From california. To the new york islanders. Saturday at noon eastern on cspan2 book tv and sunday afternoon American History tv. After one dr. Anthony fauci director of the National Institute of allergy and Infectious Disease how many years . Guest 30 after one in those 30 years 30 years have you ever had the feeling that something would get away from us when it came to one of these crises and disease . Guest not that it would get away from us but would be much more serious than anyone anticipated and that started from the beginning of my career as the director of the institute. When i 1st started seeing and taking care of hivinfected individuals in the early 80s, 1981 the fall winter of 81 and 82 as to what would happen. I got involved early on and was concerned that many people in and out of government were considering this just a fluke among gay men some strange disease. The way i saw it involved and following it it was quite scary. Unfortunately my concerns were wellfounded because it turned out to be historically and yesterday one of the most devastating historic pandemics that we have ever experienced, the civilization has ever experienced. Cspan when do you personally recognize this . Guest there was a moment the early summer of 1981, 1981, the cdc, the center for Disease Control and prevention every week puts out something called the morbidity and mortality rate report which is almost a pamphlet which gives you a heads up on diseases or patterns of disease like a flu is coming or an outbreak of this. They reported on their june 5 1981 5 men from los angeles who presented with a very unusual kind of pneumonia that you only see in people who have dramatically suppressed immune systems. I looked at it and said five gay men. Why all gay men and why this strange disease you almost never see in Healthy People . They were supposedly completely healthy otherwise i thought it was a fluke and put it aside. One month later july 4 of 1981 the next in nwr appeared on my desk at nih and they said no 26 men with not only this strange pneumonia but a strange kind of cancer you only see in people that are immunosuppressed. All of them were gay. I. I said something is going on here that is really bad and this is likely a new disease. I had no idea what it was. Was. It looked very much like it was an Infectious Disease. When you look at the pattern it seems to have been spread by sexual contact and command that is when i had a combination of a realization and anxiety where i was saying this was going to be bad and made what i consider the transforming decision in my own career and decided i would stop what i i have been doing rather successfully for the previous nine or ten years and devote myself completely to studying it and what i felt would be an enormously difficult disease. Unfortunately turned out that was the case. Cspan when you look back at that, i that i have read that people were mad at you in your operation. Who got mad at you for what reason that you took a zen and had them involved in the discussion . Guest it was a a combination. In a wellmeaning way, my mentors those red cultivated me in science and academics thought i was being foolish throwing away a promising career in one area of medical research to go after something that they thought was going to disappear, was just a fluke that would go away. Later on away. Later on as i began to take a leadership role in that only the research, but when i became director of the institute of the National Institute of allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984 there were people that were concerned and i think bordering on being angry with me in that it was clear i wanted to put more research on this. I wanted to get more Government Resources and research into became clear to me that we needed to embrace the gay community, the activists to get a a better feel for what was going on in the trenches. There was a lot of resentment on the part of the scientists because they thought i would diverge resources away from other important areas, other Infectious Diseases. I was arguing out to diverge resources but get knew resources, argue before congress and the president about why we needed more resources for this disease. That was the area of resentment. The idea of activists playing a Important Role in a Research Program was completely foreign and antithetical to many scientists. At the time it was, well, we are. Stick scientists. We will make the decisions and dont need to involve the community. They were the ones that were suffering with unknown diseases, the rigidity of the regulatory process of getting drugs approved quickly that were experimental drugs that showed some efficacy was all a change in paradigm that had not been experienced before. Cspan we will come back to some of this, but we have seen a lot of you over the years. I want to talk about your background and life. When did you make a decision why you would be available to the media . There are 27 institutes at the National Institutes of health and i could name maybe one or two others. You are always available to answer questions. Why . Guest it became clear to me that particularly in the discipline i was dealing with, emerging Infectious Diseases that would generate a lot of concern on the part of the public hivaids, pandemic flu ebola, most recently now with the ebola crisis it became clear that the public needed to be educated to understand just what these issues meant to them personally and to the nation and the world. I was perplexed by seeing scientists who shunned away from trying to explain things in plain english in a way people could understand. There was a culture back then that scientists did not want to be bothered with the press or getting involved or when they did they spoke over people as opposed to trying to get people to understand. I made a decision a long time ago that it was important for the public to understand and if you wanted the to garnish support from the congress and administration he had to be understood and in the public eye. Otherwise it would slip under the radar. That was one of the reasons there was attention paid to it in. Science technically science technically speaking if you look at the executive branch of the federal government obviously the president is the boss. The department i am in is the department of health and Human Services. The secretary is the next level and then there is the nih. Technically speaking that is the boss. When you are in a scientific and Public Health there really is very little of the boss tells someone to do something that you might see in another endeavor. It is more of a collaborative discussion and intellectual deciding what is the best direction to go. Technically someone is administratively your boss but in reality it is more of doing the right thing and best thing and most appropriate thing cspan where are you located . Guest bethesda bethesda, maryland, right off the main campus right there just a little bit north about five and a half miles to washington dc. Cspan the 1st dark in your family was your father a pharmacist. Tell us about him. Where were you born . Guest i was born and raised in brooklyn, new york the bensonhurst section which was back then and maybe even now brooklyn, if you took an aerial photo ethnically divided italianamerican, irish, africanamerican, puerto rican so i so i was in an italianamerican section called bensonhurst, a very family oriented warm and nurturing area to live in. My father is firstgeneration. His father was born in italy and came to the United States at the turn of the 20th, 19 to 20th century my father was raised early on and little italy section of new york in manhattan moved to brooklyn and that our family was raised in brooklyn. He went to Columbia University college of pharmacy, became pharmacy became a pharmacist, and that is what he did for his life. Cspan that is how he got the name dark. Guest they called him dark. A little bit different than it is now. Many people either could not afford to go to a dr. Or did not want to take the time to make an appointment and would go to there neighborhood pharmacy and explain symptoms. My father never overstepped his bounds. Often he would give them the advice that they needed to take care of what minor ailment they had. Cspan moms background . Guest my mother went to Hunter College in new york city and got married at an early age. My mother and father got married right out of high school. My father went through Pharmacy School and my mother went through Hunter College, both married, and as soon as my mother gave birth to my sister three years older than i and then me she became a homemaker. Cspan the jazz it was. Dot you high school. What did it mean to be taught by jesuits . Guest it was a great experience. They combine intense intellectualism with discipline not in discipline, not in the sense of smacking you around but intellectual rigor discipline and how you handle yourself zero as a human being. And they have a general motto and i and i think this had a major influence on me and what i did the issue of service to others that is big it does not mean people who dont go into Public Service are doing anything lesser with their lives but they tend to have a pushing but leaning toward something about what you do is Public Service, either everything you do which turned out what i did or at least a part of your life. So when i went to the Regis High School we took four years of greek four years of latin romance language, ancient history, things like that. When i went to holy cross i took a hybrid premed course almost an oxymoron called a be greek classics premed. Majoring in majoring in the humanities and classics with a lot of philosophy but took a can of science to get into medical school. The idea about what i wanted to become a doctor i like science, discovery, the challenges of science but also liked mankind into the humanities that it was just a natural fit over you put science of people in the same bucket. To me bucket. To me that was medicine. Cspan who was an early mentor . Guest probably some of the very young jesuits in Regis High School. In the jesuit training it is a long long training before you become a priest. Back then they had what were called scholastics people who were not yet priests but dressed in the garb and taught in high school and there were a couple of scholastics who had a major impact on you migrate people, highly intellectual and nurturing. Cspan you did an interview with science magazine. They lead off of this by saying he worked 14 hours a day charge for lunch, eats dinner with his family and continues working until bedtime when he sleeps for about four and a half hours. How much of that is still true . Guest it is still true i do that. I do that. I work a lot of hours, most of the weekend. I do not do it as a drag. I like it and am energized our undoing. We fortunately likely through the creativity and the tolerance of my wife who also works at the nih and is the chair while the departments there we arrange your schedule when the children were growing up even though it is not particularly healthy to eat dinner later at night i preach to people about that. The only way the only way that we could as a family be together everyday was when i would i would come home at quarter to nine, 9 00 oclock, my children got out of school at 3 00 oclock come home, have a snack, and wait for me to come home. We would have dinner together. I would go into my office and continue to work until midnight and go to bed and get up around 5 00 oclock. Cspan how old are those kids now and what are they doing . Guest my eldest is 28 28, a phd student in Clinical Psychology at Boston College graduated from harvard and taught in the innercity minority areas in new york city and washington dc and then went for further graduate training and is now in a phd program. My middle daughter is 25, a firstyear medical student at the university of pennsylvania and my youngest just graduated from stanford as a Computer Scientist working in San Francisco for twitter. She is a computer geek. Cspan please tell us the story of meeting your wife. [laughter] guest well i had been at the nih for about ten years or so. I just happened to have made a trip to china for a meeting for a scientific meeting. While i was away the nih it was the beginning of the hivaids pandemic hired a nurse, a clinical nurse specialist. My wife started off as a nurse before she got her phd in ethics. I did not know she was a new nurse because i was away. One of my patients was a person from brazil who only spoke portuguese. My wife had just come back a few months earlier from two years with project project hope in brazil and was totally fluent in portuguese so as i was talking to the patient, i wanted to tell the patient that the patient had to go home could not do activities, drink, and dolts because he was recuperating. I told him that i needed someone to translate and they said, we said we have a new nurse back from brazil who could translate. I told her he is got to do a, b c and d. She turned round and spoke portuguese and i found out later that he told her to tell the dr. That there is no way the 1st thing im going to do when i get back is go to the copacabana beach, play around have some fish ossa and have a ball. She was horrified, so she turned to me and said, he said fine he will do that. I believe it or. When i. When i looked at her she was just this very attractive young nurse. Very interesting. I went back to my office a few days later and told the head nurse, tell that nurse to come to my office, i office, i wanted to talk to her. She thought she was going to get fired because she thought i had found out she misled me about the patient so she walked into my office petrified and sat there looking nervous. I cannot figure out why. I did not realize you had come here and tell just last week. Would you like to go out to dinner sometime. Of course. We get married a year later. Cspan in the same interview they asked you a question. You attended to jesuit run schools. Are are you a man of faith. Let me read to you what you said. I am not a regular church attender. I have have evolved into less a Roman Catholic religion person to someone who tries to keep a degree of spirituality of upon them. I have faith in the goodness of mankind. Is that still accurate . Guest totally accurate cspan what does that say to the jesuit education . Guest i am less and amit of organized religion than i i am with the principles of humanity and goodness to mankind and doing the best that you can. There are a lot of things about organized religion that are unfortunate, and i tend to stay away from that and think more in terms of the principles that i learned from the jesuits the catholic religion the principles of run my life by the idea about the organization of religion is not something i adhere to very much. Cspan the National Institute of allergy and Infectious Diseases is responsible. What are those 1800 people doing . Guest either the conduct an administration and planning of research and all of Infectious Diseases as well as in certain immune mediated diseases. Cspan what is an Infectious Disease . Guest one caused by a microbe that is transmissible, the ones that you know of that are clear, aids is an Infectious Disease. Influenza, a recurrent problem. Every winter you get an influenza outbreak. Sometimes you get a pandemic malaria tuberculosis childhood diseases respiratory diseases viral diseases sexuallytransmitted diseases diseases caused by a microbe that hopefully you can prevent and or treat. Cspan what is a microbe . Guest an organism that has the capability of replicating being transmitted from one person to another. Bacterias can live more freely. Viruses need to get into a cell to live. Cspan as we look at the world as an outsider and you see the cdc your institutions, the nih, the World Health Organization, who is in charge . Guest no one needs to be in charge. Within the federal government it is relatively easy to explain. Take the department of health and Human Services the three most commonly recognized organizations are the cdc nih and fda. The cdc are the disease detectors. They do surveillance, tracked down disease, recognize outbreaks, track recognize outbreaks, track them and are active with the Ebola Outbreak right now in west africa very active with the flu season or an outbreak of west nile fever. The nih is pure research. When there is a disease what we do in my institute when you are thinking of Infectious Disease is we understand how that disease evolves, develop drugs develop vaccines to my do prevention mentality the research that allows you to intervene. The fda is the Regulatory Agency and they make the regulation of approval or monitoring of drugs or interventions. That is within our own government. When you go globally who is kind of like a global cdc. They sort of coordinate Health Globally throughout the various nations. Cspan leobally throughout the various nations. Cspan let me show you video that you probably have not seen for a long time. Very quick from the debate. George Herbert Walker bush and Michael Dukakis talking about heroes. I agree with the governor on athletics, governor on athletics, and there is nothing corny about having sports heroes, young people that are clean and honorable out there sett