Before AIDS, Anthony Fauci turned a nearly always fatal disease into a curable one
Long before he became a household name, Anthony Fauci worked out how to re-dose cancer drugs against vasculitis, turning a condition that killed 98 percent of patients into one with a 93 percent remission rate. Rheumatologists later ranked it among the biggest treatment advances of their era.
Fauci grew up in Brooklyn after his birth on December 24, 1940, working the till with his mother and older sister in his father's pharmacy, which sat directly below the family flat. His roots were Italian: his father's people came from Sciacca in Sicily, his mother's from Naples. At Regis High School, a demanding Jesuit school in Manhattan, he captained the basketball team despite standing 5 ft 7 in, and settled on medicine halfway through.
At the College of the Holy Cross he read classics, taking Greek, Latin, French and philosophy alongside pre-med courses, and spent summers on a construction crew. He graduated in 1962 and finished first in his class at Cornell Medical College in 1966, specialising in infectious disease and immunology.
He joined the National Institutes of Health in 1968 at the allergy and infectious diseases institute, NIAID, rose to lead its Laboratory of Immunoregulation in 1980 and became institute director in 1984, a post he held until 2022. He repeatedly turned down the job of running the whole NIH. His research clarified how the immune response is regulated and produced treatments for once-lethal conditions such as polyarteritis nodosa; a 1985 survey of American rheumatologists placed that work among the most important patient-care advances of the previous two decades. Between 1983 and 2002 he was among the most cited scientists in any field.
His NIAID years were defined by HIV. He won the National Medal of Science in 2005 for work on how the virus causes disease, and in 2008 George W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his part in PEPFAR, the AIDS relief programme he helped create. He also pushed biodefence vaccines after 9/11 and worked on SARS, MERS and Ebola. He advised every president from Ronald Reagan onward, and during COVID-19 served on the White House task force and then as chief medical adviser from 2021 to 2022.
Source: Anthony Fauci
