Erratum
When Robert Gallo announced he had isolated and grown the AIDS virus, he didn't mention those who established the key cell line. A 1988 NIH inquiry quietly resolved the credit issue. But the NIH director has decided to revisit the matter and look into the distribution of income from the AIDS blood test. Here, in the voices of the participants, is what happened
Ellis Rubinstein
In the chronology that accompanied the news report on the origin of the cell line in which Robert Gallo's laboratory first grew the AIDS virus (Ellis Rubinstein, "The untold story of HUT78," 22 June, p. 1499), Doris Morgan and Frank Ruscetti are incorrectly credited with the characterization of interleukin-2. In fact, they were the first researchers to show that you could grow T cells long term. But it was Dartmouth researcher Kendall Smith and his team who subsequently figured out what the active ingredient was in the conditioned medium—an ingredient that, in a 1978 paper U. Immunol. 120, 2027 (1978)], they called T cell growth factor. The molecule that acts as a T cell growth factor was named interleukin-2 by a consensus of attendees at a lymphokine meeting held in Switzerland in 1979.
