The Morbidity and Mortaility Weekly Report is a federal medical bulletin on all things fatal, or potentially fatal, offering scholarly research on how to contend with epidemics and disease.

In 1981, AIDS was understood to be a strange combination of pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma -- a rare form of skin cancer. It had shown up in a handful of gay men in the Los Angeles area, and Dr. Gregg, who was also an epidemiologist, and his staff argued extensively about the apparent disease before publishing the short piece.

They weren't sure if there was any causal relationship between the disease and the sexual orientation of those who had it. In fact, they believed it might have just been a "statistical quirk," according to Dr. Richard A. Goodman, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control.

Fortunately, they went ahead and published the article, despite their confusion over its origins and causes.

It was the first step in the long, hard work-in-progress known as AIDS awareness.

Dr. Gregg died on Sunday at age 78 of congestive heart failure.