Introduction

BREAKTHROUGH! 139
Born in mainland China in 1952, Ho was raised in the United States
and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard
Medical School. He was a medical resident at UCLA’s Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center in 1981 when doctors there reported the world’s first
known AIDS cases. The budding virologist immediately gravitated to
the new field. In 1982, Ho accepted a postdoctoral fellowship in Martin
Hirsch’s lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he raced to
become the first to discover the virus that caused AIDS. He lost that battle,
but through his daily contact with AIDS patients he gleaned crucial
insights into the dynamics of the disease. In 1985 he coauthored a paper
that first described the flulike symptoms that accompanied a person’s initial
HIV infection. 3 But it would take the emergence of protease inhibitors
nearly a decade later before he learned the deeper significance of
his own observations. At the time, he, like most AIDS researchers, believed
infected individuals built up antibodies to knock down the initial
infection, and those antibodies kept the retrovirus in a near dormant
state for years before losing their potency.
He carried those beliefs with him when he moved from Boston to the
new Aaron Diamond Center, which provided the young scientist with an
ideal setting for pursuing intriguing avenues of research. Irene Diamond,
the wife of a wealthy New York real estate developer who was devoted
to medical research and the arts, believed the city that was an epicenter
of the AIDS epidemic needed to do more to combat the disease. Forging
a partnership with the New York City Department of Health, her foundation
created the specialized center in 1988 and pledged $220 million
over the next ten years for its support. The center officially opened next
door to Bellevue Hospital in 1991.
Often overlooked in policy debates, nonprofit institutions like the
Aaron Diamond Center have long been major players in biomedical
research. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for instance, which
was endowed by the reclusive billionaire’s fortune and is located around
the corner from NIH headquarters, pours more than a half billion dollars
a year into basic and applied medical research. The research arm of
the practice-oriented Mayo Clinic, which is headquartered in Rochester,
Minnesota, spends more than $125 million a year of its own resources on
applied research. Like most nonprofits, even the best endowed, the
Aaron Diamond Center’s permanent staff also competes for government
funds. Ho and his colleagues received major AIDS-related grants from
both NIH and New York City. Coupled with the Diamond family’s generous
bequest, Ho had the wherewithal to forge an independent rela-