A founder of the World Health Organization's Global Program on AIDS, he was one of the first to point out the pandemic dimensions of the HIV problem and to link it to social and political conditions. Traveling with him was Mary Lou Clements-Mann of Johns Hopkins University, his immunologist colleague and wife, a researcher leading efforts to test vaccines against the virus. Pierce Gerety of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees was also going to Geneva that night. Gerety brought relief, medical and otherwise, to those dispossessed by wars and other disasters. More than an administrator, he was in the field, rescuing people and property, distributing supplies, negotiating for hostages.
Science comes to life in laboratories.
It matures outside. The Manns and Gerety knew firsthand that dry politics and epidemiology add up as the bodies of the sick, wounded, starving and doomed. When vaccines failed, when therapies failed, when our technologies for maiming outstripped the technologies for healing, the Manns and Gerety witnessed the misery. They persevered anyway. Sometimes readers ask why Scientific American publishes articles with a political or social edge.