CD8A and infection: Clinically healthy HIV-infected individuals that maintain stable high CD4+ T cell counts also exhibit strong and early onset of anti-HIV CD8+ T cell responses pointing to their protective role, which prompted elegant experiments that tested in vivo CD8+ T cell depletion in SIV infected rhesus macaques demonstrating the critical role of these immune cells in the early control of infection (Deeks and Walker, 2007; Freel et al., 2010).