Current
Position
• Director of the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes
of Health, Bethesda, Md. (1984 to present)
• Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation,
Div. of Intramural Research
• Section Head, Immunopathenogenesis Section
Education and Honors
• MD, Cornell University Medical College, New
York
• Internship/Residency, The New York Hospital/Cornell
Medical Center
• 13th Most Cited Scientist (1983 to 2002), Institute
for Scientific Information
• 9th Most Cited Scientist in Immunology (1993
to 2003), Institute for Scientific Information
• 30 Honorary Doctorates
• Lifetime Achievement Award (2005), American
Association of Immunologists
• ‘Extraordinary Accomplishments’ Award
(2004),
New York Academy of Medicine
• Top 50 Scientific Leaders (2003), Scientific
American magazine
• 2003 Ellis Island Family Heritage Award for
Medicine and Science
• 2002 Albany Medical Center Prize in
Medicine and Biomedical Research
• 2001 Frank Annunzio Award in the
Humanitarian Field from the Christopher Columbus Fellowship
Foundation
• America’s Best in Science and
Medicine (2001), CNN/Time Magazine
• Frank Brown Berry Prize in Federal
Medicine (1999), U.S. Medical and
Delta Dental Plan of California
• Author, Coauthor, or Editor of
more than 1,000 scientific
publications
Current Memberships
• National Academy of Sciences
• American Academy of Arts and
Sciences
• Institute of Medicine (Council Member)
• American Philosophical Society
• Royal Danish Academy of Science and
Letters
• American College of Physicians
• American Society for Clinical Investigation
• Association of American Physicians
• Infectious Diseases Society of America
• American Association of Immunologists
• American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology
• Editor, Harrison’s Principles of Internal
Medicine
The world is faced with tremendous medical challenges
that now, all too often, have come to include the word
pandemic. Consider the fact that HIV/AIDS, malaria,
and tuberculosis alone are directly responsible for
more than 4 million deaths per year. That’s one
death every eight seconds of every minute of every
day for just three diseases. TB, often thought of as
a cured disease, will be responsible this year for
two to three times the 220,000 people killed in last
year’s Indian Ocean tsunami.
More than 2.5 million people will die of AIDS this
year, many of them children—in Africa alone.
And malaria, an ancient disease mostly preventable
with DDT sprayings, will still claim more than 1 million
lives this year.
And on the horizon is the threat of a pandemic influenza
that could rival the severity of the 1918 influenza
pandemic, which killed between 20 and 40 million people
worldwide in just one year. With all of these monstrously
large challenges to the world’s public health,
the search for this year’s R&D Magazine Scientist
of the Year was comparatively easy. The editors of
R&D are proud to award our 40th Annual Scientist
of the Year to Anthony Fauci, MD, Director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) in
Bethesda, Md.
Fauci joins Steven Rosenberg, the Chief of Surgery
at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute and R&D’s
1990 Scientist of the Year. Other life scientists that
have received this distinction include the Broad Institute’s
Eric Lander (2003), geneticist J. Craig Venter (1998),
systems biologist Leroy Hood (1993), Nobel Prize winner
Kary Mullis (1991), and more.
Fauci has been the Director of NIAID for the past 21
years—the longest term of any NIAID Director
and second longest of any active NIH director. But
seniority, by no means, is indicative of Fauci’s
contribution to medical science. Indeed, he has focused
a great deal of his research on the pathogenesis and
treatment of immune-mediated diseases. He pioneered
the field of human immunoregulation by making a number
of basic scientific observations that now serve as
the basis for understanding the regulation of the human
immune response.
Fauci also has made significant contributions to the
understanding of how the AIDS virus destroys the body’s
defenses, which then leads to the body’s susceptibility
to often-fatal infections. And he also defined the
mechanisms of how HIV is transmitted throughout the
body. He continues to devote much of his personal research
time to identifying the mechanisms of the HIV infection
and the scope of the body’s immune response to
the AIDS retrovirus.
Thirst for knowledge
Fauci traces his drive to succeed partly to the strictness
of his Jesuit upbringing, first at Regis High School
in New York City, and then at Holy Cross College
in Worcester, Mass. “At Holy Cross I got
a hybrid BA in Greek Classics and pre-med,” says
Fauci. The Jesuits created an environment and a
demand for excellence that “was profound,” according
to Fauci. They also created an atmosphere and an
environment to seek the truth, to obtain a command
of the intellect in your specific area, and to
seek public service.
Anthony
Fauci accepts R&D' Magazine's 2005
Scientist of the Year award from Editor in
Chief Tim Studt at the R&D Magazine/R&D 100
Awards banquet held in Chicago's Navy Pier
on October 20th. Photo: Ali Ibrihim
These events just seemed to flow together, according
to Fauci. “All of this was pivotal to where
I am now,” he says. “There wasn’t
any one defining moment that I said I want to be
a doctor. I didn’t come from a family of doctors,
it’s just that if you were a top student, you
either picked law, medicine, science, or engineering,
or you became a priest. It was just a confluence
of things on top of which I got a heavy dose of having
to do something good for society,” he says.
So he became a doctor.
After Holy Cross, Fauci went to the Cornell Univ.
Medical College in New York City for his MD, followed
by a year of internship and residency at the New
York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. “The
public service, the impact on people, all created
an attitude of contributing to society,” says
Fauci. “These were important driving forces
to what I wanted to do with my life.”
Following his internship, Fauci joined the NIH in
1968 as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of
Clinical Investigation (LCI) at the NIAID. In 1974,
he was promoted to be Head of the Clinical Physiology
Section of the LCI, and in 1980 was appointed Chief
of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation, a position
he still holds today.
In 1984, Fauci was appointed Director of the NIAID,
one of 27 NIH Institutes that will command a total
of more than $27 billion in federal R&D funds
this year, second only to the Dept. of Defense. In
the 21 years that Fauci has been Director, he has
seen the NIAID grow from the sixth largest NIH Institute
to the second largest (to the National Cancer Institute,
and only by 8%) with an annual R&D budget of
about $4.4 billion.
Managing by example
Front
row (left to right): Tae-wook Chun,
Ph.D.; Audrey Kinter; Anthony S. Fauci,
M.D.; James Arthos Ph.D.; Claudia Cicala,
Ph.D. Second row (left to right): Mark
Dybul, M.D.; Susan Moir, Ph.D.; Domenico
Mavilio, M.D.; Shyam Kottilil, M.D.,
Ph.D.; Angela Malaspina, Ph.D. Photo:
NIAID
Identifying
and Developing Cures
While R&D’s 2005 Scientist of the Year,
Dr. Anthony Fauci has a full-time job in directing
research at the National Institutes of Health’s
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases (NIAID), he keeps active in the actual
research of his institute by continuing to run
one of its labs—that of the Laboratory
of Immunoregulation, a position he has held for
the past 25 years. He also is Section Head of
the Immunopathogenesis Section of that lab.
There are two groups of labs within the NIAID—the
Division of Intramural Research Labs (DIR) and
the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) Labs. DIR labs
conduct peer-reviewed laboratory and clinical
research. These labs consist of two or more smaller
labs (or sections) headed by tenured researchers.
The VRC, which is jointly funded by the NIAID,
National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the National
Institutes of Health Office of AIDS Research,
encompasses all stages of vaccine development,
including basic research, design and development
of vaccine candidates, pre-clinical testing,
production of vaccine candidates, human clinical
trials, and efficacy testing. Its primary research
focus is to conduct research to develop an effective
AIDS vaccine.
Fauci is recognized for his driving demand for excellence,
and noted for working 12 to 14 hours every day
at his job. He’s motivated to work this hard
by the enormous challenges of his job. The NIH
is obviously a world leader in medicine. “We
determine public health policies and I personally
feel that I have an impact on the health of the
country and the world. That’s my motivation.”
Fauci thrives on the excitement and the action of
curing, or at the very least alleviating, serious,
life-threatening diseases and never forgets the seriousness
of the work that he’s involved in, and the
fact that people’s lives hang in the balance. “We
all have to make sacrifices, and sometimes it even
gets to the point where we feel that sleep encroaches
on that work. To manage the workload and to get the
results we need, we have to be efficient and not
waste time.”
Fauci motivates his NIAID staff similarly, ‘by
example.’ “Organizations follow the leadership
they’re given,” he says. “And our
leadership demands nothing short of excellence. It
permeates the Institute. It’s clear to me as
a leader what has to be done, and we work to instill
that attitude to the staff.”
And the challenges, for those at the NIAID, have
profound consequences. “There are the constant
challenges of emerging and re-emerging diseases,” says
Fauci. “There’s HIV, West Nile virus,
tuberculosis, pandemic flu, and SARS. For some diseases
there are good therapies; but for other diseases,
they’re raging out of control.
Fauci claims to have a low-grade sense of anxiety
that acts as an energizing force that keeps driving
him to each new scientific challenge. “We’ve
accomplished a lot over the years, but in this position
you never get the chance to become bored,” he
says. “You’re constantly learning and
you always have to put the challenges you face in
their proper perspective.”
The
37 NIAID labs are comprised of:
DIR Labs
• Allergic Diseases
• Cellular and Molecular Immunology
• Clinical Infectious Diseases
• Host Defenses
• Human Bacterial Pathogenesis
• Immunogenetics
• Immunology
• Immunopathology
• Immunoregulation
• Infectious Diseases
• Intracellular Parasites
• Malaria and Vector Research
• Molecular Microbiology
• Parasitic Diseases
• Persistent Viral Disease
• Viral Disease
• Zoonotic Pathogens
• Bacterial Toxins and Therapeutics**
• Malaria Vaccine Development**
• Molecular and Cellular Immunogenetics**
VRC Labs
• Advanced Clinical Development
• Animal Medicine
• Biodefense Research
• BSL-3 Virology Core
• Cellular Immunology
• Clinical Trials Core
• Flow Cytometry Core
• Human Immunology
• Immunology
• Immunology Core
• ImmunoTechnology
• Structural Biology
• Structural Virology
• Vaccine Production Program
• Vector Core
• Viral Pathogenesis
• Virology
** — Individual lab sections not related to a
DIR lab.
The biggest challenge Fauci and the NIAID face at
the present time is the potential threat from pandemic
flu. While NIH influenza vaccine and preparedness
funding has more than quadrupled in the past two
years, from $101 million in 2003 to $419 million
in 2005, “we’re still racing against
time.” The NIH will spend about $119 million
on influenza research to study the pathogenicity
of pandemic influenza viruses, the transmission of
influenza viruses among different animal species,
and the mechanisms of animal to human transmission.
The NIAID awarded contracts in 2004 to develop a
vaccine against the H5N1 avian influenza as part
of its preparedness program with safety/immunogenicity
trials from the initial doses scheduled to begin
this fall. Two million doses were ordered to “better
prepare the nation for a pandemic.” The whole
influenza vaccine enterprise is quite fragile, according
to Fauci, with sole suppliers in some situations
creating the possibility of shortages as what occurred
in the winter of 2004-5 where the UK abruptly shut
down a major supplier of flu vaccine to the U.S. “We
continue to push the development of new tools, such
as new delivery methods which could alleviate shortage
issues when they occur.”
Rebuilding the infrastructure
Fauci also continues to fight the good fights outside
of the technical area. “In the U.S., we’re
at the cusp of losing a step in the quality of
the life science graduates coming into the marketplace,” he
says. “We’re not at the overwhelmingly
better level that we used to be at, compared to
the graduates and university systems in other countries.
Our university system has not kept up with our
leadership in the sciences. We need to push the
sciences and educate our students better and to
do that we have to start educating them at a much
earlier level.”
In the relationships between government and industry
in the life sciences, “there’s more of
a dichotomy now than there used to be between the
biomedical research being performed in government
and industry,” says Fauci. “We need to
translate our research into more meaningful products.
There has to be a greater collaboration between government
and academia, especially in the biomedical research
arena.”
While continuing to support the development of U.S.
academia and government-industry relationships, Fauci
also finds himself more involved than ever before
in the international aspect of medical research.
His work in the HIV/AIDS area and the Bush Administration’s
pledge of $15 billion in aid over five years to combat
the global HIV/AIDS pandemic especially have pushed
him in that direction.
While there are about 1 million people in North America
living with HIV/AIDS, there are another 38.4 million
people outside of North America with the disease
that need to be treated. Fauci now finds himself
traveling to Africa and other places in the world
more often than he used to in the past. Even the
international aspect of the influenza vaccine contracts
that the NIH creates “has become a substantial
part of what we do.” As has become readily
apparent, infectious diseases don’t recognize
international borders.
The future
So does Anthony Fauci believe that there will be
an unforeseen life science problem or crisis within
the next five to 10 years? “Unquestionably,
yes, absolutely! We’ve had the AIDS situation
now for 23 years and it’s only marginally
stable in the U.S. and mostly out of control everywhere
else,” he says. “We got lucky with
SARS in that it was able to be identified and controlled
relatively quickly and was medically manageable.
We may not be so lucky with the next pandemic influenza.”
“
In this business, we’ve learned that we should
never feel that we have enough safeguards, and that
we cannot ever rest on our laurels,” he says.
With a person of Fauci’s stature at the helm,
we can be assured that we’ll always have as
many safeguards against infectious diseases as are
humanly possible, and that Fauci will always be pushing
the system and himself for more.
