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Fauci: When I came down to what was the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation, of which Dr. Wolff was the laboratory chief as well as being the clinical director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, I wanted to work on cellular immunology. But, interestingly enough, as popular as cellular immunology is now, there really were not very many cellular immunologists at the time, and certainly not in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation. I went to work with Dr. John Johnson, who now practices rheumatology in Nashville, Tennessee. John was an immunochemist at the time, but he allowed me to work on problems in cellular immunology. I had to go around to different groups in different laboratories to learn the fundamentals of cellular immunology under the auspices of the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation. It was a great experience and a testimony to the flexibility of people like Dr. Wolff and Dr. Johnson, who allowed me to work in that field even though it wasn't their field of expertise. Dr. Wolff was mainly working on the pathogenesis of fever. I told him I didn't want to work on that, although it was a very interesting topic. I wanted to learn some basic cellular immunology with the ultimate aim of going into what has been my theme for the past twenty-one years–human immunobiology and the regulation of the human immune system. I was then, and still am, extremely interested in clinical medicine, and I have been successful in being able to mix and meld together the very fundamental, basic concepts of immunology with clinical medicine. It was Dr. Wolff who encouraged me. I worked on some projects looking at the regulation of the immune system in animals, with rabbit and guinea pig models. I learned from Dr. Baruj Benacerraf, who was down the hall in the Laboratory of Immunology; from [Dr.] David Katz, who worked with him; and from [Dr.] Carl Pierce and a few others. There were in the laboratory working with Dr. Johnson two people who have gone on to be very successful and prominent immunologists–[Dr.] Alexander Lawton, who is now at Vanderbilt [University] and chairman of pediatrics, and [Dr.] Herbert Reynolds, who is now chief of medicine at the Hershey Medical Center of the Pennsylvania State University. They were just Fellows with me at the time, and we taught each other immunology. However, though I liked it very much, my main desire was to get back to the New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center and to be a clinician. That's what I really wanted to do. I liked the scientific environment, but my real love was taking care of patients.