AIDS Research Pioneer Gerry Myers Dies

Abstract

IN MEMORIAM AIDS Research Pioneer Gerry Myers Dies Bette Korber and Brian Foley os Alamos National Laboratory Fellow, and AIDS research pioneer, Gerald ‘‘Gerry’’ Myers passed away peacefully at his Santa Fe, New Mexico home on January 25, 2010. Gerry played a critical role in the foundational science of HIV, and his work has left a powerful legacy. He was among the first people to fully realize the implications of HIV diversity, grasping immediately that this virus was going to present a great challenge for vaccine design. This came about because in 1986 he was working in the theoretical biology group at Los Alamos at GenBank (GenBank was then housed in Los Alamos, where it was founded), where he was studying the evolution of gene families across organisms. He learned that several HIV sequences had become available, and he encouraged his daughter to take a look at them for a science fair project. Through this serendipitous event, he took a close look at HIV sequence alignments, and was struck by the extent of the genetic differences between the earliest US/French HIV isolates and African HIV isolates. He understood immediately that this was an extraordinary virus, and that more