Three days short of thirty years after writing an early, perhaps the first, newspaper story on what would become to be known as AIDS, the nominally retired – as are several of the NYTimes’s old-guard of science writers – Lawrence K. Altman reviews today with somber aplomb and a tinge of chagrin what has happened since. His chagrin is displaced a bit – he notes that an early New England Journal of Medicine editorial that reviewed the puzzling disease never even considered that a novel virus or other microbe was responsible. One must note that his July 3, 1981 article similarly did not carry any evidence that Dr. Altman even asked sources about that possibility (to be sure, the story focussed only on one common sign of a new disease – the rare cancer-like lesions of Karposi’s sarcoma). Not that he was alone. Dave Perlman and I at the SF Chronicle, writing at about the same time and slightly behind Altman, didn’t get ahead of the medical field at all, either. A feature I wrote in October that year, which recognized the broad range of manifestations of what was to be known as AIDS, has to my retrospective dismay no hint that a novel infection might be at work.

The story by necessity omits many things, one being the epic Montagnier-Gallo rivalry. But it strikes the right balance. Two key passages:

For the patients who died in the early years, the wait for effective treatments — a decade or so after the first reports of the disease — was far too long. But that is a relatively short time in the history of medicine to develop treatments and preventions; after all, many incurable cancers and other diseases have been known for centuries.

And the concluding graf:

One of the most daunting challenges is to stay vigilant until AIDS is at last conquered. Consider that it has been almost a quarter century since federal health officials confidently predicted that a vaccine would be available in the late 1980s — a promise that has yet to be fulfilled.

Other notable headlines:

• Abigail Zuger – BOOKS – Broad Brushstrokes Obscure a View of Brain Trauma ; A good book, it says here, is out on a peculiar episode of post-stroke transformation of one patient. It has to do with art, and with drastic personality deficit. Read it for Zuger’s explosive frustration, which she vents at the very end (better by not looking ahead but I’ll give away the reason for her anger). The book has no pictures, inexplicable even given the cost of adding some color plates to the imprint. We’ve all seen examples. Such printed books give more reason to surrender to electronic slates where it may not be so costly to include vital illus. Another example that had me seething – the Wash. Post’s Joel Achenbach wrote a gripping, inside-the-pressure-cooker book, A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea, on the BP oil spill. It does not bother with much hand wringing over turtles or shrimpers, but is heavy on who did what to spill the oil and then to stop it, full of grit, grease, and detail on heavy hardware. It lays the guilt collectively on all of us. Fine, and yet not a single damned diagram of a drill string, a BOP, a riser. Nothin’. I recommend it … but no pictures?!!
• Felicity Barringer – Groundwater Depletion Is Detected From Space ; Some welcome detail, and back story, on the GRACE satellites that, dancing around Earth, do geodesy and in the bargain hint where the water is coming and going, including in aquifers. Not fundamentally new. Writers have written it before, but seldom with such perspective. I did look up some of the earliest coverage – such as this 2002 APstory by Andrew Bridges with some of the same angles, and some additional ones (such as the Aqua satellite of a special kind of A-train fame). The latter piece is diverting for another reason. This instance ran in the Southeast Missourian, a smallish regional pub that back than had, it appears from this scanned copy of Bridges’s yarn, a regular science page. One wonders if it, by any small chance, still does.
• Tara Parker-Pope: Tuning In to Patients’ Cries for Help; Boy will this ring a bell for a lot of former and current hospital patients. And the solution to a near-universal complaint is so simple – hire an  operator. Don’t expect every nurse to drop what she or he is doing, every time, right away, at each interruption for the umpteenth time by a little red light or ding-dong.
• Jane E. Brody: A Good Night’s Sleep Isn’t a Luxury; It’s a Necessity ; What could be a toss-off topic, handled well. Also source of the delicately composed graphic artistry top right.

Lot’s More: Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

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