The fact that I was fortunate enough to escape contagion, in spite of frequent, sometimes daily contacts with the disease, was because I soon guessed how it spread.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When the AIDS epidemic broke, because I happened to be a science nerd and knew a lot about viruses and a lot about that virus at the time, I felt a moral obligation to go out and try to stem the fear and get out and explain to people what the disease was and how it worked.
Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.
Even if it had not been possible to reproduce the disease in animals and consequently to verify the hypothesis, this simple observation would have been sufficient to demonstrate the way in which the disease was propagated.
I hadn't stopped fearing the chance of passing on an illness, but that fear had become balanced by the observation that being ill wasn't the same as being beaten.
My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today.
Rumors of sneezing, kissing, tears, sweat, and saliva spreading AIDS caused people to panic.
I really believed that fear is contagious.
My father invented a cure for which there was no disease and unfortunately my mother caught it and died of it.
Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread.
When I was diagnosed I didn't know how epidemic cancer was. You find out that everybody you know is touched by this disease.