Dr. Michael Gottlieb P’08, Who First Identified and Reported AIDS, Shares His Story with Poly’s Upper School Students

By SUSIE KIM, Upper School Science faculty member APRIL 20, 2017

Last Friday, Dr. Michael Gottlieb, parent of Jill Gottlieb ’08, visited the senior elective Literature and Science of Disease class. As an assistant medical professor at UCLA Medical School in 1981, Dr. Gottlieb was the first to identify and report AIDS as a new disease. After reading the first article Dr. Gottlieb submitted to the Center for Disease Control, as well as a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, students engaged with Dr. Gottlieb in a dialogue about how the story of the AIDS epidemic transpired. Dr. Gottlieb shared with the class his experience in delivering medical care to patients and his thoughts about the current treatment of AIDS.