Secrets of the HIV Controllers; July 2012; Scientific American Magazine; by Bruce D. Walker; 8 Page(s)

One day in early 1995 a man named bob massie walked into my office at the outpatient clinic of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Massie told me he had been infected with HIVthe virus that causes AIDSfor 16 years and yet had never shown any symptoms. My physical examination confirmed he was healthy, in stark contrast to all other patients I saw that day. At that time, a new combination of drugs was being tested that would eventually slow the progressive decline in immune function that HIV caused. In 1995, however, most people who had been infected with HIV for a decade or more had already progressed to AIDSthe stage marked by the inability to fight off other pathogens. The young man standing before me had never taken anti-HIV medication and strongly believed that if I learned the secret to his good fortune, the information could help others to survive what was then generally thought to be a uniformly fatal disease.

Massie was born with hemophilia, a blood-clotting disorder. In those days, nearly all hemophiliacs were HIV-positive because they were infused repeatedly with blood products agglomerated from thousands of donorsnone of whom were screened for HIV until the mid- to late 1980s. (Today hemophiliacs receive artificial clotting factors, which pose no risk of HIV contamination.) Some of Massie's blood samples that had been stored for a study revealed that he had contracted HIV in 1978. Yet every test I conducted on him or his stored samples showed that the amount of virus in his blood was vanishingly small and that his immune responses seemed as strong as ever.