Cancer, infection and immunity: a personal homage to Jan Svoboda

Jan Svoboda has had an extraordinary influence on my research. Following our first meeting in 1967, he encouraged me to pursue my tentative evidence for the existence of endogenous retroviruses latent in normal cells. He introduced me to the Czech scientists, Pavel Veselý and Jan Závada, with whom I collaborated fruitfully on the transformed cell phenotype and on virus pseudotypes, respectively. Through my brief training in his laboratory in Prague I gained a breadth and depth of analysis in virology, immunology and oncology that helped me subsequently to tackle problems in AIDS and AIDS-associated malignancy at the levels of both cell biology and epidemiology.