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slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American

for the seven days backdated to February 20th, 2008, because I actually filed on the evening of February 21st.

Oh, I'm Steve Mursky, by the way.

If you've been breathlessly waiting for this week's podcast, I apologize.

I was out of town at a couple of conferences, and this week's episode features some highlights from one of them,

and that's the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAS, which took place last week in the beginning of this current week in Boston.

The other conference was Inside Baseball, was about the future of science journalism, which is going to be good, thankfully.

So this week on the podcast, we'll hear from Nobel laureate David Baltimore about HIV research.

We also have an interview with the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Charles Alashi,

and in a real coup, we actually managed to get Scientific American editor Mark Fischetti to come on board and make an appearance.

First up, David Baltimore, he's the president of the AAAS and professor of biology at Caltech.

He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for the discovery of reverse transcriptase.

I attended his presidential address to the conference, and he spent a few minutes of about an hour,

reviewing the effort to create an HIV vaccine. Here's what he said.

Having mentioned AIDS, I want to comment on how we can ever expect to reverse the spread

of this scourge. The background is, I'm sure, well known to most of you. There is no AIDS vaccine.

There is no hopeful candidate AIDS vaccine. HIV, the cause of AIDS, has evolved to be virtually impossible to attack by antibody

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