This week I went to a conference for Fred Hutch’s HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN). The network has been slow with bringing in new research for the past year because of the disappointing results in the STEP trial and the lack of funding in HIV issues which has been characteristic of the Bush administration. Time has passed since that last troublesome trial, plus the Obama presidency has promised more funding for this kind of work, and for Seattle at least, our node has partnered with another clinical trials network that tests HIV microbicides, so likely busier times are coming.
I met this guy from the San Francisco CAB named Steve Oxendine. He told me about the Legacy Project, which is an effort to get African Americans more involved in HIV issues. Talking to him made me realize how white our group is.
I went to the presentation for laymen and met this man named Dr. Spies, who works at Fred Hutchinson. He cleared up a lot of confusion I had about the mechanism by means of which the experimenters are expecting an HIV vaccine to work and how developing an HIV vaccine will be different from developing other vaccines. I want to make time to write him and ask him more, even though we talked for quite a while. Dr. Spies asked me for my personal opinion about this new trial which is similar to another one which we did. I had read so much about the researchers being interested in public opinion on this, but it made it more real to get confronted by one of the actual researchers looking for a clue as to whether his field was getting community support. I did not give him a straight answer because I was thinking I wanted to talk to the CAB.
I met this lab guy from the Hutch named Barry Robinson. He invited me to come take a tour of his lab and see what equipment they use to get data during the trials we talk about. I will bring this up at the CAB meeting this week and see if anyone else wants to go with me, even though I probably will not have time until about February.
Ian always has a lot of say and he lets me ask lots of questions in a hurry, stepping on his words and driving the conversation without hearing him out. It just seems natural to do this with him because he doesn’t mind at all, even though I would not do that with most people. He and I had a short talk about various trials and I think we are going to talk about it again at the meeting tomorrow. He brought up that one of the people asking a rather strange question (“How do you decide where to build a church?”) to a preacher from Boston who had come to talk about mobilizing his church community to fight homophobia and promote HIV awareness was the global CAB rep, Rick Church in the NYC CAB. I had wanted to meet this guy, and Ian pointed him out to me. I cut Ian off and ran to meet Rick, and again I am sure that Ian didn’t mind.
After meeting Rick my impression was that he was the kind of person who could deeply sympathize when he wanted to and not care when he had other things on his mind. It just surprised me that someone at a conference like this would reframe the issue of how to decide which populations get public health aid as being analogous to building a church, even though of course that is exactly what the issue is. We only talked for a few minutes and he told me I should start getting on the global CAB calls, so I will talk to Ian about that (he is our site g-cab rep).
Coincidentally, I had just meet Ian a few days before the conference at an open house for a place that takes in sick homeless kids for the night. I went there to try to get involved, and Ian was there telling me that he is on one of their organizing committees. I had no idea because it seems unrelated to his work. I talked some more to the people there and found out that its funding comes from the UW and that this guy named Caleb Banta-Green founded the project, and he is in the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute, which is the office that manages my project. I asked Sharon and Betsy (my project directors) if they knew they guy, and they said he was in their office.
This homeless kid program is called MedRest, and it is a UW faculty position so if I got it then I would just have to be on call to show up if anyone was sick (2 nights a month max). It is a few blocks from my house, so no problem for me to do this. The big benefit is that I would be UW faculty, so I would have library and journal access among other small things that go to people at universities. I really miss that library, but I would want to join MedRest just for fun even if it was a volunteer position.