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In a paper published 20 years ago this week in "Science," Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris announced that he had isolated the virus that causes AIDS. Now, after a priority dispute with Robert Gallo, an American researcher who claimed to have discovered it independently, and who called it HTLV-3, it has become more familiar under its compromise moniker, the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV. In the decades since Dr Montagnier's paper, HIV has run riot. The latest report on the epidemic, issued on May 13th by the Global HIV Prevention Working Group, a committee of the great and good, reiterated how bad things are. If nothing changes, the world faces 45m new infections between now and 2010. And what needs to change, naturally, is that more money must be spent on prevention. In 1986 a second AIDS-causing agent, now known as HIV-2, was isolated by Dr Montagnier's laboratory. And an important aspect of this virus's spread has just been elucidated in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Unlike HIV-1, which seems to be a chimpanzee virus that leapt the species barrier to infect people, HIV-2 came from a monkey called the sooty mangabey. Its spread coincided with Guinea-Bissau's war of independence from Portugal, which began in 1963 and went on until 1974. War, with its attendant movement of armies of sexually active young men, provides an ideal climate for the spread of a virus such as HIV-2.