When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. It’s an oft-repeated med-school axiom that means consider the simple solution first. Clarence “Joe” Gibbs Jr., a researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), hears hoofbeats, and unlike many of his colleagues, he’s thinking horses. Along with Jonas Salk, the developer of the first successful polio vaccine, Gibbs is working on an AIDS vaccine that does not employ such post-Watson-and-Crick technologies as recombinant DNA, synthetic peptides, or anti-idiotypes to immunize against human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This riddling parasite causes AIDS and may already have infected more than a million people in the U.S. alone.
The IRC vaccine also has its share of detractors. “There’s a lot of heartburn about what we’re doing,” says Gibbs. While most researchers are working on vaccines to protect people not yet infected with HIV, IRC–which calls its vaccine an “AIDS immunotherapeutic”–has set its sights on the HIV-infected population. The same postinfection vaccine strategy is used for hepatitis-B and rabies, both of which have a relatively long lag time between infection and the onset of symptoms. With AIDS, the lag time is an average of 7.8 years.
Joe Gibbs speaks like a sailor, cerebrates like a Thomist, and looks like a scientist. Which, as he might say, makes plenty of damn sense. Days after graduating from prep school in 1943, Gibbs joined the Navy. He served in World War II as a hospital corpsman on a heavy cruiser and then entered the reserves. By the time he retired his uniform in 1987, he had risen to the rank of captain and had served as a commanding officer five times. A disciple of Saint Thomas Aquinas and an active member of his Catholic church, Gibbs received his BA (biology/philosophy), MA (zoology/chemistry), and PhD (microbiology with minors in cytology, ecology, and chemistry) from Catholic University.
Dr. Allan Goldstein, a George Washington University professor who’s working on an AIDS vaccine himself, calls Gibbs an “unsung hero.” GW’s biochemistry department, which Goldstein chairs, honored Gibbs two years ago for his work with Gajdusek, giving the two men equal billing. “He’s very unselfish in the way he does science,” says Goldstein, whom Gibbs is working with in addition to Gajdusek and Salk.
“HIV.”
Forget Susan Sontag’s warning–war is an apt metaphor for AIDS. When a virus invades the body, the immune system calls out troops of antibodies and white blood cells to stop the enemy. Usually, the body wins the battle and the immune system remembers–in some cases, for life–how to defeat the virus should it reinvade. But sometimes viruses overwhelm the immune system, causing disease. Scientists design vaccines to stage mock wars in the immune system. By attacking the body with a harmless foe, vaccines teach the immune system how to fight the real thing should it later raid the body. Though one dose of some vaccines can protect for life, others require periodic “booster” doses to retrain the immune system’s soldiers.
