Seth Berkley travels the world trying to arrange HIV vaccine clinical trials and stimulate HIV vaccine research. Much of the time, the only way to reach him is via his international cell phone number. But his traveling came to a screeching halt when he suffered a serious fracture of the fibula and torn ligaments in both legs while hiking in the Namibian desert last spring. The president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) in New York has been spending a lot more time at home. "I set the leg in the field," he says. Then he toughed out a night that he calls "the worst of my life," on a riverbed in a heavy rainstorm, while hoping for a helicopter evacuation.
At the hospital in Windhoek, after a phone consultation with a well-known US orthopedic surgeon, he and the other doctors decided that the best path was to operate. ...
