July 25, 2000
Vol. LII, No. 15

Speakers Bureau Volunteers Recognized
at Ceremony

NIH'ers Urged To
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

OSE Summer
Film Festival Returns

Celebrate World Breastfeeding Week

Sociologist Riley
Leaves NIH for Maine

By Rich McManus

Drs. Gary Felsenfeld (l), Buhm Soon Park (c) and David Davies discuss the success of a 40-year-old NIDDK lab.

It isn't the only laboratory at NIH that has an enviably long track record of combining impeccable scientific achievement with a loose, congenial atmosphere, but NIDDK's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) — established in 1960 to break further ground in a field then comparatively new — is a fitting poster child for what NIH labs are supposed to accomplish. Some 15 members of the National Academy of Sciences are either there now or have passed through its ranks, and its extensive bibliography is studded with scientific peaks: seminal studies of protease that laid the groundwork for understanding HIV protease; the discovery of DNA gyrase, an enzyme important in developing effective antibiotics; and studies of chromatin and DNA organization that help explain gene expression in higher organisms.
M O R E . . .

'Worst Is Yet to Come'
Fauci Says AIDS Pandemic Far from Over, Prevention Is Key

By Carla Garnett

Towards the end of 1999, NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci recalled he was often asked if after 20 years of the epidemic, AIDS could finally go into the history books as the disease that was. After all, his questioners reasoned, we have many combinations of drugs — both anti-HIV and those to combat opportunistic infections — that are forestalling the onset of AIDS in HIV-infected people, and keeping people with AIDS alive longer. We may not have a cure, but the rate of new cases seems to be leveling off, and a vaccine is in our not-too-distant future, right? Fauci said time and again he'd have to shake his head. On the contrary, he told them, "the worst of the global pandemic has yet to occur."
M O R E . . .