Like
many other researchers who manned the front lines during the
emergence of AIDS, Dr. William Blattner remembers a complex
problem scientists struggled to understand. AIDS was really
the proverbial elephanteverybody had his or her hands
on the elephant but could understand only a portion of its components.
Dr. Blattner approached the disease as he had many others, using
the tools of epidemiology to seek the factors that determine
the incidence, frequency, and distribution of an illness. A
pioneer in using laboratory techniques to answer epidemiological
questions, he began looking at retroviruses before AIDS had
emerged, joining with Dr. Robert Gallo and others in the search
for retroviruses that could cause human cancers. His research
played an important role in establishing the link between human
T-lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) and a type of T-cell leukemia
observed in the Caribbean and Japan, a discovery that surprised
many cancer researchers.
When a rare form of skin cancer began to appear with increasing
frequency in young, gay men, Dr. Blattner helped track the disease.
That cancer, Kaposis sarcoma, became known as a common
sign of AIDS, and the early cases seen by Dr. Blattner were
a harbinger of the coming epidemic. There has never been
a disease like AIDS, he says, I hope to God there
is not another one.
After 22 years of service at the NIH, Dr. Blattner retired and
joined Drs. Robert Gallo and Robert Redfield to found the Institute
of Human Virology in Baltimore, Md., where he is director of
the division of epidemiology and prevention. He is also a professor
in the department of medicine at the University of Maryland
School of Medicine. |