The Truth About HIV: Dr. Jay A. Levy on the Controversy That Changed Medicine

Jock Putney: HIV and AIDS. That's where I'm headed. Here you are. You're a virologist. You're in San Francisco at UCSF. What happens?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: So, the first thing was that the government said, "This is not to be worked on." Reagan never said the word AIDS for his first term in office. And there was no support from the government, no real grants. They thought this was a gay disease caused by activities of gays and also intravenous drug use. The reason that my destiny, as I say, was somewhat different is that I took advantage of experiences.

Meet Dr. Jay A. Levy + The Weizmann Institute & Why Basic Science Matters

Jock Putney: Wow. Welcome to the Pathway to Peak Performance. It's so great to see you, my friend. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Thank you.

Jock Putney: We talked and your charity is going to be the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Fantastic. Tell me a little bit about them.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Well, it's aimed at basic science, which is unusual for charities. Usually, in scientific ways, it's a field that may be clinical where you're taking care of patients. This is getting at basic research. It would be how the DNA works, how the RNA works. And it takes up the most recent information. Today we had a discussion about AI and how it's influenced basic research, and we heard of some very interesting science from the Weizmann scientists in which they can take information.

This is tough, but just as a concept: you finish an experiment and you throw the cells away that you're using. They found that they could cut the cells and the leftover information into pieces and then take each one and look at them separately and get a whole different picture.

Jock Putney: Oh, fascinating.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: It is. And the woman who did it has a learning problem. She had a difficulty in her schooling so that she didn't pass her high school, and they didn't want her to go on to any extra education. So you had that on top of it. And here she was named one of the 30 leading scientists in the world. Not everyone's pathway to peak performance begins in the box in which people say you should exist.

Jock Putney: I'd say it's rare if they begin—but you like when they have begun in a totally different one.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Yeah, that's so true.

Jock Putney: Well, you sir have quite a story, and I think it's always instructive to go back and get a sense of your origin story so we can get a sense of what drove you to this incredible work that you've done over your career. So, take us back—take us all the way back to your childhood—and we'll go through the whole story.

Twin Life, Science Mischief, and Learning to Explain Complex Ideas

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Well, I think it's unusual in that I was born as a twin. My brother was the firstborn. So in Charlie Chan—I don't know if you know the TV program—I was the number two son. Stuart was the number one son. The number one son in the old tradition gets all of the awards and riches from the family, and the number two son follows through. So I was fortunate because my brother had to be the model child and I could do anything I cared. I was a lot more free, and I think I led my brother into some of the crazy things we did, and that made it a much more exciting life.

Jock Putney: Being a twin is a really unique experience in that there are two of you, even though you could be so dramatically different from one another. Were you identical twins?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Yes.

Jock Putney: And how similar were you in the sense of the way that you thought? I mean, could you understand what he was thinking and communicate that way?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Yes. It's the same old story. You were with him in birth; you came from the womb. They call them "womb-mates." He would know what I was going to say. In fact, we had fun growing up in science because when we went to a national meeting—a cancer meeting—by chance, this was exactly around Mother's Day in May, and we were both selected to give talks. They put them back-to-back. So we decided, "Let's have some fun. We'll switch our talks." So he gave my talk and I gave his talk.

These are complicated stories. He was working with animals in which he took them apart; I worked with animal cells. The thing that became very clear to us by doing that was that we had many more people who understood the science because we had broken it down to very, very fundamental lessons.

Jock Putney: So rather than explaining things at the highest level of the science, you brought it down to a level where people could truly understand it in a way that maybe they couldn't have otherwise.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: That's right. And the fun that we had with it is, you can imagine, then we get questions. When we had the questions, we had a set answer. First of all, you said, "That's a very good question." That automatically gave you time to think what the answer would be. I would put up one finger or two fingers, and that said to Stuart, "Give number one answer" or "Give number two answer." He did the same thing with me.

It got to a point where one of the most famous scientists in the United States was the chair of the meeting. He was on the stage, and Stuart and I walked onto the stage. He took one question, I took another question, and then it got to a point where I said, "That question is a very good question and it can be answered by the person who gave the second lecture." Then Stuart would say, "That question is a very good question; it should be answered by the first speaker."

Well, Henry Kaplan, who was the leading person there, got so confused. Every story, we had these huge bow ties. No one looked at us; they looked at the bow ties. Go ahead several months and Henry Kaplan was a guest at UCSF, the university, and he said to me, "You know, Jay, I don't understand. When you and your brother were doing that, there was a lot of laughter. Why were they laughing?" It just showed you immediately how strict and very straight-laced scientists can be. They didn't pick up on the humor at all, and certainly didn't pick up that they were twins changing places.

Jock Putney: So now, where did you grow up? Childhood, where were you?

Growing Up in Delaware: Segregation, Family, and a Changing America

Dr. Jay A. Levy: We were in the suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware. So if you know the United States, it's below the Mason-Dixon line. We were a southern state. We had segregation without an announcement of it. We were in a Pierre Du Pont area because the Du Pont family lived in Delaware. In fact, that's the reason why we had no sales tax. We really were included in the southern states and had the kind of education you expect—perfect—but we didn't see any Black influence. The Black neighborhood was in the southern part of Wilmington. Segregation was in full swing.

It was totally different. My uncle was the Attorney General of the state of Delaware, and he argued in front of the Supreme Court for "separate but equal." If you remember that experience, the schools would be separate but provide an equal education. Well, that was very naive, but they didn't care. When that finally was overturned, my uncle fought in front of the Supreme Court; he changed and took his position as the Attorney General to argue for the end of segregation.

Jock Putney: So he was an advocate for integration, right? And that was the Supreme Court decision and a major turning point in the United States. Lots of things to talk about there, but we have so many things to talk about regarding you that we need to move towards that. At what point in time do you decide that you would like to be a doctor?

Doctor or Diplomat? The Advice That Shaped His Path

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Okay, another story. My father was a doctor, and so I went to Wesleyan as Stuart went to Williams. I was very interested in lots of different subjects. I was a major in biology, but I also liked French—I minored in French. In junior year, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be a doctor or a diplomat. I liked to travel. At that age, I didn't do a lot, but I liked to travel.

So I went and saw Sigmund Neumann, who was head of the Ford Foundation and was a teacher at Wesleyan. I was auditing his class. The class was three or four hundred people. I had the nerve to go to him and I said, "Professor Neumann, I can't make a decision between being a doctor or being a diplomat where I could see the world." And he said, "Can I ask you a question?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Do you like medicine?" I said, "Yes, very much." He said, "Become a doctor. But stay interested in French and stay interested in music and all the other areas. Keep the science as an important part, but French and literature and liberal arts as a hobby. Keeping international things in your mind, one day you may find that you're really in that field."

Well, it proved true by the time I was going to be in AIDS and international health.

Jock Putney: Yeah, it was almost clairvoyant, right? The notion of it feels almost meant to be.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: That by the way is an expression that my life has very much been determined by—something that I just know I picked the right path for.

Jock Putney: So you go to medical school. Where did that take place?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Columbia, New York.

Jock Putney: And what was it like?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Well, I had had a fellowship to go to Paris when I graduated from Wesleyan. So when I came back, I started medical school. Essentially what I want to say is that I was not as focused on grades as I was on content. I went to medical school after I came back from Paris and I learned what I wanted to learn. I not only believed in the idea that there's a destiny that you don't control but may happen with your life—I found the Yiddish expression bashert.

There was something else that I read. There was a psychiatrist in London who had this concept that energy expanded in one direction will come back. It's the conservation of energy. Now we have lots of rules of conservation of energy in science, but that was different. I took it to mean that if I exerted the energy to write enough letters of what to do in the summer, it would all come back with something. And it worked. It got me to Sweden. It got me to England. And the most important is it got me to Africa. These experiences that you had—we'll start with Paris.

Paris on a Fulbright: Freedom, Language, and First Research Adventures

Jock Putney: Being in France at that particular point in time, 1960—that's an interesting time to be in France post-World War II. You're not that far off from the tension of the Cold War. We're not that far away from 1962, and the buildup is happening. There's tension in Europe, but you're in this amazing place where there's got to be a feeling of freedom and great expression. What was your experience like in Paris at that time?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: A mixture. I got there and they thought I was Italian. I did not want to be in the American house (Cité Universitaire), so they put me in the Italian house. I was thrilled. I didn't know Italian, but I did know French. We had to speak French when you wanted to communicate with the students living in the same house. That lasted for a while. Then they caught on. They made it sound like I fooled them, but I didn't do anything; I just waited to be assigned. I think I have a bit of an Italian look, so they sent me to the Italian house.

When they finally called me and said, "You shouldn't be in that house," I went to the Fulbright office and said, "I don't want to be in the American house. I came here to learn French." They said, "What do you want?" I said, "Well, I'd like to have some money. I'd like to get an apartment in Paris." They said fine. So I would wake up in the morning and walk out into the Place de la Contrescarpe, and I was like a French writer. That's how I made it. I met a playwright, Georges Schehadé, who was Lebanese and wrote in French, and I decided I'm going to translate his plays.

All along, I'm doing research in a small laboratory in Paris as well. I was studying planaria—flatworms. What you do with these worms is you take them and you cut them. If you cut them at the top, they regenerate a head. I always thought that was very dramatic. Thinking outside the box was necessary because it was very boring; all you did was cut them and put them in a bowl with different metals.

So, I made a huge wax tray. The professor said, "Jay, you have the week off to go find planaria in the brooks outside the suburbs of Paris." I got in the car, found the first brook, turned over some rocks—tons of planaria. I grabbed them all, went back to my room, and decided to have some fun. I anesthetized the planaria by putting them in ice water, lined them all up on this wax plate, and cut them in pieces. When the professor said, "So, Monsieur, how's it doing?" I said, "Very good. I just did a hundred experiments." He said, "You did?" I said, "Yes. I cut the heads off some of these, I cut the tails off some." I just told him I did a hundred experiments. He announced it at the lab meeting: "We have a visitor from the United States and he did a hundred experiments last week. How many have you done?" I was so embarrassed. It was not very clever of me. It took a while before they warmed up to me, but then they realized it was a fun thing to say.

Samuel Beckett & ‘Waiting for Godot’: A Friendship That Opened Doors

Jock Putney: That's great. I have to introduce one other person who had an enormous influence...

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Oh, let's hear about it. His name is Samuel Beckett. When I was at Wesleyan, I had a date coming in for the spring parties. Karen and I went to the airport. I don't know if you know Beckett, but he wrote a play called Waiting for Godot. At the airport, I'm waiting for Karen and the plane is not coming in. There was a student there and he said, "Jay, this is like Waiting for Godot." I said, "What's that?" He said, "Oh, that's a French play by a writer, Samuel Beckett."

I decided I'm going to look up Samuel Beckett. I realized that this was a very, very powerful play. I did a thesis on Waiting for Godot—and I'm embarrassed to say I pronounced it "Waiting for God-it." My French professor thought it was a very good paper. When I was going to Paris, he said, "Jay, I want you to give this paper to Mr. Mayoux, who is head of English studies at the Sorbonne. I want you to have him read it because he may want to talk to you about Beckett."

I went to Paris, contacted Mayoux, and went to his apartment. He said, "Well, what do you want to say?" I waited and nothing happened. Suddenly, I got a phone call and he said, "Can you come back for a drink next Tuesday?" He had a spread of hors d'oeuvres and everything. He said, "I like this very much and I've talked to Beckett and he would like to meet you." He gave me my critique back and said, "Why don't you put it in his mailbox?"

Beckett lived on Boulevard Saint-Jacques. As I'm putting it into the mail, the door opens. There is Samuel Beckett. I was blown away and I started to speak to him in French. He said, "Why are we speaking in our non-native language? Let's go to English." We went upstairs. He said, "You know, when I was your age, I was a scribe for a writer." I said fine. Then I said to myself, "I think Beckett is offering me a job." But I decided I had to go to medical school, so I didn't do that. We became very good friends. As a result of that experience in Paris, I had 30 years of interactions with Samuel Beckett.

Jock Putney: Wow.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Not only me, but my twin brother and my parents. There's a famous story where my twin brother took a year off and was in Paris. I told Sam that Stuart was coming. He meets him. Everything you see about Beckett being a hermit who didn't talk to people—it all crashed down, at least in terms of what I experienced. Jacques is telling me the world is an unbelievable place, and I had an avenue that was completely opened up to me.

Jock Putney: What an incredible experience.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: And it continues. Like I said today, I got an email from his biographer. I wrote an article called "Conversations with Samuel Beckett" and it got published in The American Scholar. When they accepted the paper, they sent a check for $400. I thought, "I usually pay journals to publish my articles! Is this correct?" Having that published, letters came in to me. It opened doors. I had a whole group of writers in Israel that knew the play. All you need to do is see a play of Beckett and write a note saying, "I'm a student, I saw Samuel Beckett in Paris, and I'd like to see his play." They say "come in" gratis. I had friends in many different parts of the world that Samuel Beckett introduced me to.

Jock Putney: What a phenomenal—I mean truly—you can't write this up. It just happened.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: That's what I was going to say. What are the odds? Well, I'm telling you, that's what's been shared. Karen is responsible for the whole thing. If she had made that plane, I don't think I would have written on Waiting for Godot.

Jock Putney: Timing is everything. It's almost as if he was offering you a job to be a scribe—he had high hopes for this relationship—and yet you go back to medical school and you're able to preserve that relationship. The chemistry between the two of you was undeniable.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Yeah. And I thought one of the reasons he opened up was I wasn't coming to take advantage of him. I was there for real academic reasons, and that just tied us together. Jock, I have to pinch myself to think how many gates were opened. Alan Schneider from New York—every time Beckett went to New York, he said, "If the Levies come by, they can see my film." I saw their film; it was only seen by people that knew Beckett. All at the same time, I give myself credit—I could have thought, "Karen's plane is coming in, I'm waiting forever." It sure made a dent in my pathways.

Back to Medicine: Discovering Viruses, Cancer, and a Research Calling

Jock Putney: Let's go back to medical school and start talking about that endeavor. You have a father who is a doctor. Let's start there and take us all the way through.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Importantly, no one gave me advice except Professor Neumann. My father couldn't give me advice. Neumann said, "Go to medical school, get your degree, and keep international affairs as a hobby." I've had luck in having people along the way who feel they have something to offer.

I'm now in medical school and I was leafing through a cancer journal. I read of an idea by a French professor, Latarjet was his name—ironically my brother ended up working for him in Paris—who wrote that the cause of cancer was a virus that got into a cell and, by secreting certain substances, transforms the cell into a cancer cell. Now, this is in 1958. Very new idea. Very progressive. I decided I wanted to see if that's true. I'd never done medical research.

At Wesleyan, I couldn't get the professor into biology; I had to get the professor who was into physiology, and that was a disaster. I don't think I gained much except to prove that I was going to stay in research. I ended up looking at the ability of fungi to breathe. I had these fancy glass vessels measuring the amount of nitrogen. I was warned, "Don't break these because they are so difficult to calibrate." Well, that's what happened. I turned 21 and my sister had a party for us. I was rushing to make the party, broke the vessel, and the professor was so angry that he lowered my grade just enough that I didn't get what I wanted. I said I wasn't going to do physiology if I wanted to do biology.

When I went to medical school, I found Professor Roseman, who was studying viruses that go into cells and transform them. I did that my sophomore year through to graduation and had some very nice observations.

Jock Putney: Really fascinating to think that notion of viruses that enter the cell and change the cell—there it is again, prepping you for the work you're going to do in the future.

Africa & Burkitt’s Lymphoma: Mosquito Hunts, Uganda, and EBV Breakthroughs

Dr. Jay A. Levy: I read about a cancer that was present in Africa where lymph nodes grew larger. It was thought to be caused by a virus. Why? Because it appeared in what we called the lymphoma belt in Africa, where there was a certain amount of rainfall and climate. It suggested a mosquito. So I wanted to work in Africa on Burkitt’s lymphoma. Dr. Burkitt did take me and I helped him in operations.

The real marvelous thing from this was there was an institute for virus research in Entebbe, Uganda. I worked for Tom Bell there. In the summer of medical school, I got a fellowship to go to Africa. I sent out all these letters because I believe that energy is conserved. I didn't get anything back except one letter from Louisiana State University. They said, "Would you be interested in going to Latin America and studying cancer?" I wrote back and said, "I'd like to do it in Africa." They said, "We've never had anyone go to Africa. We'll send you."

I learned everything I knew in terms of working with viruses from Uganda. I had to collect mosquitoes. My professor said, "Jay, do you mind climbing a tree and exposing your legs?" There are mosquitoes that like the smell of legs. We could then capture them and check them for viruses. I climbed the tree, exposed my legs, and worked with a student. You had to have a live mosquito. I just couldn't stand the bite of a mosquito—I'd slap it. That's a dead mosquito. I had to have alive ones.

We never found a virus there, but I did a lot of work and learned all my basic virology. In the midst of that, I got involved in Burkitt’s lymphoma. Those cells were available because they were being worked on in England. I started working with them, and I was part of the group that determined that Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) was associated with Burkitt’s.

Jock Putney: So interesting. And that whole EBV and lymphoma... I have a friend who actually had lymphoma and survived. It was a rough go.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: He's very lucky. It is one of the cancers that you now can treat very well, and it's partly because of Burkitt’s. Burkitt’s was very sensitive to one injection of a chemotherapeutic drug.

Jock Putney: You arrive in Uganda and what's that like? The feel?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: I felt, "This is what I wrote about. This is what I've been wanting to do." I had an opening in Entebbe to learn how to grow cells. When I got to Columbia, Au Tanabi was the technician. She was a classic cell culture technician and I learned everything from her. This was my fourth year in medical school. They gave me extra time because they were pleased with my background.

The professor of pediatrics came by on my return from Africa, and I said to him, "I'm concerned. Where are we going to house the monkeys?" He said, "What?" I said, "I need the kidney cells from the monkeys to grow viruses." He started to laugh. I was so embarrassed. "We buy them!" I didn't realize there was a whole commercial enterprise providing monkey kidney cells. I continued the work with Burkitt’s lymphoma and finished at Columbia.

Residency Meets the Lab: Wistar Institute, Human Viruses, and Destiny Toward AIDS

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Then I went to Philadelphia to do my internship and residency. There was a big break because the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia is a fabulous basic science institute. There was a professor called Koprowski who was a big polio guy. They said, "We can give you space if you want to work here." I had a clinical program, but I had it down to a second. Wistar Institute was across the street from Penn Medical Center. When I was on duty, I timed myself. I could run down the steps, cross the street, and get to my lab in less than a few minutes. The nurses would call me in the lab. They started calling me the "Wistar Fellow."

My sister Ellen was also in research. My brother, my sister, and myself were all in it. She was working in the children's hospital. I was studying Burkitt’s lymphoma and I went there. They started telling me there was a couple that had come to talk about children's viral diseases. They wanted to know how to get cells from Burkitt’s lymphoma patients. The head of the lab said, "Well, it's interesting, we just have Jay Levy who just came here from Africa."

This was done by the Henles—Gertrude and Werner Henle. They were my sister's professors. Again, an attempt to explain destiny. HIV and AIDS is my big... I mean, that's where I'm headed. I didn't know that then. I knew I liked viruses and that they are fascinating biologic creatures. I wanted to work in human viruses. The human viruses brought me to Burkitt’s, then to EBV, and I stayed active.

At the same time, I want you to appreciate that I've got my interest continuing in the arts and in Samuel Beckett. I would go from New York to Philadelphia, or he would say, "Can you meet me here?" I wasn't just only in science.

Jock Putney: You're living a full life. You felt comfortable enough to actually take advantage of these experiences. It was something that was natural to you, and you just went with it.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: I'm getting emotional now because I was very much appreciative of the education I was getting. I was convinced this was really fun. Okay, so that's what kept me on the road.

From Medicine to Virology (and a Detour Through Theater)

Dr. Jay A. Levy: I'm now a virologist. I worked in Burkitt’s lymphoma. I finished Columbia and got accepted at Penn to be an intern and resident. My twin brother left Penn and went to New York. He had my patients in New York and I had the other. Is that funny? We exchanged patients and changed places in a minor way.

I was pretty sure I was a virologist. All right, so that meant Neumann's story was "keep the other as a hobby." In New York, the theater was there. I met Edward Albee. I wrote him, told him Beckett—the door was open. I told him he was in the Theater of the Absurd. Meanwhile, I had met Beckett, and he didn't think much of Albee. "He's okay." That was the end of it.

But I took the whole class to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I thought Albee was old. When he finally arrived, he must have been 28, and he gave us a big talk about acting. My medical school class often said that was a highlight because we weren't in medicine, we were in theater. I think the arts and medicine are very interactive. I play the piano, and many medical people have an artistic flavor. Anyway, back to Penn. I found that Reovirus was not the cause of Burkitt’s, and that's the end of that. Then I go to NIH because I didn't have to go to Vietnam.

NIH & the Vietnam Draft: The Foot Exam That Changed Everything

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Stewart applied and I applied. There's a strange flip. When I went for the physical, I said I have a stunted left foot because I had osteomyelitis when I was a year old. I had a problem walking and had a brace. One toe was smaller in size. When I was examined by the physician for the Army—my big mouth—he doesn't remove my socks. He says, "You're fine." I said, "Well, you didn't look at my toes." He takes the socks off, and there's my little toe. They reject me from the Public Health Service. If we list the blows I got, that was the worst.

Three days later, I was set to get a marching order to go for a physical for the Army. I went to NIH. The head of medicine in Philadelphia was Jim Wyngaarden. I was petrified. He said, "Jay, we're going to work on that." It ends up Luther Terry, who outlawed cigarette smoking, was a Surgeon General. He had just become vice president of Penn. Even though I signed a document saying I would never join the Public Health Service because of my foot, they got after Luther Terry. He opened the doors, everyone from Penn wrote letters, and they got me in the Public Health Service.

Joining Bob Huebner’s Lab: Breakthroughs, Backlash, and the ‘Annihilation Speech’

Dr. Jay A. Levy: I then get a letter from Bob Huebner, who is one of the top virologists in the world. I wanted to work with him. Huebner was a very colorful character, and there I was helped by his wife. She took a liking to me; it was like a family. She advised me, and I wanted to work in cancer viruses. Stewart goes down there at the same time. We run together—fantastic experience. He goes into a lab with Loretta Leive, and that was biochemistry.

I became a virologist. I wanted to know why a virus causes disease. He was in chemistry; he wanted to know what the proteins of the virus were. So I worked with Huebner. Two events happened to challenge me. One was that they were trying to grow cells and have a lot of proteins made for a test for lymphomas. This is still viruses and cancer. They couldn't grow the cells.

In New York, I had worked with hydroxyurea, which was a drug that blocked the replication of cells but allowed them to continue to make proteins. I said, "How about trying hydroxyurea?" It was fabulous. Thousands of cells were being produced. Well, some in Huebner's lab were so angry that I had solved a problem that they hadn't. They were so angry that a fellow tried to change the results and poisoned my animals. I was accused of doing crazy things and told I had to meet with Huebner.

Huebner said, "You don't know what you're doing. I don't know why I took you. You're the worst person to come in my lab." I started to cry. He said, "You think you're such a nobody because you solved this problem? What the hell does that mean?" I learned later someone said, "Where'd you get the 'annihilation speech'?" That's what it was.

He then invited me that weekend to his ranch and we became very close friends. He opened doors that were unbelievable. It takes you back, right? Huebner had a lab at the institute in which Wally Rowe and Janet Hartley were his two major people. They took me under their wing. I had a different bent for virology, but it was all very helpful. Hartley taught me how to write experimental designs. Rowe liked to challenge you.

The NZB Mouse Virus Mystery: Proving an Active Virus and Getting on the Map

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Rowe calls me into his office and has a cage with a black mouse. "This mouse gets lymphoma and autoimmune disease. They see particles in the lymph node that look like viruses. We can't grow it. That's your job."

I take it back to my lab. I had been working with showing that you could get a virus in one cell and, if you put cells together, the virus could cross into another line—phenotypic mixing. I showed that the NZB virus was active, but it could not grow in the cells we were using—it couldn't grow in mouse cells. Just by chance, I was showing that when I rescued the transforming gene, I could put that fluid on rat cells and they would transform. When I did it with NZB on rat cells, it worked.

This meant there was an active virus there, and if we took it to a different cell, like a giraffe cell, you could get it to grow. Rowe wanted someone else to do it because it was so unexpected. Ted Pincus showed it as well. We had a paper in Science that showed active replication. That really put me on the map.

Naming Xeno- vs Eco-tropic Viruses: Greek Roots and a New Framework

Dr. Jay A. Levy: I like to say when I teach: If I didn't have an appreciation for the arts and languages, I wouldn't have been able to show that the NZB virus would not go into NZB cells but could go into giraffe and human cells. I called the viruses... I went to Greek. I love Greek. I name all my viruses with Greek names.

Xenotropic: Tropic is attracted to, Xenos is foreign. Ecotropic: Eco is staying within.

All the viruses we'd been studying were mouse-to-mouse—those are ecotropic. The xenotropic virus became known as that. Huebner was so pleased. I then began looking for the human xenotropic virus and got a grant to do that. I came out to California because a friend, John Mills, said, "Why don't you leave the East Coast and see what medicine is like on the West Coast?"

Cross-Country to UCSF: Enter AIDS and the Politics of ‘Don’t Study It’

Jock Putney: So here you are. You're a virologist at UCSF. What happens?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: The first thing that happened was the government said this is not to be worked on. Reagan never said the word "AIDS" for his first term. There were no real grants. They thought this was a "gay disease." It was very tough for me, but I wasn't turned off. I wanted to find the cause.

Everyone working in AIDS who was courageous enough—those who would not be afraid to have a patient come in and bleed them—bound together. We met every Thursday and had a discussion about what's going on. We ironed things out so you didn't have competition; you had cooperation. That was very different from New York or Los Angeles. There was such infighting there to find the cause. I played a pretty active role in bringing people together.

First Patients, No Funding: Building an HIV Lab from Scratch

Dr. Jay A. Levy: When AIDS hit, I got a phone call from Paul Volberding. Paul had come to UCSF to work with me. AIDS hit and Paul called me and said, "I have a patient in the office now. He has this very strange disease in gay people, but others as well. It leads to cancer." That was Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Dan Turner was the patient—he was a very active activist. He got me involved in the community. It became a binding together because we had a common enemy.

I had people who wouldn't come visit me in my lab because they didn't dare get near. Too afraid. A company we were going to work with didn't want to work on it—if they did, they had to have a sign up, you had to take a shower. It was crazy. By 1984, people were just scared to death.

Paul was very worried because he and Molly had children and they didn't want the children to get infected. They didn't know what to do. I checked him for antibodies to see if he was infected; he wasn't. Nothing. Everyone thought we were prepared for COVID because we had worked with HIV, but it was handled in a totally different way.

Paul calls me and Dan Turner comes over. I draw his blood and we put it in culture. I had no money. I didn't have an ultracentrifuge, which I needed to spin down the material. I didn't have a biosafety hood—no one would give me that. A biosafety hood was about $1,500. I went to see the Chancellor and he said, "We don't have the money."

Mark Conant was the hero here because he went to the state legislature and got them to put a line item in the budget: "$1,500 biosafety hood for Jay Levy." I was called to the Dean's office and accused of going above his head to get money. It was highly political. People didn't want to touch this.

Jock Putney: Do you feel that people were afraid that if you investigated that, it could hurt future funding?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: No one at the NIH level said "you shouldn't work on this"; they just didn't give money for it. The one who helped me most was Willie Brown. He went to the state legislature and got me a hood. He got me $50,000 so I could buy a damn ultracentrifuge. If I had had that when I wanted it in 1981, I would have had the virus much sooner.

Fear, Stigma, and Safety: Working While Everyone Panics

Dr. Jay A. Levy: We were looking for a virus. I went to a meeting with Sabin in which I thought it was due to a DNA virus. If I'd had a centrifuge, I would have spun down the fluid and seen the damn viruses. But all this was blocked because no one wanted to work in this field.

Jock Putney: What was propelling you?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: As a virologist, I was going to find this. I didn't worry about it being dangerous because I had worked with viruses before. I felt if we followed the directions—double gloves, careful blood draws—we would be okay.

Let's go back to the origins of the virus. No one has the definitive answer. They use what we call the "molecular clock"—going back to blood from chimpanzees. They believe it came from a chimpanzee virus called SIV-cpz. I thought it was too comfortable for them.

By the late '70s and early '80s, people are dying. Huge quilts. Everyone's terrified. But you stay on path.

Jock Putney: What do you think the impact was when Magic Johnson said to the world that he has HIV?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: It first went into the wives. I remember Pat Fouchy saying, "It's not been widespread in non-gay populations." Then some wives got it. Then they found it in sweat, in urine. You almost didn't want to go to a urinal because you might be... all the things that would make you fearful were being used.

My classmate from medical school would come home, take his clothes off in the garage, take a shower, and then go in the house. He was protecting his wife. The company working with us made a petition to remove the HIV sign from the building. It just was a "stay away from it" atmosphere. Now, I get a lot of praise because I stuck with it, but I didn't have any other direction.

The Emotional Toll—and the Lesson: Education Beats Fear

Dr. Jay A. Levy: I had almost no one to turn to for support. I was like a pariah. Why would they deal with me? I was working with it; I could have it and give it to people. Famous scientists would come to the door and say, "No, I stay here." I didn't blame them because they weren't virologists.

But I hope the lesson from HIV is that you don't shy away from that. You support people. You go and you face that enemy. I talk about the microbes and the macrobes fighting each other. You stay in the good fight. You discover HIV until someone else does.

From Discovery to Treatment: How HIV Became Manageable

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Now we have drugs that essentially make HIV undetectable in the bloodstream—a normal lifetime. That is the most exciting.

Jock Putney: You are credited with an incredible discovery. As you look back on that today, what are your thoughts?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: My biggest thought is if I had gotten $1,500 to buy the damn filter, I could have started looking 15 years before. There was a lost opportunity and a lot of people died. There's no heroism here except to say you have someone who had enough courage—or you just wanted to find this damn virus that was killing off so many people. You knew it was a virus. You had the tenacity.

Jock Putney: From a transmissibility standpoint, what was the evidence telling you?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Best evidence of all came from the epidemiologists. They showed it can be by blood or by genital fluids. That's it. We were already doing the tests. We were not allowed to advertise, but all the kidney transplant patients came to us to see if they were getting an infected kidney. The science of figuring things out isn't as difficult as some might think. You can do it if you act quickly and have the right knowledge.

Closing Reflections: Microbes, Humans, and the ‘Real Virus’ Question

Jock Putney: I always like to ask guests: If you're a young person today thinking about a career in medicine, what would you say to them?

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Be educated. Then you won't be frightened. Be educated, be persuasive, and believe in yourself.

Jock Putney: Dr. Levy, thank you so much for spending this time with us. It's been an honor, and I appreciate your time so greatly. Thank you for all that you've done for the world. You're an incredible person.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: Well, thank you very much. I have to say, I didn't expect to have such a persistent appreciation for the challenges we have when we take on disease. I like the analysis of us being "macro-parasites" on the earth fighting "micro-parasites." Unless we do things like you're doing now here, the microbes will win.

Jock Putney: Last thoughts—I've often thought to myself, who's the real virus? Maybe it's us.

Dr. Jay A. Levy: We all are parasites on this earth. If you know the Gaia hypothesis, you can do everything you want to the earth, but it will survive.

Jock Putney: So true. Thank you for coming in. Hey, thanks everyone for watching the show. Please remember to like, comment, and subscribe. Share the video with someone who might be interested in supporting the charity our guest mentioned. We'll see you soon.