An unwanted relation

In June 1981, the United States’ Centers  for Disease Control noted in its weekly report that five ‘previously healthy’ young men in Los Angeles had been treated for pneumonia. Two of them had died. On the other side of the country lived soon-to-be third grader Marco Roth, the son of a doctor and musician. Receiving an ‘experiment in nineteenth-century “middle-class” European education’, he was surrounded by classical concerts, classic literature and medicine in Manhattan. Oblivious to the fact that that summer’s bulletin included some of the first officially recognized deaths brought about by the AIDS epidemic, Roth was also unaware that his own father had been infected by the HIV virus at around the same time.

According to the ‘official’ version of events, recounted in the opening pages of his memoir The Scientists: A Family Romance, his father contracted the virus from a needle accident whilst taking blood from an infected patient.