Chapter 16 explores the fate of two individuals who left their mark on the history of AIDS, but for very different reasons. Gaétan Dugas, a French Canadian airline steward, was falsely accused of being the man who brought the virus to the USA and of having deliberately infected dozens of other gay men in some kind of morbid vengeance. This ‘false villain’ was eventually exonerated by evolutionary biologists who succeeded in characterising Dugas’ own virus. The life of Jonathan Mann, a visionary humanist who founded the World Health Organization’s special programme on AIDS, illustrates the beginning of the international battle against HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s. A parallel is drawn between Mann and Rieux, the main character in Albert Camus’ novel The Plague.