One could not have isolated this retrovirus without knowledge of other retroviruses, that's obvious. But I believe we have answered the criteria of isolation.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
If you really want to isolate a disease, then you have to isolate the people who carry it.
Since most of the transmission is sexual transmission, you have a regional or local response to the virus.
Of course, screening for HIV did essentially eliminate the transmission of this virus by transfusions.
In San Francisco, I found Warren Levinson, who had set up a program to study Rous Sarcoma Virus, an archetype for what we now call retroviruses. At the time, the replication of retroviruses was one of the great puzzles of animal virology. Levinson, Levintow and I joined forces in the hope of solving that puzzle.
People may have said that without symptoms, you can't transmit Ebola. I'm not sure about that being 100 percent true. There's a lot of variation with viruses.
It turns out that viruses evolve from each other, like everything else. So if you look at the evolutionary tree of viruses, you can find parts of their genome that haven't changed over evolutionary time. You can recognize what may be a new virus by identifying this little piece of their genome that hasn't changed and is represented on the chip.
Isolation is a dream killer.
Isolation doesn't bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.
A virus is not just DNA; a virus is also packaged up, covered over with a series of proteins in a nice, elegant, well-compacted form.
The risk from viruses is an unanswered question - and it won't be answered until you have had organs transplanted into humans over many years.