A plague on all our houses: medical intrigue, Hollywood, and the discovery of AIDS

2016-10-05

University of Virginia. School of Medicine

Thirty-five years after the discovery of AIDS, the story of this disease and the momentous scientific, medical, political, and social changes it occasioned is rich and complicated, even sensational. In 1981, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, a young UCLA immunologist, saw--and published a New England Journal of Medicine article about--a cluster of five cases of immune dysfunction and unusual opportunistic infections in gay men. Not long after, as personal physician to Hollywood actor and AIDS patient Rock Hudson, Dr. Gottlieb became the medical face of this terrifying epidemic.

In this Medical Grand Rounds/Medical Center Hour, Dr. Bruce Hillman, a medical school classmate of Michael Gottlieb, probes the war of egos, money, academic power, and Hollywood clout that advanced AIDS research in its first decade even as it compromised the medical scientist who discovered the disease. Dr. Hillman draws on interviews with Dr. Gottlieb and others to chronicle one of the most important and contentious medical discoveries of our time.

Medical Grand Rounds/History of the Health Sciences Lecture
Co-presented with the Department of Medicine and the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series of Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

Hillman, Bruce J. (Speaker); Childress, Marcia Day (Moderator); University of Virginia. School of Medicine

Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

Filmed lectures

AIDS (Disease)--History; Gottlieb, Michael S.; Medicine--History

Medical Center Hour

Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

English

The speakers in this presentation have given the University of Virginia permission to make it freely accessible online for all audiences to view. To request permission to reproduce, republish, and/or repost this presentation please contact the Historical Collections and Services Department of the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library at the University of Virginia.

1 online resource (1 video file, 49:55 min.) : sound, color