SRS -

Your comment on the orang bit a couple of hits back is of course more accurate than my first offhand (and rather casual) recollections.

The first articles I recall that related to what is now known as HIV were possibly around 1981 - 1984, but could have been a bit earlier. Recollection is that there was a series of two or three articles in Scientific American(?) that brought some public attention to "a mysterious degeneration of immunity in gays."

I did make an unsuccessful attempt at finding those first-I-saw articles some years ago when people were claiming to have identified the airline employee they were blaming for starting it all, since they reported the existence of what obviously was the same thing several years before the purported "first appearance." At that time it was not known whether there was a particular infective agent, or whether it was just a "normal reaction" to higher than usual repeated infections of ordinary kinds. (One article subtitle was something like "can your immune system be worn out by overuse.")

The first articles I recall about the orang genetics were prior to the discovery of the virus, and before a name was given to the infection. On reflection, I'd put them somewhere around 1985 - give or take a few years (+/- maybe 5 years?).

The articles at the time noted a mysterious "inability to infect" orangs, which implies that an infectious agent was fairly well accepted but it probably had not been identified; and while they commented on the "close relationship" between orangs and humans, they also were a few years prior to the major recent developments in genetic sequencing. The "explanation," based on a presumed HIV epidemic among orangs came at least a couple of years later. (That suggestion probably came after the virus had been identifed.) So far as I've noticed there's been little past the "postulation," since research moved on to other test methods and test subjects.


I'm afraid the new Internet record speeds will remain out of reach for most of us, at least for now. Almost certainly they were using the very best fiber optic connections, and selective routing/addressing to pick the fastest relays possible. Both these are a bit out of reach in my neighborhood, and will likely remain so for some time (unless we can find someone who can make a lot of money off of the upgrades).

John