Dr. David Ho, an alumnus of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, was named the 1996 Man of the Year by Time in its December 30 issue. Dr. Ho was a member of the program's third class and received the MD from Harvard in 1972. He is professor of medicine and microbiology at New York University School of Medicine and scientific director and CEO of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center.
In 36 pages, Time cited Dr. Ho's pioneering work in combining several drugs in the treatment of AIDS. Patients who take a combination of protease inhibitors and antiviral drugs such as AZT have shown significant decreases in viral levels and increases in T-cell counts, resulting in marked improvements in their condition. Earlier, Dr. Ho was the first to show that HIV grows in macrophages.
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The December 13 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education featured a comprehensive story on Associate Provost for the Arts Alan Brody and the arts at MIT. Titled "Where Art and Science Meet," the piece by Zoe Ingalls has multiple photographs-many in color-of Professor Brody, visiting artists-in-residence and student musicians and artists.
"MIT boasts myriad activities-more than 400 events in theater, music, and dance every year, as varied as Shakespeare and Afro-Cuban dance. This might not be out of the ordinary at a major liberal-arts college or conservatory, but the variety is astonishing at an institution devoted to science and engineering," Ms. Ingalls wrote after interviews with Professor Ellen Harris, MIT's first Associate Provost for the Arts; Professor Alan Lightman, director of the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies; MIT students, and Dr. Brody. "There's an energy in the air at MIT that is difficult to describe but is palpable nonetheless. On the fourth floor of Building 6, classical music seeps into the hall from behind the closed door of a laboratory bearing the sign Caution: Radioactive Material."
QUOTES:
"The American miracle is that despite how badly we short-change education and how little we save, we manage to be so rich. And the reason is that we're so efficient. The way we do that is a wild free-for-all of competition and decentralized initiative." -Professor Paul Krugman of economics, in a quote cited as one of the best of 1996 by the Kansas City Star (December 21).
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on January 15, 1997.
