Moritz Kaposi was born Moritz Kohn, in the village of Kaposvar in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time he went to study dermatology in Vienna, he was known as Moritz Kaposi. It is still debated as to why he changed his name; it is unlikely to be due to the pressures of anti-Semitism, but more likely because many other dermatologists at the time in Vienna were called Kohn and he wanted to stand out. Kaposi described sarcomatous skin lesions on the legs and arms of elderly men in 1872 (ref. 1). This became known as 'classic Kaposi sarcoma' and is predominantly found in men of Mediterranean, Eastern European or Jewish heritage. For over 100 years, Kaposi sarcoma (KS) remained a rare curiosity to cancer researchers, until it shot to prominence as the sentinel of the AIDS epidemic2. The particularly aggressive form of KS in HIV-1–infected individuals prompted Robert Gallo and colleagues to study the role of the HIV-1 Tat protein in KS tumor growth. They showed a synergistic effect of Tat with cytokines to promote KS formation. However, the observation that KS is present mainly in gay men infected with HIV-1, and not in individuals who acquired HIV-1 through a blood transfusion or intravenous drug use, impelled husband-and-wife team Yuan Chang and Patrick Moore, pathologist and epidemiologist respectively, to search for an infectious agent in KS. In 1994, with their colleagues at Columbia University (New York), they identified sequences of a new human herpesvirus, which they called KSHV, in an AIDS-KS lesion4.

Kaposi (1837-1902). Credit: Courtesy of Károly Nagy, National Institute of Dermato-Venereology. Budapest, Hungary.