Dr. Levy was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 21, 1938. He attended and received his BA from Wesleyan University in 1960.

In 1960-1961, Dr. Levy had a Fulbright and French government fellowships to study at the Faculte de Science in Orsay, near Paris. His research was on regeneration in the flatworm planaria. This project introduced him to the fields of embryogenesis and regeneration but was not directly related to viruses and cancer.

In 1961, he attended medical school at Columbia University. As a medical student, he volunteered to join the laboratory of Dr. Herbert Rosenkranz to study a -state in bacteria called lysogeny, in which viruses silently infect bacteria and affect their function.  That research led to his discovery that the recently developed chemical drug hydroxyurea (HU) was unique in blocking DNA synthesis but not RNA synthesis. 

In 1965, during his senior year at Columbia, he wished to get involved with viruses in human cells. He received a fellowship in tropical medicine from Louisiana State University, which permitted him to work with Dr. Dennis Burkitt, who had described lymphomas in young children in Africa. Dr. Levy graduated from Columbia University in 1965.

In 1967, he joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He worked in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Huebner, who introduced him to the field of RNA viruses, particularly animal retroviruses.  A significant part of his research at the NIH was the study of inherited viruses in mice, such as xeno-tropic and eco-tropic viruses.

In 1970, he accepted an invitation to join the faculty and be a member of the Cancer Research Institute at UCSF. He established a laboratory, particularly for studying retroviruses with an emphasis on xenotropic viruses. -- those viruses that grow in non-human cells. They developed approaches to look for human xenotropic viruses using a variety of animal and human cells. In 1982, Dr. Levy had just returned from a sabbatical year, partly at the Weizmann Institute in Israel studying mouse retroviruses and leukemias and later at the Pasteur Institute in Paris studying the effect of mouse retroviruses on cell differentiation. He developed the concept that viruses could play a role in normal and abnormal cell processes. At this time, because of limited funding nationally, he was among the few who still had a laboratory for research and established a research program looking for possible human viruses as a cause of AIDS.

In 1983, his laboratory isolated the human retrovirus that caused AIDS by following cell culture and biochemical approaches he used to study other viruses. That discovery opened their focus on the characterization of this new human retrovirus and approaches to detect and combat it by treatment and prevention.