ACCORDING to Michael Fumento, whose book is an early contender for ‘AIDS
expose of the year’, AIDS is not spreading into the mainstream, heterosexual
population because the virus cannot easily be transmitted by ‘straight’
sexual intercourse. So, says the author, the American media are guilty of
a giant con trick in portraying AIDS as a suburban nightmare. Fumento believes
that minority pressure groups, mainly homosexual, desperate for research
money, and a ratings-hungry media have conspired to present a terrifying
fiction of AIDS running riot, decimating American society.

To prove his dubious thesis, Fumento claims that in a selection of heterosexual
AIDS scare stories from the popular press in the US there lurks a gruesome
little tale of matrimonial deceit with a bisexual relationship or a secret
tale of drug abuse. Fumento makes great play of how our inhibitions about
sex and sexuality conspire to produce an inaccurate picture of who gets
AIDS, how and why. He maintains that these taboos are even stronger in African
societies with large populations of ‘heterosexually’ transmitted AIDS. Of
course, epidemiological inaccuracy is not the only reason for suggesting
that the route of AIDS spread in Africa is no different to that elsewhere:
needles in hospitals are re-used and blood in transfusions is not heat-treated,
for example – part of the vast infrastructure of danger inherent in impoverished
societies.

Fumento makes his case in that tiresome way which passes for scholarship
but is not: every statement has a reference number after it, but the bibliography
reveals that about half of these academic-seeming numbers refer to ‘personal
communications’, that is, telephone calls by the author. Most of the rest
refer to articles in popular magazines and newspapers or to television programmes.
This isn’t surprising as Fumento wants us to be deeply shocked at the media’s
treatment of AIDS, and to do this he needs to establish that there is a
conspiracy in the first place. But he is so selective as to be laughable,
were it not for the tragic nature of the subject. He cites only those television
shows that demonstrate his point, ignoring the many responsible programmes
that have been made. Fumento does not refer once to ‘AIDS Monitor’ in New
ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, for example, or to the magazines that have carried story after
story on AIDS – Nature, Scientific American, Science News – and many of
these have not been technical. Fumento cites Science, the leading science
magazine in the US and so a source that even he cannot ignore, in an absurdly
partisan way, completely ignoring many news articles on research on AIDS
and focusing on the news reports that cover some of the heterosexual scare
stories.

Anyone who had read any of these magazines since the AIDS epidemic began
would know that epidemiologists are only too well aware of the errors implicit
in their data, and that projections of the spread of AIDS based on these
data are extremely uncertain. Yet these projections must be made if the
medical and scientific establishment is to have any idea of what it is dealing
with and, more important, how to deal with it. Fumento has failed to understand
that hypotheses need to be tested, and that withdrawing a hypothesis in
favour of another is what science is all about. And if the media pick up
on the more sensationalist hypotheses and emphasise them at the expense
of the less dramatic ones, well, when was it ever different? Fumento explicitly
compares the budget for AIDS and cancer research, showing how the former
has increased as the latter decreased, hinting that cancer is a more ‘worthy’
cause because it affects ‘blameless’ people. This argument is silly as well
as irresponsible. Research on lung cancer, the most common form of cancer
in the West, has not been cut back since it was discovered that lung cancer
is linked to smoking.

Throwing money at the problems of cancer has conspicuously failed to
find any universal panacea. Scientific discoveries do not come to order.
It is possible that AIDS research will bear quite unpredictable fruit: already
it has transformed our knowledge of the immune system, the first step towards
treatment of a host of diseases.

Telling people to behave sensibly may offend notions of individual freedom
or of decency, depending on which side of the fence you sit. If the media
have gone over the top on AIDS, the effects can hardly be said to be disastrous:
the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases has decreased since hard-hitting
education campaigns about AIDS began and some silly taboos – not mentioning
condoms on the air, for example – were dropped. And many people considering
injecting drugs or risky sexual behaviour may now be thinking again. So
even if it were true, Fumento’s conspiracy theory fails to shock.

This book will undoubtedly be a best-seller in the US, seized upon by
the moral majority and the conservative political establishment as evidence
for the evils of homosexuality and drug use. But arguing that heterosexuals
need not worry about AIDS, that it is not ‘their’ problem, is horribly dangerous
for an as-yet incurable disease.

Impoverished drug users aren’t likely to be reading magazines or watching
television dramas. To help this increasingly at-risk population, the general
public must be convinced that AIDS is a serious problem, one which belongs
to all of us. Stories of Mr and Mrs America being affected in some way by
AIDS are thus surely legitimate.

Maxine Clarke is features editor for nature

‘CREATION of life rated best of science stories in 1967 . . . human
heart transplant second.’ When Arthur Kornberg and his group synthesised
self-replicating DNA, the press went wild. Although by the mid-1960s the
structure of DNA was known and its ability to replicate had been observed
many times, Kornberg’s landmark experiment demonstrated from first principles
how DNA is constructed and confirmed people’s idea about how it worked,
not to mention providing a rich seam of new discoveries to come. In his
wonderful autobiography, Kornberg takes the reader on a journey through
his scientific life. Always modest, yet with dedication and intensity apparent
on every page, Kornberg’s account is more gripping by far than the half-understood
hyperbole of the hack.

For Kornberg, the roots of molecular biology lie in biochemistry. Fundamental
to the present ‘golden age’ of genetic engingeering and research on recombinant
DNA is the biochemist’s systems-eye view of biology: the relentless pursuit
of function and the structures responsible for it. Time and time again,
Kornberg shows how an obsessive attention to detail paid off in his quest
for the answer to a particular problem. For him, the miracle of genetic
engineering is not its enormous impact on agriculture, medicine, industry
and even Wall Street, but its illumination of biology: how the individual
subunits of an enzyme work, are assembled and function, and therefore how
the biochemical process of nature can be controlled.

Kornberg began his research career almost by accident; applying to medical
school as a brilliant young student at the University of Rochester, Minnesota,
he was turned down by everyone because he was Jewish. Nevertheless, what
has now become the National Institutes of Health (NIH) offered him a government
research post in the 1940s and Kornberg has never looked back.

First interested in nutrition, a poor relation among the establishment
disciplines of biology even now, he made several fundamental discoveries
about the action of vitamins. His purification of the enzyme NAD gained
him recognition from his peers and set him on course for the many discoveries
he was to make about the enzymes that assemble DNA, genes and chromosomes.

Kornberg makes us share not only the frustrations and elations of a
life at the bench, but also the methodological details. How do you make
an enzyme? What does it do? When Jim Watson and Francis Crick published
their account of the structure of DNA, Kornberg asked the same questions
that he had previously been asking about the enzymes of respiration and
metabolism. How is DNA assembled? How are its constituent nucleotides synthesised?
How does DNA replicate? How is it contained in chromosomes? And how is it
expressed? Kornberg’s book reveals why he found the answers to many of these
questions. His extreme care in experimental technique, intelligence in applying
the right question to the right problem, and his insistence that members
of his group, first at the University of Washington, St Louis, and later
at Stanford University, California, were allowed to work in the way they
wanted to. Above all, the problem, and not its rewards, is the thing.

Kornberg’s frequent digressions and diagrams to explain the background
before describing his experiments made me wish this book had been written
when I was a student, at that time using a dull textbook to learn about
the biochemical pathways in metabolism. Kornberg’s fascination is a far
more inspiring tutor.

Personal details take second place to the science in this book. With
one or two exceptions, Kornberg prefers to express a strong view or tell
a joke than reveal too much about what he really felt.

A ‘mad scientist’ appears only once; Irving Lieberman came to the NIH
to do a postdoctoral fellowship with Kornberg. He drove across country and
came directly to the laboratory to find out what project he could work on.
Kornberg thought it would take a week or so for him to sort out housing
and get settled, but Lieberman wanted to discuss an experimental plan immediately.
Already late for dinner, Kornberg suggested talking the next day, but could
not stop Lieberman from starting a series of experiments right there and
then. Later, Kornberg learnt that Lieberman’s wife and child had been waiting
for hours in their baggage-stuffed car.

Kornberg’s book shines with a love of science. Clearly uneasy with the
commercialisation of molecular biology that began with Genentech in the
1970s, on Kornberg’s Stanford doorstep, he is also unhappy now about the
reduction of the American government’s immense budget for basic scientific
research. But just as Kornberg dealt with the prejudice and poverty of his
early days in research, let us hope that there are those like him today
who will, in 50 years’ time, be able to inform, instruct and amaze us with
a book such as this.

Maxine Clarke is features editor of Nature.