Robert Charles Gallo (born March 23, 1937) is an American biomedical researcher. He is best known for his role in the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the infectious agent responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), and he has been a major contributor to subsequent HIV research.

Gallo is the director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. He and two longtime scientific collaborators, Robert R. Redfield and William A. Blattner, co-founded the institute in 1996 in a partnership including the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore. In 2005, Gallo co-founded Profectus BioSciences, Inc., which develops and commercializes technologies to reduce the morbidity and mortality caused by human viral diseases, including HIV.

Gallo was born in Waterbury, Connecticut to a working-class family of Italian immigrants. 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. 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.

Leonard George Horowitz DMD, MA, MPH (born June 20, 1952) is a former dentist, a health industry entrepreneur, and the author of a number of books, pamphlets, DVDs, CDs and articles on public health issues; the books and pamphlets have been published under his own Tetrahedron imprint. Horowitz is an AIDS conspiracy theorist and opposes vaccination.

From 1978 to the mid-1990s, Horowitz wrote several articles on dentistry, including its relation to medical marijuana and holistic health. Beginning in the early 1990s, AIDS hygiene in dentistry and addressing patient fears about AIDS risks in the dental office became dominant themes in Horowitz's peer-reviewed work.

Horowitz's self-published books include Deadly Innocence: Solving the Greatest Murder Mystery in the History of American Medicine (1994), in which he claims that Kimberly Bergalis' dentist, David J. Acer was a pedophile and a serial killer who used HIV as his murder weapon; and Emerging Viruses: Aids & Ebola — Nature, Accident or Intentional? (1996), which advances the theory that AIDS and Ebola were engineered by the U.S. government with biological warfare and genocide in mind.

Margaret Mary Heckler (born June 21, 1931) is a Republican politician from Massachusetts who served in the United States House of Representatives for eight terms, from 1967 until 1983 and was later the Secretary of Health and Human Services and Ambassador to Ireland under President Ronald Reagan. After her defeat in 1982, no woman would be elected to Congress from Massachusetts until Niki Tsongas in a special election in 2007. In 1971, however, coinciding with her eight terms in Congress, one other woman from Massachusetts, Louise Day Hicks, was elected and served one term.

She was born Margaret Mary O'Shaughnessy in Flushing, New York. Her undergraduate studies began at the University of Leiden in Holland in 1952. After graduating from Albertus Magnus College (B.A.1953) and from Boston College Law School (LL.B. 1956), she was admitted to the bar in Massachusetts. She had also been editor of the Annual Survey of Massachusetts Law.

From 1962 to 1966, Heckler served as an elected Governor’s Councilor for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. She was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1964 and 1968 and elected as a Republican to the 90th through the 97th Congresses (January 3, 1967 – January 3, 1983).

"The Man" is a slang phrase that may refer to the government or to some other authority in a position of power. In addition to this derogatory connotation, it may also serve as a term of respect and praise.

The phrase "the Man is keeping me down" is commonly used to describe oppression. The phrase "stick it to the Man" encourages resistance to authority, and essentially means "fight back" or "resist", either openly or via sabotage.

The earliest recorded use^{[citation needed]} of the term "the Man" in the American sense dates back to a letter written by a young Alexander Hamilton in September 1772, when he was 15. In a letter to his father James Hamilton, published in the Royal Dutch-American Gazette, he described the response of the Dutch governor of St. Croix to a hurricane that raked that island on August 31, 1772. "Our General has issued several very salutary and humane regulations and both in his publick and private measures, has shewn himself the Man." ^{[dubious – discuss]} In the Southern U.S. states, the phrase came to be applied to any man or any group in a position of authority, or to authority in the abstract. From about the 1950s the phrase was also an underworld code word for police, the warden of a prison or other law enforcement or penal authorities.

Max (Myron) Essex, DVM, PhD, is the Mary Woodard Lasker Professor of Health Sciences at Harvard University, Chair of the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative (HAI), and Chair of the Botswana–Harvard AIDS Institute in Gaborone, Botswana. Essex was one of the first to link animal and human retroviruses to immunosuppressive disease, to suspect that a retrovirus was the cause of AIDS, and to determine that HIV could be transmitted through blood and blood products to hemophiliacs and recipients of blood transfusions. With collaborators, Essex also provided the first evidence that HIV could be transmitted by heterosexual intercourse.

In 1984, Essex identified gp120, the virus surface protein that is used worldwide for blood screening, HIV detection, and epidemiological monitoring. With collaborators, he discovered the first simian immunodeficiency virus, as well as HIV-2. Since 1986, he has developed programs for AIDS collaboration in Senegal, Thailand, Botswana, India, Mexico, and China. In 1996, Essex helped establish the Botswana–Harvard Partnership for HIV Research and Education (now the Botswana–Harvard AIDS Institute). This is a collaboration between the Ministry of Health in Botswana and HAI.