s,
Running on Empty? worries grow over the sustainability of the nation’s scientific enterprise Many physicians can recall the period more than three
decades ago when a plague emerged that appeared to selectively afflict urban men. As death tolls mounted, no one knew why the immune systems of these patients deteriorated, how to treat the illness, or how widespread the sickness might become. n Thirty-five years have passed, and today, in most developed countries, people don’t die of AIDS. Rather, they live with HIV. The same disease that was a death sentence in the 1980s had become a chronic condition by the mid-1990s. For the bench-to-bedside trajectory, this is light speed. Although pressure from patient advocacy groups certainly played a transformative role in the development and distribution of therapeutics, years of curiositydriven, publicly funded basic research into retroviruses—organisms that were considered irrelevant to humans—had been aggregating a reserve of knowledge that spurred rapid and effective translational research.
by David Cameron
42-45. Future Sci r1.indd 43
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