[Letter to Mary Russell from Jon Cohen]

August 30, 1990

Mary Russell
Spin
6 West 18th St.
New York, NY 10011
Dear Ms. Russell,
I am a friend of Jeff Morley's and he gave me your name. I am
writing a book on AIDS vaccine research for Delacorte Press,
which I'm structuring in a "one-year-in-the-search-for" format. I
previously was the senior editor at the Washington City Paper,
where, during my four year stint, I wrote and edited hundreds of
feature and news stories. I covered everything and anything, but,
because I speak both science and English (I made up my own BA in
science writing at UC San Diego), my strong suit was the
science/medical story.
The year I'm following for my book begins at the International
Conference on AIDS held in San Francisco this past June and ends
at the International Conference on AIDS in Florence, Italy, 1991.
As I attend a bevy of AIDS conferences, interview dozens of
researchers in the trenches, and read the literature, I often
come across stories that don't tightly fit into my book, but do
intrigue me. I think several of them would be right for your AIDS
series.
o Frank Plummer, a University of Manitoba physician stationed in
Nairobi, Kenya, is one of the world's foremost AIDS
epidemiologists. Since 1985, Plummer and his co-workers have been
running a clinic for Kenyan prostitutes, who have a higher risk
of becoming HIV positive than any population yet studied (in
biospeak, they have a 50 percent seroconversion rate). Plummer's
group also has opened satellite clinics for Kenyan truck drivers.
I'd like to profile Plummer, a generous, bear of a man, and his
patients. The article would explain the galloping spread of HIV
in Africa by looking at the relationships between sex and
poverty, circumcision and infection rates, and prostitutes and
truck drivers.
o Scott Layne, a physicist working at Los Alamos National
Laboratories has come up with a kinetics model which suggests
that one of the main tests used in AIDS research, the
neutralization assay, is being improperly done throughout the
field. To put it plainly, if Layne's right, the data coming out
of these experiments is bullshit. Layne calls it an Alice's
Restaurant scenario--you can get anything you want out of a
111 5511 IH 1 1 11111 99.00III 11111
5571 095.01 99.006