Shots in the Dark: The Wayward Search for an AIDS Vaccine
W.W. Norton, 440 pp, $27.95, 2001 ISBN: 0393050270 | ISBN: 0-393-05027-0
Jon Cohen has presented a provocative and remarkably detailed account of the first 20 years of the quest towards an AIDS vaccine. In 1981, it was a new disease. By 1983, there was a causative virus that one could culture. Yet 20 years later AIDS is an epidemic of tragic proportions for Africa and the fourth leading cause of death in the world. The biomedical establishment successfully mobilized to produce antiviral drugs, but faltered in its effort to produce a vaccine. Was there truly “no real leadership,” “no real funding,” and “no real sense of urgency”? Or, had the virus—a relentless 10,000 base pairs of stealth and persistence—confounded conventional approaches to vaccines? Cohen movingly opens the account in the Reagan White House at a 1982 press conference where the disease known as the 'gay plague' is handled in a way that draws laughter. He ends at the 13th International AIDS conference in Durban where South African President Thabo Mbeki in an opening address blames AIDS on poverty not HIV-1, and where an impassioned Nelson Mandela closed the congress with a plea for the recognition of the viral origin of AIDS, the thwarting of maternal–infant transmission and the development of a vaccine.
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