June 5: The First Identification of AIDS

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was described for the first time on this date in 1981 by Dr. Michael Gottlieb in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Gottlieb, 33, was an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California Medical Center in Los Angeles when he learned of a small cluster of gay men with unexplained fevers, dramatic weight loss, pneumonia, and a barely functioning immune system. Gottlieb thought this might be a new syndrome and said so in print; few weeks later, Dr. Alvin Friedman-Kien published a description of twenty-six cases of Karposi’s sarcoma in gay men in New York and California, which gained considerable media attention. An article by Gottlieb was then published in the New England Journal of Medicine and became one of the most heavily quoted articles in medical history. Throughout the early 1980s, Gottlieb treated a growing number of patients with AIDS and published over fifty papers on the disease. He was among the few scientists willing to talk openly to the media during the early years of the epidemic — which probably was a key factor in his being denied tenure at the UCLA Medical Center in 1987. (The hospital, according to Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown, “aspired to develop cardiac and liver transplant programs, and the physicians feared that if the hospital became too well known for AIDS, transplant patients might stay away. They also foresaw that there would ultimately be a lot of AIDS patients without good health care coverage.”) With Mathilde Krim and Elizabeth Taylor, Dr. Gottlieb became a founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) in 1985, with money from the estate of Rock Hudson, whom Gottlieb served as physician until Hudson’s death from AIDS in 1985. Some 35 million people now live with AIDS, worldwide, and more than 20 million have died of it. To see Dr. Gottlieb speaking about his terrible discovery, click here.

“A diagnosis was a death sentence. Strapping young men who had never fallen in love wasted away knowing they would never experience happiness with another. Many were discarded by supposed friends who didn’ t know they were gay, and disowned by families who often swooped in after death, packed up the dead man’s valuables and displaced the unprotected loved one.” —Karen Ocamb, AIDS News Archive