Day 1

Research on transmission of HIV should have been a top priority for the past decade. Instead it has become a sideline. The truth is that too many scientists are spending their energies on esoteric aspects of AIDS research, such as snipping up the genome of the virus into tiny bits to see what happens when you substitute one bit with another. This sort of laboratory “tinkertoying”, as one researcher put it, is a lot more elegant than the messy business of looking at genital secretions. It’s also a lot easier to do than complex studies of transmission which include prying into people’s sexual habits and maintaining their co-operation over months and years. But that does not make molecular biology more important.

‘Comment’ New Scientist 5 June 1993 p. 3.