Tag Archives: lecture

New Donald P. Francis Digital Collection

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We’re highlighting the new digital collection of Donald P. Francis, CDC epidemiologist, pediatrician, and AIDS public health advocate. The digital collection includes selections from the Francis papers (MSS 2015-01) that we recently processed with the generous support of a National Archives NHPRC grant.

Francis grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended the University of California, Berkeley. He received his MD from Northwestern University, his Doctor of Science from Harvard University, and completed training in pediatrics. In 1971 he joined the CDC, where he continued to work for the next 21 years. At the CDC, he worked on a number of projects in coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO), including the Smallpox Eradication Program in Sudan and India. He was also part of the WHO team that investigated the first Ebola outbreak in 1976.

Francis began investigating HIV/AIDS after its emergence in 1981. He directed the AIDS laboratory at the CDC and worked closely with the Institut Pasteur to identify the causative virus. He called attention to the threat of AIDS among gay and straight people and warned of the inadequacy of the public health response and lack of funding. As he stated in a 1983 letter to CDC Center for Infectious Diseases Director Walter R. Dowdle, “Our past and present efforts have been and are far too small and we can’t be proud. It is time to do more. It is time to do what is right.”

In 1992, Francis joined Genentech and helped found what became the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). Francis later co-founded VaxGen, which completed the world’s first Phase III trials of two candidate HIV vaccines in 2003. In 2004, Francis co-founded Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases (GSID) and he continues to consult regarding vaccines and public health.

You can view the digital collection on Calisphere. If you would like to research the Francis papers, please make an appointment with us.

New Accessions Spotlight (or My Cluttered Desk)

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It’s been a busy start to spring here at UCSF A&SC: new events and exhibits coming up, lots of researchers, and of course many new collections. As is prone to happen during times like these, there is a pile of new materials sitting on my desk, just waiting for me to enter into our database and (eventually) our library catalog. Here are a few that I am particularly excited about:

Clark Sturges papers (MSS 2017-09)

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, we recently were given the papers of Clark Sturges that relate to his profile of Dr. David E. Smith. Smith founded the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in 1967 in response to the medical needs of many of the young people who came to San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Sturges completed the book in 1993, and the papers are composed mainly of taped interviews, research notes, and correspondence.

Steven Deeks papers (MSS 2017-10)

Another recent acquisition is the papers of Dr. Steven Deeks. The Deeks papers are primarily concerned with his involvement in the controversial baboon bone marrow transplant to an AIDS patient in 1995. While the transplant was not successful, it illustrates the sense of desperation of people with AIDS at that time–and also the highly innovative approaches that UCSF and SFGH doctors and researchers were taking at that time to combat the disease.

Mark Jacobson papers (MSS 2017-12)

Finally, another collection that recently found its way to my desk is the papers of Dr. Mark Jacobson. The Jacobson papers are a hodgepodge of different materials, including calendars, index cards with patient symptoms and medication, a multitude of electronic records (including his PalmPilot), and this Triomune 30 box, which he picked up on a trip overseas. Dr. Jacobson also gave us a substantial number of books for our burgeoning AIDS History collection, and recently wrote a novel based upon his experiences that mentions the patient index cards in its foreword.

Fighting the Plague: A Story of HIV/AIDS

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As we prepare for our upcoming NHPRC grant project, Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis: Providing Access to New AIDS History Collections, we wanted to highlight some of the work researchers have created using our AIDS History Project collections.

Fighting the Plague: A Story of HIV/AIDS

Thomas Packard, PhD, postdoctoral scholar and HIV researcher with Gladstone Institutes, recently visited us and dug into the collections. Read his complete article, “Fighting the Plague: A Story of HIV/AIDS” on his blog.

Bobbi Campbell, Person With AIDS, Activist. Photo Credit: Roger Ressmeyer.

Excerpt from Thomas Packard’s “Fighting the Plague: A Story of HIV/AIDS”:

In the beginning of the twentieth century, a plague was born. A new retrovirus started infecting humans that would later be named Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Though it wasn’t the first retrovirus to infect humans, it became the most feared, deadly, studied, and written about….Though this a story about a plague, which means it’s about fear and death, it’s more about fighting for life, the extraordinary strength of humanity, and crafting new weapons against the virus using research and medicine.

Following a jump from monkeys to humans over a hundred years ago, HIV lurked in Africa near the Congo River. It was unknown to medicine until an outbreak in the gay populations of San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles in 1980. We may never understand the full implications of the unlucky fact that HIV exploded into popular awareness as a disease associated with homosexuality. Entrenched intolerance caused a cross-pollination of stigma: this was a disease of the other.

Naming a disease “Gay Cancer” or “Gay-related immune deficiency (GRID),” as it was called in the early eighties, sounds ridiculous today. Of course, HIV doesn’t care if you’re gay or straight. The cancer component came from associations with KS (Kaposi’s Sarcoma), a type of skin cancer caused by a virus that can attack when your immune system is not functioning. This type of sickness is called an “opportunistic infection”, which means that the germ exploits an opportunity — the crack in immune defense — to infect a person. These opportunistic infections (commonly Pneumocystis pneumonia and KS, but also many others) are the executioners of the HIV/AIDS death sentence. It was the sudden appearance of these diseases among young gay men that were the harbingers of a plague.

Though popular opinion in the early eighties was largely ignorant or unsupportive, a group of heroes in the gay community, healthcare workers, and scientists became our first fighters in the new war. As an HIV researcher today, living in San Francisco and talking with the pioneers that are still alive, I feel very lucky to do my part as a new group of scientists on the front lines of HIV research. The early chapter of HIV history is incredible, and my brief exposure to it has changed my perspective, fundamentally shifted my reasons for research, and given me a deep love for the humans involved…Read the complete article.

UCSF Archives Lecture: The Forgotten Epidemic: HIV/AIDS in Women and Children

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Join us on Thursday, February 26th as Arthur Ammann, M.D., gives a lecture in a series launched by UCSF Archives & Special Collections.

Date: Thursday, February 26th, 2015
Time: 4 pm-5:20 pm
Location: Lange Room, UCSF Library, 530 Parnassus, 5th floor
This lecture is free and open to the public. Light refreshments provided.
Please RSVP to reserve a seat

Collage of lab data on first patients in 1981, MMWR report and 1982 San Francisco Chronicle article on first blood transfusion AIDS

Collage of lab data on first patients in 1981, MMWR report and 1982 San Francisco Chronicle article on first blood transfusion AIDS

Beginning in 1981 researchers at UCSF defined some of the most important features of the emerging AIDS epidemic – the cause of AIDS, the clinical features of AIDS, populations at risk for HIV infection, methods to prevent and treat HIV, and discovery of HIV. Working closely with community activists, advocates, scientists and policy makers, UCSF distinguished itself as a model of successful collaboration. The first discovery of AIDS in infants and children and blood transfusion associated AIDS at UCSF were instrumental in defining the extent of the epidemic. The scientific advances in HIV/AIDS that occurred over the next two decades were remarkable resulting in the near eradication of HIV in infants in the US and transforming an acute and fatal infection in adults to a chronic and manageable one. But even as these advances occurred benefiting many millions of people worldwide, women and children were too often excluded, resulting in a global epidemic that is now composed of over 50% women and children and a secondary epidemic of AIDS-related orphans that numbers in the tens of millions.

Arthur J. Ammann, M.D.

Arthur J. Ammann, M.D.

Arthur J. Ammann, M.D., is a founder of Global Strategies, a nonprofit organization that serves women and children in the most neglected areas of the world and Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF.
From 1971 to 1985, Dr. Ammann was Director of Pediatric Immunology and Clinical Research Center at the UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco. In 1977, Dr. Ammann’s clinical trials of a pneumococcal vaccine resulted in the first FDA approval of a vaccine for bacterial pneumonia and meningitis in children and adults. In 1982 Dr. Ammann described two of the three ways that HIV is transmitted including the first cases of transmission of AIDS from mother to infant and the first blood transfusion associated AIDS patients.
Dr. Ammann has received honors from more than 60 national and international organizations including the United States Surgeon General Award for Research and Heroes in Medicine Award by the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care.
Dr. Ammann has authored over 300 scientific papers which have appeared in major medical journals. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Wheaton College (1958) and a doctor of medicine degree from New Jersey College of Medicine (1962).  He received residency training from the department of pediatrics at UCSF and fellowship training in immunology from the University of Minnesota Medical Center and the University of Wisconsin Medical Center.
Dr. Ammann’s oral history,“Pediatric AIDS Immunologist: Advocate for the Children” is accessible online and at the UCSF Library.

About the UCSF Archives & Special Collections Lecture Series
UCSF Archives & Special Collections launched this lecture series to introduce a wider community to treasures and collections from its holdings, to provide an opportunity for researchers to discuss how they use this material, and to celebrate clinicians, scientists, and health care professionals who donated their papers to the archives.