"I was sitting in my office in Building 10,2 going through my usual work and lab data, and I got that first issue ... and I thought this was really odd," recalls Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He recalls getting a "funny feeling" about it. "I don't like these unresolved things. Was this a bad batch of drugs? I never even imagined at that point that this was a new virus at all."
A month later, another MMWR report linked Pneumocystis infection in gay men with a rare cancer: Kaposi's sarcoma (KS).3 This cancer was diagnosed in 20 men in New York City and six in California; six of the 26 had pneumonia. Ten other cases of Pneumocystis pneumonia were diagnosed in California. With that second report, Fauci remembers thinking, "'Whoa; we have a problem; this sounds very much like an underlying ...
