Robert Charles Gallo (; born March 23, 1937) is an American biomedical researcher. He is best known for his role in establishing the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the infectious agent responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and in the development of the HIV blood test, and he has been a major contributor to subsequent HIV research. Gallo is the director and co-founder of the Institute of Human Virology (IHV) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, established in 1996 in a partnership including the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore. In November 2011, Gallo was named the first Homer & Martha Gudelsky Distinguished Professor in Medicine. Gallo is also a co-founder of biotechnology company Profectus BioSciences, Inc. and co-founder and scientific director of the Global Virus Network (GVN). Gallo was the most cited scientist in the world from 1980 to 1990, according to the Institute for Scientific Information, and he was ranked third in the world for scientific impact for the period 1983–2002. He has published over 1,300 papers. Early life and education Gallo was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, to a working-class family of Italian descent. He earned a BS degree in Biology in 1959 from Providence College and received an MD from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1963. After completing his medical residency at the University of Chicago, he became a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, where he worked for 30 years, mainly as head of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology. Career Gallo states that his choice of profession was influenced by the early death of his sister from leukemia, a disease to which he initially dedicated much of his research. Interleukin-2 (IL-2) and the discovery of human retroviruses After listening to a talk by biologist David Baltimore and further stimulation from his virologist colleague, Robert Ting, concerning the work of the late Howard Martin Temin, Gallo became interested in the study of retroviruses, and made their study the primary activity of his lab. In 1976, Doris Morgan, a first year post-doctoral fellow in Gallo's lab, was asked by Gallo to examine culture fluid of activated lymphocytes for the possible production of growth factors. Soon she was successful in growing T lymphocytes. Gallo, Morgan and Frank Ruscetti, another researcher in Gallo's lab, coauthored a paper in Science describing their method. The Gallo group identified this as T-cell