Dr. H. Clifford Lane

The early days were really very nice because everyone was excited and everyone wanted to figure out what was going on. Everyone had their own different little area of expertise. [Dr.] Henry Masur had taken care of AIDS patients in New York and he was here. Over at the FDA, a guy named [Dr.] Alain Rook, working with Gerry [Dr. Gerald] Quinnan, had expertise in cytomegalovirus and the immune response to cytomegalovirus. They were interested in studying the AIDS patients as well. You had people like myself who were immunology-oriented. There were people from the Cancer Institute–Ed [Dr. Edward] Gelmann, who had been in Bob Gallo's lab working on HTLV-1, had left Bob and was over here [in the Clinical Center], with an interest in the retrovirally induced diseases. He was working on AIDS before we knew it was a retrovirus. And there were people like [Dr.] Dan Longo, who were a little bit more peripheral at that point in time. Dan was interested in lymphomas and chemotherapeutic regimens, trying to make some contributions. So, there were a lot of people with different backgrounds coming in who were thrown together–not just from NIH, but from the FDA as well. [Dr.] Abe Macher, who was down in Anatomic Pathology at that time, had a strong interest in what was going on. Abe is one of the people who was bringing cadavers in to try to understand the disease. He would bring cadavers, from all round the country, to try to see what kinds of problems the patients had died of. He was doing his fellowship in pathology at that time. He had already done a fellowship in infectious diseases. There was a lot of interaction like that. That was a good time, I think.

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