Anthony Fauci: From Aristotle to AIDS

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Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2018

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the story of a remarkable doctor who, in 1981, became one of the first scientists to recognize that we were on the verge of a new and terrible epidemic - HIV/AIDS - and then devoted his career to understanding and finding treatments for it. Dr. Fauci has been at the forefront of HIV/AIDS research ever since. Along the way, he also became the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, overseeing research into every frightening outbreak imaginable: Ebola, Plague, SARS, Zika, Anthrax, Malaria, Tuberculosis, Influenza, etc… He talks here about growing up as the grandson of Italian immigrants, and about how an education in the classics prepared him for medical school. He recalls how he became a target of the AIDS activist movement, but turned out to be one their greatest champions. And he describes his relationship with presidents and lawmakers and the news media, throughout decades of medical crises. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2018

Transcript

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0:00.0	Here's what keeps Anthony Fauchy up at night.
0:03.7	Ebola, plague, SARS, Zika, HIV, AIDS,
0:08.4	influenza, anthrax, or an outbreak of some entirely new infectious disease he knows he'll wake up to one
0:16.4	morning that threatens to kill large numbers of people. It happened 37 years ago.
0:23.0	I was sitting in my office one day in the clinical center at the NIH.
0:27.0	And a morbidity and mortality weekly report landed on my desk dated June 4th 1981 and it was the report of five gay men from
0:37.1	Los Angeles who were otherwise well who came up with a bizarre syndrome called Numacistus pneumonia, an infection.
0:47.0	Now most people didn't have any idea what Numacistus pneumonia was, but I did because I was
0:51.2	an infectious disease doc at the time. I was board certified in infectious disease
0:55.3	and I had the opportunity to see a lot of patients on the Cancer Institute as a consult to them
1:00.6	when they developed infection. And the only people that develop infection
1:04.0	with pneumocyst are people who are immunosuppressed.
1:07.0	Something is wrong with their immune system.
1:08.0	So I immediately said, gee, there's something really wrong here.
1:11.0	A month later, 26 patients. All gay men were
1:16.4	reported now from New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, not only with
1:20.8	numiscis pneumonia, but with Kapisharcoma, another disease that only occurs in people with
1:26.8	suppressed immune systems. And I made a decision in life at that time. This just landed on my desk
1:32.4	that since I was an infectious
1:34.0	disease person and since I was an immunologist I was going to completely turn
1:38.3	around the direction of my career and start studying this handful of gay men thinking that was the only thing.
1:47.0	And I remember writing something that was one of the most pressure things.
	...

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