Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [107]
I leaned back in my chair and glanced across the hallway, compelled by that queer human reflex to look for something we’re told is not there. What is it that we think we’ll see?
“They took the room,” Levy added.
“Someone ‘took’ the room?”
“The Smithsonian, yeah.” A bemused twinkle lit his gray-green eyes. “They came in and just took the whole thing, where we’d isolated the virus. The lab hood, my lab jacket, my notebooks, everything. The sign on the door. One day it’s going to be in the Smithsonian.”
As he continued the tale, I realized that, to him, the furniture and equipment hadn’t been so much historical as old and in the way. What seemed to truly please the sixty-four-year-old scientist was that the university renovated the lab, providing him a tidy new space for his ongoing research.
Finding HIV was one thing. “Conquering this virus,” as he put it, has occupied him since. In the mid-1980s, for example, Levy developed a technique for inactivating HIV in the clotting factor preparations used by hemophiliacs. “Then I became sort of an expert with blood products—How do you get rid of HIV without destroying the proteins you’re dealing with?” It’s a good indication of the man that he modestly describes this work as “helping out.” Levy’s pioneering heat treatment method, adopted by the blood products industry, has saved many lives.
Levy, author of the seminal text HIV and the Pathogenesis of AIDS (1994), among other books, was also the first scientist to report that HIV could cross the blood-brain barrier, the filtration system that normally protects the brain from harmful substances carried in the bloodstream. To me, the term blood-brain barrier had always given the impression of a single dam-like structure at the base of the skull, where I’d imagined it was located, but the barrier is actually the layer of tightly packed cells that make up the walls of all brain capillaries. Levy correctly concluded that HIV’s ability to pass through this barrier led to neurological diseases such as AIDS-related dementia. Since some of the earliest available anti-HIV drugs did not cross the blood-brain barrier, his findings underscored the necessity of developing drugs that could.
I had met Dr. Levy in person once before today. In this same building, eleven years earlier and twelve floors below, standing before six hundred people in a five-hundred-seat lecture hall, he and two other prominent researchers had spoken at a public forum I’d organized as a staff member of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. The free event was the kick-off for my 1992 “Be Here for the Cure” media campaign. Like the campaign, the forum was a look forward. The topic: prospects for a cure. As the event was about to get under way, I adjusted the lectern microphone and scanned the packed auditorium, a great throng of gay men, mostly. People stood in the back, jammed the aisles, and sat on the floor before the stage where Marcus Conant, the pioneering AIDS physician; Mathilde Krim, cofounder of amfAR; and Levy were seated. I spotted Steve, who was saving a place for me on the stairway, and went to join him.
Both the setting and the stature of the speakers gave this gathering a different feel from the frantic town-hall meetings of two years earlier. The mood had changed, too. It was as if, finally, science had given hope a scaffolding to build on. Dr. Conant spoke about a new treatment strategy, “combination therapy,” now standard protocol, and reported how taking prophylaxis against Pneumocystis pneumonia increased life expectancy. Dr. Krim talked about promising vaccines under development. But the night