Diary Prequel Package — page 181

Princeton football game. Great weekend. Jenny, Meg and I watched the Sarah Palin - Joe Biden debate. What an idiot Palin is!! Stock Market is tumbling badly. It is scary as it looks like it is crashing as a result of the bank credit crunch that is causing anxiety of Wall Street. When this settles, I will rethink the advisability of my even being invested in Wall Street as opposed to safe Money Market investment or T bills. Oct. 6, 2008 - Big news today. Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology given to Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for HIV and to Harald Zur Hausen for HPV discovery.. This is a big slight to Gallo, likely because of the controversy from the 1980s. The Committee could have given the 3 (limit) to HIV and save HPV for another year; yet they combined them and thus Gallo was out since it is clear from the 1983 Science paper that Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi discovered the virus first, although Gallo proved cause effect one year later and discovered TCGF (IL-2) that allowed everyone to grow T cells in culture and hence grow the virus. Gave the after dinner address at the Woodrow Wilson Internal Center for Scholars Dinner for their Board of Trustees, Councilors, and Scholars at the Ronald Reagan Building in DC. Cool, crisp night. I was invited by Lee Hamilton. Many notable people there including Sam and Jan Donaldson, Marvin Kalb, Robin Cook, etc. I spoke on HIV/AIDS: An Historical Perspective. Talk extremely well received. Oct. 11 - 16, 2008 - Traveled to Cape Town, South Africa to deliver a keynote address at the 2008 AIDS Vaccine Meeting on "An HIV Vaccine: Science and Policy". The talk was very well received. I spoke of the particular challenges of HIV vaccinology compared with "classical" vaccinology. Weather was beautiful and the city was in my mind a cross between San Francisco and Rio de Janeiro. We took a drive on Monday AM, Oct. 13 around the countryside to vineyards and around the historical parts of the city. Most disturbing to me was the conditions that I saw at the "townships" a few miles outside of the city. Particularly disturbing was Khayelitsha township that seemed to go on for miles with huts that were made of corrugated tin roofs and plywood and other soft material. The huts were smack next to each other with very little room between them to even walk outside. Apparently they have electricity in some huts and common water sources and latrines, but I cannot imagine anyone living there. The black South Africans say that it is not as bad as it looks and they are gradually trying to phase them out and replace them with regular housing. I cannot judge since this is the first time that I have seen them, but I would flatten the whole thing now and build high-rises. Problem is that hundreds of thousands of people live there and you cannot just displace them now without a facility to put them in. I have some concern at this point that the Vaccine Enterprise in the person of Allan Bernstein is looking for ways to change the direction of HIV vaccine research even though he has been in the field only for months. He is a very good guy, but I repeat my usual statement of "everybody wants to be somebody" and "beware of people who do not