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Randy Shilts ('', published in 1987 , won the Stonewall Book Award . ''And the Band Played On'' is a sweeping and extensively researched journalistic account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It details a variety of overlapping story lines including the torpid response to the epidemic by the scientific research establishment, and the later controversy over competing proprietary claimes to discovery of the virus, now known as HIV , that causes AIDS made by a research group at the NIH of the United States led by Robert Gallo , and by a research group at the Pasteur Institute of France led by Luc Montagnier . One thread in ''And the Band Played On'' is based in part on an early AIDS study by Dr William Darrow of the Centers for Disease Control. The study stated that a gay Canadian airline steward called Gaetan Dugas is Patient Zero , the original carrier of the transmittable cause of AIDS (later found to be HIV) who is responsible either directly or indirectly for many early cases of AIDS in San Francisco . However, four years after the publication of Shilts' book, Dr. Darrow repudiated his study, admitting its methods were flawed and that Shilts had totally misrepresented its conclusions. Shilts also wrote a biography of '', was published shortly before his death of AIDS at the age of 42. SELECTED BOOKS
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