Ex­clu­sive: Af­ter four decades, one re­searcher's rad­i­cal HIV cure fi­nal­ly gets its shot

In the down­time be­tween ex­per­i­ments, Kamel Khalili and his men­tor trad­ed their wildest ideas for cur­ing HIV. It was the mid 1980s and Khalili was a post­doc at George Khoury’s Na­tion­al Can­cer In­sti­tute lab, where he stud­ied links be­tween virus­es and tu­mors, then one of the hottest fields in can­cer re­search. But the epi­dem­ic was rag­ing through New York and San Fran­cis­co, mount­ing the largest pub­lic health threat in decades. A cou­ple build­ings over, Robert Gal­lo was se­quenc­ing the virus for the first time. It felt im­pos­si­ble to stay away.

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