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In many ways, I was well prepared for the AIDS roller coaster that I’ ve been on for these past 16 years. I am a classically trained anatomic pathologist, with experience in ultrastructure, light microscopy, and autopsy pathology. No one however was truly prepared. I have been in the school of HIV disease ever since. I knew little about the Lentiviruses, the fascinating family of slow viruses of which HIV is a member. Early on, I probably observed viral particles in the electron microscope, but my mind was not prepared for their recognition. From my autopsy experience, I knew about the opportunistic infections that occur in patients on chemotherapy and corticosteroids, but they are not the most common ones seen in AIDS. When I went to medical school and even during my residency, relatively speaking, immunology was in the dark ages. Kaposi’s sarcoma was an obscure enigmatic skin disease seen in Eastern Europe, bordering the Mediterranean Sea, and in Africa. I never saw a case of Kaposi’s sarcoma before AIDS came along.

Any student of microsporidia is confronted with two contradictory facts. One is the frustrating smallness of microsporidian developmental stages when seen in the light microscope and the difficulty to resolve some meaningful details in their structure. The second fact is that scientific literature (especially of the beginning of the century, when the art of scientific drawing flourished most) shows many, sometimes very detailed, drawings of complicated microsporidian life cycles.