Faculty Bibliography

At the same time, the prevalence of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, among young people has declined in eight countries in Africa, showing that prevention efforts can work, UN officials said Tuesday. 'Even limited resources can give high returns when investments are focused on reaching people most at risk and adapted to changing national epidemics, said Dr. Paul De Lay of the international body's AIDS program, known as Unaids. Nevertheless, 'these estimates are amongst the most robust for any disease of global public health importance,' said Dr. Kevin De Cock, the World Health Organization's chief AIDS official. The global death total would be even higher without the efforts undertaken in recent years to provide anti-retroviral therapy to hundreds of thousands of AIDS patients in poor countries, De Cock said. Still, he said, such drug therapy has not reached enough poor people to match the degree of decline in death rates seen in wealthy countries

At the same time, the prevalence of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, among young people has declined in eight countries in Africa, showing that prevention efforts can work, UN officials said Tuesday. 'Even limited resources can give high returns when investments are focused on reaching people most at risk and adapted to changing national epidemics, said Dr. Paul De Lay, of the international body's AIDS program Unaids. Nevertheless, 'these estimates are amongst the most robust for any disease of global public health importance,' said Dr. Kevin De Cock, the World Health Organization's chief AIDS official. The global death total would be higher without the efforts undertaken in recent years to provide anti-retroviral therapy to hundreds of thousands of AIDS patients in poor countries, De Cock said. Still, he said, such drug therapy has not reached enough poor people to match the degree of decline in death rates seen in wealthy countries

At the same time, the prevalence of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, among young people has declined in eight countries in Africa, showing that prevention efforts can work, United Nations officials said. The officials said they were encouraged by new data showing declines in H.I.V. prevalence among young people from 2000 to 2005 in eight African countries: Botswana, Burundi, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. In Portugal, new H.I.V. infections among injecting drug users declined after the introduction of special prevention programs focused on H.I.V. and drug use

Dr. Chan would take office in early January, filling a vacancy left by the death of Dr. Lee Jong-wook, a South Korean, from a stroke on May 22. Her term would run to June 2012. The agency's 34-member executive board nominated Dr. Chan, 59, most recently the W.H.O.'s top official on communicable disease, in secret balloting. As Hong Kong's health director, Dr. Chan led its response to two major disease outbreaks that threatened the world's health and economy. In 1997, she ordered 1.4 million chickens and ducks slaughtered to control the first cases of the A(H5N1) strain of avian influenza. In 2003, she led the investigation of SARS after the new virus, which had emerged in mainland China, had spread to Hong Kong. In 2005, she became the W.H.O.'s top official for communicable diseases

'It's the first formal way to track HIV/AIDS treatments and outcomes on a broad, comprehensive scale and in real time,' said Dr. Michael Saag, the principal investigator of the project, which is based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Extrapolating findings from clinical trials to individual patients can be difficult. One reason is that there are restrictions on the kinds of other ailments that participants in the trials can have. A second is that such trials usually are conducted on a short- term basis -- weeks or months. Doctors say that while short-term information is crucial for starting therapy, they need more data about the long-term benefits and dangers of such treatments. The seven current centers had pre-existing databases that tracked the clinical outcomes of their individual patients but lacked a collaborative, interactive information-sharing network. The centers were selected in part because they had shown the reliability of their data. be06 0078 061011 N S 0000000000 00002863

''It's the first formal way to track H.I.V./AIDS treatments and outcomes on a broad, comprehensive scale and in real time,'' said Dr. Michael Saag, the principal investigator of the project, which is based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. A chief aim of the network is to determine the effectiveness of therapies for the thousands of patients in everyday practice compared with a hundred or so selected for clinical trials. The network will track patients who receive various treatments for such ailments to determine if and how they adversely interact with those for H.I.V./AIDS. Steps will be taken to keep the identities of the 15,000 patients in the project confidential. Dr. Saag said he hoped that the H.I.V./AIDS project would be a successful pilot to develop similar networks for other diseases

Dr. [Robert G. Petersdorf], who was known affectionately to his colleagues as the Dorf, usually swam at lunchtime. As a teacher, he emphasized the practical and demanded that his students be prepared, and if they were not, he occasionally terrified them during rounds, said Dr. Paul G. Ramsey, the dean and vice president of the University of Washington. Dr. Roger J. Bulger, who retired last year as president of the Association of Academic Health Centers, based in Washington D.C., and who trained with Dr. Petersdorf, said that 'the knowledge he could spew extemporaneously on rounds was pretty amazing.' Dr. Petersdorf became famous in medicine for a classic study of prolonged fevers of unknown origin, which he carried out with Dr. Paul Beeson at Yale. Doctors still cite the study, published in 1961, although CT, MRI and other scans have made some of its findings less relevant to practice today

Dr. Petersdorf became famous in medicine for a classic study of prolonged fevers of unknown origin, which he carried out with Dr. Paul Beeson at Yale. Doctors still cite the study, published in 1961, although CT, MRI and other scans have made some of its findings less relevant to practice today. Dr. Petersdorf trained a number of leaders of American medicine as he moved back and forth between the East and West Coasts. He had a knack for ''identifying good people who he knew would work hard,'' and in return he ''earned a tremendous loyalty from them,'' said Dr. Marvin Turck, another leading infectious disease expert at the University of Washington. Dr. Petersdorf, who was known affectionately to his colleagues as the Dorf, usually swam at lunchtime. As a teacher, he emphasized the practical and demanded that his students be prepared, and if they were not, he occasionally terrified them during rounds, said Dr. Paul G. Ramsey, the dean and vice president of the University of Washington. Dr. Roger J. Bulger, who retired last year as president of the Association of Academic Health Centers, based in Washington D.C., and who trained with Dr. Petersdorf, said that ''the knowledge he could spew extemporaneously on rounds was pretty amazing.''

Nobel wrote his will in Swedish a year before his death while he lived in Paris, and the portion dealing with the prizes was one long paragraph. It named the groups to make the awards: the Karolinska Institute (medicine), the Swedish Academy of Sciences (chemistry and physics), the Swedish Academy (literature) and the Norwegian Parliament (peace). Later, economics was added as a separate prize. Nobel was unhappy in love, never married and described himself as a loner. Mr. [Ragnar Sohlman] wrote that when one of Nobel's brothers asked for a biographical note, Nobel said about himself: ''Alfred Nobel -- a pitiful half-life which ought to have been extinguished by some compassionate doctor as the infant yelled its way into the world.'' The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901. Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen, top, won in physics for his discovery of X-rays, and [Emil von Behring] won in medicine for developing a diphtheria immunization. Alfred Nobel's will, below, which he drew up himself, was challenged in court by disinherited relatives. (Photo by Bettmann/Corbis); (Photo by Corbis); (Photo by Nobel Foundation)(pg. F6); THE BENEFACTOR -- [Alfred Nobel], shown in 1853, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, bequeathed the bulk of his estate to establish the prizes that bear his name. (Photo by Nobel Foundation)(pg. F1)

The four other Lasker winners are Dr. Elizabeth H. Blackburn, 57, of the University of California at San Francisco; Dr. Carol W. Greider, 45, of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Dr. Jack W. Szostak, 53, of Harvard Medical School; and Dr. Joseph Gall, 78, of the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution in Baltimore