Editor's note: Citation Classics Commentaries were written by the authors of some of studies that were the most highly cited papers between 1961 and 1975. The essays were originally published between 1977 and 1993 in Current Contents, a publication of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now Thomson Scientific. (ISI was founded by Eugene Garfield, also the founder of The Scientist.)
In the early 1980s, a few researchers began to speculate that a retrovirus was the cause of the mysterious disease known as AIDS. In this essay, Luc Montagnier, then the director of the virology department at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and his colleagues describe the experiments proving that a retrovirus is the causative agent. The group isolated a novel retrovirus from the lymph node of an AIDS patient and showed that it produced a decline of lymphocyte proliferation. Their paper was cited 835 times ...
