Faculty Bibliography

[Robert Gallo] has written that other members of the retrovirus family to which the AIDS virus belongs originated in Africa. Retroviruses are so named because they reverse some normal cell-construction processes. He said he 'could not conceive of AIDS coming from elsewhere into Africa.' [William A. Haseltine] has testified before Congress that, as well as can be determined now, AIDS 'began about 20 years ago' and 'we now know that a spread of the disease in the United States and Europe was preceded by a massive spread of disease in Central Africa.' He made the point on the basis of extrapolation from various scientific articles, not from direct evidence. Although now predominant among American and European researchers, the idea that AIDS began in Africa is by no means universal among them. Dr. Peter Piot, professor of microbiology at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, says it is not certain where the disease started and that proving Africa as the place of origin would be difficult. [Robert J. Biggar] headed another team of American and Kenyan scientists who reported finding evidence of the AIDS virus in widely varying percentages among six distinctly different regions of Kenya. The frequency was highest, at 50 per cent of 99 samples, among the Turkana people living in the remote areas of northern Kenya where little if any AIDS has been reported. The frequency was lowest, at 8 per cent of 99 samples, among the Masai. Over all, 22 of the 592 samples showed evidence of the AIDS virus. Finding an effective treatment, if not a cure, and a way to prevent AIDS unquestionably are high priorities for scientists. Though finding the origin of AIDS may contribute to this quest, nearly all those interviewed in Africa said they had given more thought to the cases they might have missed than to speculation about origin. 'AIDS is the talk of the town,' said Dr. Evarist Njelesani, who directs medical services in the Zambian Ministry of Health in Lusaka. He added that he could recall a few cases that now appear to have been AIDS that occurred in Ndola where he worked in 1981 and 1982

Dr. G. Hunsmann and three other doctors who work in Gottingen, West Germany and Ndola, Zambia reported last month in a British medical journal, The Lancet, on tests of 4,000 Africans in seven countries. ''It would seem that the epidemic of AIDS in Africa started at about the same time as, or even later than, the epidemics in America and Europe,'' they said. ''Our results do not support the hypothesis that HTLV-III virus originated in Africa.'' Finding an effective treatment, if not a cure, and a way to prevent AIDS unquestionably are high priorities for scientists. Though finding the origin of AIDS may contribute to this quest, nearly all those interviewed in Africa said they had given more thought to the cases they might have missed than to speculation about origin. 'AIDS Is the Talk Of the Town' ''AIDS is the talk of the town,'' said Dr. Evarist Njelesani, who directs medical services in the Zambian Ministry of Health in Lusaka. He added that he could recall a few cases that now appear to have been AIDS that occurred in Ndola where he worked in 1981 and 1982. ''We have lots of priorities within Africa and our highest is to learn where the disease is there,'' Dr. Assaad went on. ''To study in real depth where the disease started is a low priority in the W.H.O. program but is a fit subject for individual scientists. The only thing we know for sure about AIDS is that the disease as described by C.D.C. appeared nearly simultaneously in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa.''

In another study, prepared earlier and being published in the United States in The Journal of the American Medical Association, several Belgian physicians working in Rwanda and Belgium together with American scientists from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., also reported finding high incidence evidence of AIDS infection among prostitutes; they said they found the virus in 80 percent of a group of 84 prostitutes surveyed in Rwanda. The scientists concluded that ''female prostitutes are highly susceptible to infections'' with the AIDS virus and ''could be an important reservoir of the AIDS agent among the heterosexual population of central Africa.'' In a study of 90 prostitutes in Kenya by a team of Kenyan, American and Canadian doctors 49, or 54 percent, were infected by the AIDS virus and more than three-fourths of these women had evidence of significant illness such as swollen lymph nodes throughout their bodies. The figure for the prostitutes compared with 3, or 9 percent, of 35 sexually active men who attended a medical clinic and two, or 5 percent, of 42 medical personnel who served as a comparison group for study purposes. Number of AIDS Cases May Be Much Higher The figures cited for AIDS cases in Rwanda, as in other African countries, must be regarded as minimal because not all AIDS victims seek medical treatment; physicians do not recognize all cases of AIDS as such; intensive care units either do not exist or rarely meet American standards; few autopsies are performed in most African countries; most doctors in Africa have less chance to compare notes with their colleagues practicing elsewhere, even in the same country; and it is difficult to keep up with medical advances because American and European scientific journals do not circulate widely in Africa. Some other studies have found about 10 percent of healthy adults in parts of central Africa, including areas of Rwanda, Zaire, Zambia and Uganda, to have AIDS virus antibodies in their blood, a sign of probable ongoing infection with the virus. These studies, cited the Journal of the American Medical Association, also have found that ''heterosexual contact is probably the predominant mode of transmission of the AIDS agent'' in Africa, and that AIDS patients here are far more likely than others to have a history of multiple heterosexual partners and visits to prostitutes

To Dr. [Peter Greenwald], the problem is akin to the one that cancer researchers faced three decades ago when they developed chemotherapy programs. ''We don't have full information about what population groups are most likely to benefit or not, so we pick out high risk groups like'' that in China, Dr. Greenwald said. As more dietary factors and compounds are identified in laboratory and animal experiments as potentially effective against cancer, researchers can expect to narrow their focus and better fashion such studies. But for now, Dr. Greenwald said, much of the selection process in dietary preventions of cancer reflects a kind of informed guesswork. In the meantime, he said, ''If only one or two studies come out positive it would be a very big step forward.'' ''I'd be surprised,'' Dr. Greenwald said.

In his library research, [Johnson L. Thistle] noted that MTBE remains liquid in the body. He first tested the effects of MTBE by dissolving gallstones in test tubes. Then he implanted multiple human gallstones in a dog's gallbladder and tested the speed with which the ether solvent dissolved them. So Thistle enlisted the aid of Dr. Gerald R. May, a radiologist at the Mayo Clinic, to do his first human experiment in March 1983. The patient was a 64-year-old woman who refused surgery. With the MTBE therapy her gallstones dissolved in seven hours. Since then, Mayo Clinic officials have approved the therapy as an investigational procedure. When a person with gallstones is referred to Thistle for the new dissolution therapy, the doctor first determines if the gallstones are causing the symptoms the patient has, and, if so, how severe they are. Many people who have gallstones also have symptoms of belching, nausea, and intolerance to fatty foods, but these symptoms and gallstones may be unrelated

The findings were the first concerning a Jarvik-7 removed from a patient who had suffered strokes while being sustained by the device, and they have caused researchers to rethink the way the Jarvik-7 is snapped together inside the body. When a prototype of a revised design is ready, though, it is likely that humans again will have to try it experimentally. Although the artificial heart pioneers at the University of Utah implanted various models of the Jarvik-7 in more than 100 animals, strokes occurred in only three. In each case, they were caused by clumps of bacteria that had broken away from artificial hearts that had become infected, not by blood clots or bleeding. Dr. Don B. Olsen, head of the University of Utah artificial heart unit, said he had implanted artificial hearts in 15 calves, and ''none of those had blood clots.'' One reason that implants in animals did not identify blood clots as a major complication, Dr. Olsen said, is that the human blood system differs markedly from those of the calves, sheep and goats in which the device was tested. Some critics have suggested testing the device on primates, which have circulatory systems similar to those of humans, but that would involve redesigning the Jarvik-7 because it is too big to fit in primate chests. Experiments on primates also might come under attack by animal rights groups because the researchers would have to tie the animals to chairs so they would not yank out the hoses placed in their abdomens to carry the air that powers the device. In any event, primate tests would be very costly, since the animals are expensive to buy and keep

AIDS is without known cure, effective treatment or prevention. It is caused by a virus that paralyzes the immune system and that, in time, kills virtually all its victims. Scientists inevitably follow many blind avenues in seeking the cause of a disease of unknown origin, and they did so with AIDS until French and American researchers identified a member of the retrovirus family as the culprit. In ''A Strange Virus of Unknown Origin,'' Dr

African sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease of humans and animals that is spread by the bites of tsetse flies, is a major health hazard that severely hinders the economic development of Africa and contributes to a protein shortage there. An area the size of the United States within Africa is rendered unpopulated by cattle because of the prevalence of the trypanosome parasite that causes trypanosomiasis, or African sleeping sickness. DFMO\'s role in trypanosomiasis came about when researchers interested in enzymes and cell growth began a series of biochemical manipulations in the mid-1970s. They were also interested in polyamines, substances that exist in all living cells and that play important roles in processes required for rapid cellular growth and replication. A key enzyme in the production of polyamines is ornithine decarboxylase, or ODS, and DFMO irreversibly inhibits ODS. Dr. Cyrus J. Bacchi of Pace University said a key step occurred in about 1977 when he began collaborating on DFMO after meeting Dr. Peter P. McCann of Merrell Dow at a Gordon conference. That led to the discovery of a dramatic curative effect of DFMO in mice; the drug cured the mice infected with a virulent strain of trypanosome within a week. Since then, DFMO has had widespread use as a biological tool in research, and chemists have begun synthesizing other suicide inhibitors in hopes of finding cures for other diseases

Dr. [Harry Meyer] said on the CBS News television program ''CBS Morning News'' that in French tests the drug had been reported ''to actually knock out the virus and suppress virus multiplication in the test tube, and there've been some indications that it may also suppress virus multiplication in people.'' The African swine fever virus infects pigs but is not known to infect humans. Its possible link to AIDS was first suggested two years ago by Jane Teas of the Harvard School of Public Health in a letter published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, and was raised again recently by The New York Native, a newspaper that reports on issues involving homosexuals. #160 Blood Samples Studied In the new study, which was undertaken in July, blood samples were obtained from 160 people who donated blood at the New York Blood Center and who gave samples for an AIDS blood test at doctors' offices and elsewhere. Of the 160 people whose blood was sampled, 46 had evidence of infection with the AIDS virus, designated HTLV-3 or LAV, and 114 did not

Clots in the left side of the heart appear to have been the source of the fragments that broke off and traveled in the blood to lodge in [Michael Drummond]'s brain to cause his strokes, according to lectures by and interviews with Dr. Don B. Olsen, who heads the Artificial Heart Unit at the University of Utah, where the Jarvik-7 was developed, and Dr. Mark M. Levinson, one of Drummond's surgeons. Six people have had implants of Jarvik-7 hearts. The two who have died, Dr. Barney B. Clark and Jack Burcham, did not suffer strokes. In addition to Drummond, three other Jarvik-7 recipients who did suffer strokes as complications remain alive. They are William J. Schroeder and Murray P. Haydon in Louisville and Leif Stenberg in Stockholm. For instance, Dr. Jack G. Copeland, the head of the University Medical Center team that used the Jarvik-7 heart as a bridge to transplant, used only one anticoagulant drug, heparin, on Drummond in the belief that it would be sufficient to prevent clots and strokes without the risk of bleeding. Such bleeding has been a major problem in other Jarvik-7 recipients