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-10- anthrax vaccine research. The first was HIV. After the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus in 1984, the cause of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the National Institutes of Health would devote billions to develop a vaccine. That year, the Centers for Disease Control reported 7,699 AIDS cases with 3,665 dead. By 1988, the number of diagnosed U.S. cases was 82,764 with 46,344 dead. That was a jump of more than 1000% in just 4 years. Mortality was 100%; for someone with AIDS, drugs could prolong life but not save it. Public health officials doing the math were horrified. No one dared make a whole virus vaccine, living or dead, from a germ like HIV. Vaccine researchers embraced gene-splicing as their only alternative—inserting HIV genes into non-lethal organisms like vaccinia. But the results were disappointing: these microbial hybrids barely elicited an immune response. That's why a new adjuvant was essential to NIE. Because of Yarkoni and Rapp's work, squalene and squalane emulsions had by then established themselves as NIH's adjuvants of choice. HIV was threatening to become the great plague of the 20th century, worse even than the flu pandemic of 1918 that claimed more than 20 million lives. It was the public health cause célébre of the 1980s. Rock Hudson had it; so did Liberace. When an Indiana school banned 14 year-old Ryan White from classes because he had HIV, Elton John and Michael Jackson became his friends and offered their support. Vice-President George Bush called for mandatory HIV testing. No other disease made as many headlines or pushed as many political buttons. For NIH, that translated into wide open government coffers. For researchers, it offered a shot at immortality. Any scientist who found a way to stop this new global scourge could reserve a seat in Stockholm for a Nobel Prize ceremony. A successful recombinant HIV vaccine would be just a start. The goal was to roll back all infectious diseases through immunization . if that were possible. But it wasn't going to happen without a more powerful vaccine booster. The FDA, stung by criticism from dying AIDS patients who wanted access to new drugs that could keep them alive even a few months longer, started to "fast-track" drugs through its licensing labyrinth, including experimental vaccines containing squalene. This was not without risks. The problem with the fast track was knowing when someone was playing it fast and loose. Even NATO got on this bandwagon by sponsoring a conference in Cape Sounion, Greece, on vaccine adjuvants in the summer of 1988. The search for a new adjuvant was now a matter of national security. The U.S. Army sent a contingent from its Walter Reed Army Institute of Research led by Dr. Carl R. Alving, a proponent of vaccine boosters emulsified in squalene, in addition to his own favorite: liposomes. Liposomes are microscopic vesicles containing vaccine antigens. Think bath oil beads. Encapsulating bath oil in soluble beads makes it possible to transport measured doses of oil from the drug store where you bought them to where you ultimately want to put them—in your bathtub. Alving's liposomes were made from cholesterol, another oily substance closely related to squalene. The Soviets Again If anyone in the military had been inclined to ask questions about squalene's toxicity in the late 1980's, something else happened around that then that might have diverted them. In October 1989, a high-ranking Soviet biological weapons scientist defected to the West—the first one to do so. This was an extraordinary intelligence coup. At the