Kai Wright is joining us as a guest columnist for two weeks. This week, he considers the current state of AIDS research:
...There was no mistaking the disappointment in Anthony Fauci's remarks to the 300 scientists he brought together in Bethesda, Maryland, this week. On the heels of one the biggest setbacks AIDS research has seen since its early years -- a failed vaccine that had promised to mark the beginning of the epidemic's end -- Fauci convened the sober meeting to rethink the whole enterprise. And after 25 years of aggressively pursuing an AIDS vaccine, the new perspective he urged upon researchers was a return to "fundamental questions." It sounded an awful lot like starting over.
Worse, it sounded like starting over with a handicap. AIDS research hasn't been spared the budget cuts that have hit the National Institutes of Health throughout the Bush years. And even as Fauci tried to reassure the gathering that there'd be enough money to re-prime the research pump, he conceded he'd never seen times so tight. A scientist to the last, Fauci called it "an unprecedented phenomenon."
It's also a stunningly fast reversal of fortune. As recently as last summer, even the most sober observers suspected the vaccine sleuths were on the cusp of a world-changing breakthrough for AIDS, one on par with the 1996 unveiling of multidrug antiretroviral therapy, which slammed the breaks on AIDS deaths in the developed world.
Read the rest (and comment) here.
--The Editors
