In 1993, some 10 years after the first Dutch cases of HIV/Aids, the epidemic stabilised, a partial indication that the expert community had gained relative control over the situation. The general implications were that HIV/Aids became less newsworthy, which of course had implications for the roles of the scientific experts, in particular Roel Coutinho. Transformation is a recurring theme in this third stage: positions, whether in a political, institutional, public or epistemological sense, changed, and the role of our experts changed accordingly.