WHAT: The Sabin Vaccine Institute and GW Medical Center will host a presentation by Patricia Thomas, author of Big Shot: Passion, Politics, and the Struggle for An AIDS Vaccine. Published by PublicAffairs in September 2001, the book chronicles the search for an AIDS vaccine. The author has written an account that dramatizes the controversial search for a vaccine—the players, the politics, the money—in a vivid, suspenseful story that reveals how science is done, and not done, in America today. She will discuss her appreciation of the immense scientific challenges involved in making an AIDS vaccine that alone do not explain why the world still does not have such a vaccine—twenty years after the pandemic began.

WHEN: Tuesday, June 11, 2002, at 5 pm
Followed by Book Signing Opportunity

WHERE: The George Washington University
Marvin Center (800 21st Street)
3rd Floor Amphitheater
Washington, DC

WHO: Patricia Thomas has written about medical research for many years, and from 1991 to 1997 she was editor of the Harvard Health Letter. She has been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, and in 1998 was awarded the Leonard Silk Journalism Fellowship. Thomas was one of the first healthy volunteers to be injected with an experimental DNA vaccine for AIDS, in a study at the National Institutes of Health.

For more information about the book, please visit www.publicaffairsbooks.com.