How AIDS Has Changed The Nature Of Research

In his best-selling expose, And the Band Played On (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1987), San Francisco Chronicle reporter Randy Shilts documented how AIDS was largely ignored by the research and funding communities until the disease reached crisis proportions. Today, however, AIDS has become a glamorous field of investigation. Because the United States research establishment has become convinced that proceeding at an accelerated pace might help save lives, the processes of proposal review and d

Barbara Spector

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James Weinrich, an assistant adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, says it is now common knowledge that "if your research can be shown to be AIDS-related, funding can be obtained more easily." Thus, he says, researchers are "recasting pre-existing grant [applications] or moving in an AIDS direction" in an attempt to use the speedup to their best advantage.

While fields like immunology are benefiting from the mobilization for crisis, says a biochemist who asks not to be identified, "there's not enough funding for investigations about sexuality." This is a serious omission, he says, because "you can't understand AIDS without understanding sexuality." The reluctance to fund such studies, the biochemist says, stems from "a strong discrimination against research on sexual orientation"; when an openly gay scientist submits a proposal for a gay-related project, the thinking in the establishment is, " `He's that gay scientist--he's just doing ...

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