[Email Exchange between David Baltimore and Bruce Weniger]

Weniger, Bruce
From: Weniger, Bruce [CORP/NIPI/bgw2]
Sent: 28-Nov-97 19:02
To: Baltimore, David (CalTech)
Subject: Re: Draft PACHA AIDS Vaccine Recommendations
Dear David,
Thanks for your feedback below, which I will take
the liberty to share with the other committee members as
part of our written feedback on the draft document. If
you would prefer otherwise, please let me know.
Perhaps to your surprise, I agree with your
skepticism over any mere mortal trying to exercise
command or budgetary authority over agencies as
independent from each other as NIH and WRAIR. As you
know, documents written by committees can contain a
number of ideas for which there may not be complete
consensus. A more effective strategy, that you
seemed to share, is that all eggs should not be put
into any one basket, and different approaches should
be supported (or tolerated).
My own view is that interagency rivalry
and healthy competition should be encouraged to get
each agency to do its best to be first in the race to
announce the first reasonably effective AIDS vaccine.
My hope for an AIDS vaccine czar is that this person
would address the many non-scientific issues
described in our draft and facilitate the blooming of
multiple approaches by different organizations.
I envision a kind of Vannevar Bush, who as an
advisor to the Roosevelt White House, brought the
scientific talent of our nation out of its ivory tower
to apply it to the sullying but crucial applied research
needed for a successful war effort: the development
of radar devices, the mass production of penicillin,
and, of course, the hiring of Leslie Groves and J. Robert
Oppenheimer for the Manhattan Project.
Where is the Dr. Bush, the General Groves, or
the Dr. Oppenheimer for an AIDS vaccine? Nowhere
in the U.S. Government -- and that includes NIH -- is there
a senior full-time official with the mandate and sole job
responsibility to develop an AIDS vaccine, and with the
vaccine development experience, sufficient budgetary
and staff resources, and contracting authority to do so.
So many years into this epidemic, eighteen months after
the Levine committee report that led to your appointment,
and six months after the President's goal declaration, this
is a scandal.
It appears the head of the proposed NIH "vaccine
institute" (not even designated for "AIDS" apparently), will
have no control over the majority of "AIDS vaccine" funding,
which appears reserved as an entitlement of the extramural
basic-science research community. I realize endowing

officials with such disease-specific, product-oriented
responsibility is contrary to the NIH culture, which is not
adapted to developing products. 1 III I 1111 I II 1111 I III II III
I can only hope that the wonderful 15% increase in 5571095.0495.081
overall funding for NIH -- remarkable against a backdrop of