Victoria A. Harden - AIDS at 30: A History

AIDS at 30

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AIDS at 30

A History

Victoria A. Harden

Copyright 2012 by Victoria A. Harden

Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harden, Victoria Angela.

AIDS at 30: a history / Victoria A. Harden.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59797-294-9 (hardcover: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61234-516-1 (electronic edition)

1. AIDS (disease)History. I. Title. II. Title: AIDS at thirty.

RA643.8.H37 2012

616.9792dc23

2011028331

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.

Potomac Books
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First Edition

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forSibyl Victoria McDonell-Leslie

Illustrations

Abbreviations

Preface

This book had its origin in September 1984, when I arrived at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to write about another infectious disease for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and found myself housed in an office with Ruth Guyer, an immunologist turned science writer who was producing a newsletter called the AIDS Memorandum. Talk around the NIH campus was intense with regard to the new disease AIDS, and a number of NIAID scientists working on AIDS were next door or downstairs from our office. Confessing that I had never heard of T cells and B cells, which seemed to be involved somehow with AIDS, I asked Guyer to enlighten me, and so began my education into molecular immunology and virology. As a historian, I wondered who was collecting materials such as the AIDS Memorandum and conducting interviews with scientists working on AIDS, and I found out that no formal historical process existed at NIH. Here was a new disease, key investigators working around me, important discoveries going on, and no one was capturing this? It seemed a dereliction of duty for a historian not to make some sort of attempt to document what was occurring.

In 1986 I had the good fortune to become the founding director of the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum, a position from which I was able to include what by then was beginning to be called HIV/AIDS documentation efforts alongside other initiatives to document biomedical research history at the United States foremost medical research institution. Because my research on HIV/AIDS was conducted over more than a quarter century, however, I have incurred more debts to more people than I can possibly acknowledge. The number of NIH staff who went out of their way to assist me at various times is far too large for me to name every person, but to them all I am most grateful. My colleagues in the Office of Communications at NIH, mostly trained as journalists, were welcoming to a historian and taught me much about excellence in writing and thinking about a public audience. Don Ralbovsky collected ephemera for the Stetten Museum during the 1990 Storm the NIH ACT UP protest. Dennis Rodrigues worked with me for some years on the AIDS oral history project, bringing his expertise as a former staff member of the NIH AIDS Executive Committee. The communications staff in the NIAID and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) worked intensely with me in 2001 to prepare the website In Their Own Words: NIH Scientists Recall the Early Years of AIDS, which was launched to mark the twentieth anniversary of the AIDS epidemic.