Anthony Fauci: From the basketball court to the laboratory

Anthony Fauci was born in New York on Christmas Eve, 1940. What a Christmas present. His father was a Columbia University educated pharmacist. His mother and sister worked in the pharmacy's register, and a young Anthony Fauci delivered the prescriptions. He was academically gifted as a student. He attended Regis High School, a Jesuit school in Manhattan's Upper East Side, where he captained the school's basketball team. He would later attend the Cornell University, New York Hospital Medical School, and from 1983 to 2002 was one of the world's most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals. In 2008, president George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States for his work on HIV and AIDS. Fauci had a remarkable career in public life. He served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases between 1984 and 2022 and as the chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022. He's advised a total of seven US presidents.

Chris - Anthony Fauci, tell us about the younger you. How did life begin? We don't have to go back to the embryo, but I heard that basketball was something that distracted you for a while and you almost ended up doing that. Is that true?

Anthony - Well, yes, I can say that with somewhat of a smile on my face. I was the captain of the varsity basketball team in a New York City high school. The good news is that I was pretty good at it, the sobering news was my height at 5'7". Although I was a quite good basketball player at the high school level - I would've loved to have continued that competitively in college - soon I found out that a very fast, good shooting, 5'7" point guard will never ever be as good as a very fast, good shooting 6'3" point guard. And so I decided that my field would not be basketball. It was a good choice, and I diverted towards science, medicine and the humanities.

Chris - Well, you have a very big brain and a high stature and have developed that stature since. I'm quite surprised by the timeline and the time that you chose to go into infectious diseases because that was the time... it's actually a misquote, but William Stewart, who was Surgeon General in the States is often quoted as having said, 'the future of infectious diseases is dull because the war's been won.' Because we were in the post-antibiotic era. Macfarlane Burnet, who won a Nobel Prize as a virologist, said it's a pretty dull future that awaits us in infectious diseases because we know everything now and we have antibiotics. I'm paraphrasing, of course. Nevertheless, despite that, you chose to study infectious diseases and the immune system. Why did you go down that path?

Anthony - Well, it's very interesting. I was very well aware of what was being said about the future of infectious diseases. And there were some people who even said that we shouldn't even train anymore infectious disease people because they won't have anything to do aside from culturing each other. Dr. Robert Petersdorf, a very famous infectious disease person, actually said that - a good friend of mine and one of my earlier mentors. But, just the idea of being able to dissect the mechanisms, the pathophysiological mechanisms, of the interaction between a pathogen and the human immune system, fascinated me. Little did I know, nor did anyone know, that over the next five decades we would see, in an unprecedented way, the emergence of new infections and the reemergence of old infections. Historically, very few people were around who were alive and remembered the catastrophic 1918 influenza that killed fifty to a hundred million people in a world population that was one third the size of what it is now. But that was such a distant memory. We did have a pandemic flu in 1957 and 1968, but the idea of a brand new emerging infection that has potentially catastrophic consequences was really off the radar screen of most people until 1981 when all of a sudden HIV AIDS thrust itself upon our consciousness. And then from there, over a period of time, the idea of emerging and reemerging infections became a very real phenomenon with things like the pandemic flu of 2009, Ebola, Zika, SARS CoV 1, MERS and now, most recently, the extraordinary circumstance of a three plus year pandemic that has really impacted in such an important way the entire world. So this whole concept of the emergence and reemergence of infectious diseases was really not fully appreciated at the time I went into infectious diseases. But now it has completely transformed the entire field.