Baltimore’s Dr. Robert Gallo oversees more than the Institute of Human Virology.
As the world’s foremost thinker in the field of AIDS/HIV research, Gallo has organized an annual retreat for 10 years, drawing infectious-disease researchers from around the world to Baltimore to share ideas, information and strategies on fighting some of the world’s nastiest viruses.
“It’s a science meeting with the feel of a family reunion,” Gallo said. “There’s a core of people who always come back, including the Europeans, Israelis and NIH people.” Gallo’s research in those years was carried out in Montgomery County’s National Institutes of Health complex, and he was a well known scientist in the Washington area as well as the world.
The meetings began as Gallo’s lab retreat with scientists, but the word spread. People from all over joined Gallo’s researchers for a chance to share information with the man responsible for identifying the link between HIV and AIDS, discovering the first human retrovirus — the leukemia virus — and developed the first blood test to screen for HIV.
Gallo was the most referenced scientist in the world between 1980 and 1990, according to the institute, and he thinks a vaccine against AIDS could be ready for testing in the next few years. Earlier this month, the London think tank Gold Mercury International awarded him the 2006 Gold Mercury Health & Science Award.
“Gold Mercury recognizes Dr. Gallo’s pioneering influence in the field of virology, including discoveries that have led to both diagnostic and therapeutic advances in cancer and several other viral diseases,” the release from Gold Mercury states.
Gallo recently shared some of his personal background with The Examiner. Raised in an Italian family in Waterbury, Conn., Gallo said his father’s side of the family was reserved, but his mother’s relatives were traditional Italian: “Long dinners, happy, smooching, loving and kissing.”
Gallo, who played basketball and football in his youth — when he wasn’t swimming in Connecticut’s many rivers and lakes, spends most of his time now with his work and his family and playing “a little tennis, even with a replacement knee.”
“I’m more of a Ravens fan than anything,” he said. “I actually went to Nashville to see them play.”
Of his childhood, Gallo said, “I got whacked many times by the nuns … kissed a lot of girls. All the fun was over by the time I was 18.”
He was inspired to go into the medical field by his uncle, a zoologist, and by the doctors who tried to save his younger sister from leukemia when he was 13.
“I met a lot of doctors in the hospital when my sister had leukemia,” Gallo said. “Also when I broke my back in my senior year of high school.”
Gallo’s father was a metallurgist.
“He developed guided missile warheads,” Gallo said.
But his father worked a lot.
“I went on vacations with my uncle,” he said. “He was always finding interesting things to point out to us” in the wild.
Gallo and his wife, Mary Jane Gallo, have been married 46 years. They have two sons, Marcus, 44, and Robert, 43, and a daughter, Caroline Wong-Staal, 23, all living in the Bethesda area.
