AIDS Research Program Needs Boost
Arnold Levine led study that examined NIH's efforts in combating the disease
The United States AIDS research program needs an infusion of diverse, new scientists, a renewed effort in vaccine research, and augmented research to further explore the human immune system, according to a report by more than 100 scientists and other experts, including Arnold J. Levine, the chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology, who led the study. The review was launched in February 1995, when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked the panel of experts to examine the agency's efforts in combating AIDS and to report its findings to an advisory council in the NIH Office of AIDS Research. The report, which Levine calls "hard-hitting and honest," calls for a major restructuring of the program to streamline research, strengthen high-quality programs, and eliminate inadequate ones. The 40-page report was released in March.
The U.S. AIDS research program needs a "midcourse correction," said Levine. "We need to step back and try to prevent the disease and not cure it," he added.
This evaluation is the first comprehensive review of AIDS research at NIH, which has been conducting and supporting AIDS research since 1981, when the AIDS epidemic was first recognized. This fiscal year, NIH's budget for AIDS research is $1.4 billion. The panel didn't recommend increasing the funding, said Levine, because the NIH can make improvements within the existing budget.
The panel made 14 recommendations. Of primary importance, said Levine, is one that calls for the redistribution of research funding from the central control of NIH to diverse scientists at universities and research institutions. The report found that NIH programs discourage recruitment of young scientists and tend to deflect original and innovative research ideas. But to advance in finding a cure for AIDS and preventing the disease, said Levine, the program needs "diversity of opinions and research directions." To this end, the report calls for a doubling, to $200 million, of the research budget allocated to support unsolicited investigator-initiated research.
The report also calls for a major, renewed effort in vaccine research. This effort has been underfunded, according to the report, when developing an AIDS vaccine should be the agency's highest priority. A major problem in combating the disease is its resistance to drugs, said Levine, adding that prevention is the best way to combat AIDS. He believes that scientists will eventually develop a vaccine, but he's not sure how effective it will be; a vaccine probably won't eliminate the need for safe-sex practices.
To prevent the transmission of HIV, the report recommends increased research on social and behavioral interventions: looking for better ways to get people to use condoms, for example, said Levine. And the report encourages the further development of biomedical technologies such as topical microbicides, condoms, and new treatments for sexually transmitted diseases.
The panel suggested several structural changes to the research program, among them the creation of a single integrated adult clinical-trials program housed at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Previously, there had been several clinical trials networks, which resulted in duplication of efforts, competition for funding, and lower quality research, said Levine.
Research to better understand the human immune system should be accelerated, the report found, and the basic-science research effort on AIDS-associated opportunistic infections (which generally don't harm healthy people but that are life-threatening complications of AIDS) should be invigorated. The report also found that the AIDS research program needs better coordination among different research projects within the NIH and better cooperation with outside scientists and with pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.
Levine said NIH has already started implementing recommendations from the report, which "will reinvigorate research and help to bring a cure closer."
The World Health Organization estimates 20 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, 4.5 million have developed AIDS, and 2.5 million have died.

Four Professors Retire (William Bonini '48, Natalie Davis, Robert Mark, Thomas Stix *54)
After years devoted to teaching and scholarship at Princeton, four senior faculty members have transferred to emeritus status: Professor of Geophysics and Geological Engineering and Professor of Civil Engineering William E. Bonini '48 *49, Professor of History Natalie Zemon Davis, Professor of Civil Engineering and Architecture Robert Mark, and Professor of Astrophysical Sciences Thomas H. Stix *54.
Bonini is an expert on interpreting gravity and magnetic anomalies in terms of earth structure. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and came to Princeton as an instructor in 1953. He has directed the Program in Geological Engineering since 1973. In addition, he directed undergraduate studies from 1973 to 1994. In 1992 he received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. For more than 30 summers he directed a geology field course at Red Lodge, Montana, where he also led a popular alumni college.
Davis has been at Princeton since 1978. A founder of the women's studies program, she directed the Shelby Cullom Davis ['30] Center for Historical Studies from 1990 to 1994. Davis has taught courses in society and the sexes in early modern Europe and in 16th- and 17thcentury French history. A 1949 graduate of Smith College, she earned her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1959. In 1983 she received Princeton's Berhman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. Next fall she will be a professor of literary theory at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.
Mark pioneered the application of modern engineering modeling to study the structure of historic buildings. His work, which has influenced both the discipline of architectural history and the field of building conservation, has been mainly concerned with developing optical-modeling techniques. He founded the architecture and engineering program and chaired it from 1981 to 1990. Mark earned a professional degree in civil engineering from the College of the City of New York in 1952.
Stix, who was appointed to the research staff of the Plasma Physics Laboratory in 1953 and to the faculty in 1962, was responsible for the graduate Program in Plasma Physics from its inception in 1961 to 1991, the same year he received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. Stix graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1948. He is known for his work on radiofrequency plasma heating and the theory of wave propagation in plasmas. Stix was acting director of the Center for Jewish Life in 199495 and served last year as president of the Princeton Hillel Foundation.

Faculty File: From the Insane to the Nearly Normal (History Professor Elizabeth Lunbeck)
Today, about half the people who seek psychiatric help have no diagnosable illness, and instead have trouble with everyday problems such as marriage and work. But that wasn't always the case. Nineteenth-century alienists, the forebears of American psychiatrists, were essentially gatekeepers of the insane. They managed large asylums, where patients were locked up against their wills. In the early 20th century, however, a group of pioneering psychiatrists took it upon themselves to redefine the discipline from a specialty that concerned itself primarily with insanity to one that equally concerned itself with normal people and their problems. How America's early therapists shifted their discipline from society's margins to the cultural mainstream is the subject of The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton University Press, 1994), by Elizabeth A. Lunbeck, an associate professor of history. Her area of expertise borders several fields: gender history and theory, intellectual history, and the history of science.
Whereas alienists' discipline was deemed a nonscientific, custodial specialty, argues Lunbeck, a number of America's early psychiatrists saw themselves as men of science and aligned themselves with the forces of progress. They established new kinds of institutions, modeled on hospitals, not asylums. They lobbied for new laws that would yield patients who were "nearly normal." And they laid "conceptual foundations for their specialty, delineating a realm of everyday concerns-sex, marriage, womanhood and manhood; work, ambition, worldly failure; habits, desires, inclinations-as properly psychiatric and bringing them within their purview," writes Lunbeck, who last fall won three awards for The Psychiatric Persuasion.
The American Studies Association cited it as the best book in the field, The Journal of the History of Ideas called it the best book in intellectual history, and the History of Science Society named it the best book on the history of women in science.
Her study focuses on the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, which exists today as the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and is located next to Harvard Medical School. Boston was the capital of psychiatry from about 1900 to 1920. And the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, the most advanced of Boston's mental-health institutions, was the professional home of this group of energetic psychiatrists.
Key to Lunbeck's research were thousands of patient records produced by the social workers and psychiatrists at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital. "It took me many years to figure out how to use them," says Lunbeck, whose research started as a dissertation at Harvard, from which she earned her Ph.D. in 1984. The records produced a window into the patients' lives and included moral judgments and minutiae of their lives, such as what napkins they used and what they ate.
When she started her research, she thought she would find what other scholars had found, "that psychiatrists were rounding up deviants, locking them up, and doing so in the name of greater order and control," she says. But her quantitative study didn't support that assumption. Eventually she realized that their aim was to regulate themselves and instill in patients the desire to police themselves and engage in self-scrutiny "Basically, I threw away the dissertation," she says, and reresearched, reconceptualized, and rewrote everything. Her work on the book spanned 10 years and the birth of her two children.
Gender also came into play in the new science that was practiced. Psychiatrists criticized the Victorian notion of men's and women's natures as sharply dichotomized; and they argued for a world of equality between men and women. But at the same time, "their vision was very gendered," says Lunbeck. They blamed lax sexual morals of the day on independent women who didn't conform to the domestic and passive role that was considered the norm, while exempting men from blame. The psychiatrists created such categories as "hypersexual" for a willfully passionate woman who couldn't control her desire for pleasure. Gender also played a part in the professional battles between the male psychiatrists and the female social workers. The psychiatrists sought to set themselves apart from the social workers, who in their view were engaged in women's work.
Some readers, says Lunbeck, have been confused by her perspective and read the book as a condemnation of psychiatry when in fact she has a great deal of respect for the intellectual project that they were engaged in. "My aim in the book," she says, was "to understand psychiatry and to understand the roots of psychiatry that we have today."
The world of psychiatry and its intersection with culture will also be the subject of her next project, which looks at the connections that 20th-century social commentators have made between character and society. She will examine how personality disorders such as narcissism have been shaped by cultural commentary and then used to explain what's going on in the culture. Lunbeck studies the history of psychiatry, she says, because she finds the intellectual side of the field-"psychiatrists' attempts to theorize human nature and classify personalities"-fascinating.
-Kathryn F. Greenwood

In Brief
Paw award: "Putting Away Mosquera," a feature article by Dan White '65 published in the November 8 paw, won a bronze medal in the Council for Advancement and Support of Education's annual contest for best articles of the year. The director of the Alumni Council and a frequent paw contributor, White tells the story of the successful prosecution of a Colombian assassin for the Medellín cartel by Cheryl Pollak '75, an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and Beth Wilkinson '84, an assistant prosecutor.

Honors: Irvin Glassman, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering, among the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer. Glassman was cited for his contributions as a researcher, author, editor, and educator, who established a school of combustion and propulsion that inspired generations of engineers and academicians. He joined the faculty in 1950. The Art Museum won two awards in the 1996 American Association of Museums Publications Design Competition. The museum's invitation and catalogue for the exhibit, "The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership," both won second prizes in their respective categories. The catalogue is a comprehensive publication on the ideology, ritual, and political significance of the art of the ancient civilization of the Olmec, the mother culture of Mesoamerica.

Physics auditorium: The Richard S. Reynolds Foundation of Richmond, Virginia, has pledged $1 million for a new state-of-the-art auditorium for the teaching of physics. The Reynolds family has Princeton ties over three generations: David P. '38, his nephews Richard S. "Major" '56 and the late J. Sargeant '58, and his son R. Roland '93. David and Major Reynolds serve as trustees for the Reynolds Foundation. The new auditorium, which will seat 300 students, will be the central facility in a new building for teaching undergraduate physics.