ABSTRACT
During the quarter century since AIDS was recognized in , scholars and popular writers have produced a great outpouring of literature about many aspects of this disease. is paper will focus on a narrow but critically important segment of AIDS history that has not been explored as thoroughly as the social and political contexts. It will examine aspects of the intellectual context within which scientists at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) thought about this disease from their earliest encounter with an AIDS patient in until the human immunodeficiency virus was demonstrated as the cause of AIDS in .1 Based on this case study, I will argue that the intellectual paradigm of molecular immunology, within which early AIDS research was conducted at the NIH, was incomplete in the early s, and that investigators utilized their partial knowledge to combat AIDS while simultaneously working to expand the intellectual scaffolding within which they could formulate new interventions.
