50 years ago today — Robert Rayford died, perhaps the earliest known victim of the disease that would become known as AIDS.

From "A mystery illness killed a boy in 1969. Years later, doctors learned what it was: AIDS/Robert Rayford challenged the narrative about the epidemic" (WaPo):

The 16-year-old boy had the kind of illness that wouldn’t be familiar to doctors for years: He was weak and emaciated, rife with stubborn infections and riddled with rare cancerous lesions known as Kaposi’s sarcoma, a skin disease found in elderly men of Mediterranean descent. The boy, Robert Rayford, died on May 15, 1969, in St. Louis... With a sense that something important could someday be learned, two doctors collected tissue samples after his death and froze them for almost 20 years....

In 1985, when a test became available that could detect HIV antibodies, Elvin-Lewis packed some of her long-held samples in dry ice and shipped them to Witte, who had them tested by Robert Garry, a Tulane virologist. Garry tested for nine distinct HIV proteins. Rayford’s blood showed evidence of all nine.

“Case Shakes Theories of AIDS Origin,” read a Chicago Tribune story that broke news of the results in October 1987. “Area Teen May Have Died from AIDS—In 1969,” said a banner headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The tests on Rayford’s tissues astonished researchers. The finding wouldn’t change how the disease was treated, but it challenged the conventional wisdom of how it arrived.....