In Their Own Words... NIH Researchers Recall the Early Years of AIDS

...

Rodrigues: Would you tell us about your training and your professional background before you came to the NIH, how you came to the NIH, and how you became involved with HIV disease?

Blattner: I did my undergraduate medical school training at Washington University in St. Louis. I had my first experience in epidemiology during summer rotation through [Dr.] Lou Allen Sale, who was the head of preventive medicine at Washington University. He arranged for me to go to Mexico as a COSTEP [Commissioned Officers Student Training and Extern Program], which is a PHS-sponsored [Public Health Service] activity. I spent three months in Mexico City working at a children's hospital, trying to assist in some studies of nutritional determinations, particularly measuring red cell enzyme assays in children with malnutrition. It was not scientifically productive, because we spent most of the summer trying to get reagents shipped down to Mexico to run the assays. The problems we experienced in trying to get a fairly routine substrate for an enzyme assay taught me a lot about the prolonged delays that can occur in international research programs. If I had been in St. Louis, I could have gotten the substrate in twenty-four hours. It took me two months to get it in Mexico City. There were the problems of transportation, customs, and living and working in the Third World environment. I think that often we do not appreciate what our overseas colleagues have to put up with–they do not have things we take for granted. It has helped me, subsequently, in my efforts in the international arena, to be a little more sympathetic about why things do not happen pronto.

...