickly, then clears the body. AIDS survives and replicates for years. To exist, it has developed unprecedented mechanisms to escape the immune system. It is cloaked in sugar molecules, which the body doesn’t recognize as a threat. And its viral shell is constantly mutating to avoid the attachment of antibodies. “Evolution is a smart foe,” Fauci told me in a recent interview. In virology, smart means deadly. When exposed to polio or measles, more...