[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 195 (Wednesday, December 19, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S15994-S15995]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO ANTHONY FAUCI

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, today I would like to take a moment to 
recognize Dr. Anthony Facui, Director of the National Institutes of 
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIAID, for his numerous contributions 
in medical research and specifically his work on HIV/AIDS, avian flu 
and anthrax. Even in a city such as Washington, which is filled with 
driven and motivated people, Dr. Fauci is a cut above. As Director of 
NIAID, he has worked tirelessly to lead the fight against AIDS and has 
been instrumental in shaping our understanding of how this disease 
works. I am proud to have worked with Dr. Fauci and would like to take 
this opportunity to submit the following article recounting the 
remarkable work and career of Dr. Fauci for the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

               [From the Washington Post, Sept. 28, 2007]

                           The Honored Doctor

                     (By Sue Anne Pressley Montes)

       Routinely, his gray Toyota hybrid is parked from 6:30 a.m. 
     until late at night outside Building 31 at the National 
     Institutes of Health in Bethesda. Sometimes his colleagues 
     leave notes on the windshield that say things like, ``Go 
     home. You're making me feel guilty.''
       But Anthony S. Fauci has made a career of long hours, 
     exhaustive research and helping the public understand the 
     health dangers stalking the planet. As director for 23 years 
     of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases 
     at NIH, his milieu is the stuff that scares the daylights out 
     of most people: bioterrorism, deadly flu epidemics, the 
     enduring specter of AIDS.
       Fauci, who is equally at home in the laboratory, at a 
     patient's bedside, at a congressional hearing or on a Sunday 
     morning talk show, scarcely has time to collect all the 
     accolades that come his way. But this has been an 
     extraordinary year. In the spring, he won the Kober Medal, 
     one of the highest honors bestowed by the Association of 
     American Physicians. In July, President Bush awarded him the 
     National Medal of Science. And today, he receives one of 
     medicine's most prestigious prizes, the $150,000 Mary Woodard 
     Lasker public service award, as ``a world-class 
     investigator'' who ``has spoken eloquently on behalf of 
     medical science,'' according to the Lasker Foundation.
       No one deserves the honors more, his associates agree.
       ``Dr. Fauci is the best of his kind,'' said former U.S. 
     surgeon general C. Everett Koop, 90, who has often sought 
     Fauci's medical advice and counts himself as a friend.
       For someone else, this might be heady stuff. But Tony 
     Fauci, 66, has never strayed far from his down-to-earth 
     Brooklyn roots or his Jesuit training, with its emphasis on 
     service and intellectual growth. Beginning his career in the 
     lab--viewed by many as a backwater of medicine--he soon 
     became the chief detective probing a mystery that would 
     encircle the world. Before AIDS even had a name, he made the 
     ``fateful decision,'' he said, to make it the focus of his 
     research.
       ``It was a matter of destiny, I think, but by circumstance 
     alone I had been trained in the very disciplines that 
     encompassed this brand-new bizarre disease,'' he said. ``This 
     was in my mind something that was going to be historic.''
       He and his researchers would make breakthroughs in 
     understanding how HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, 
     destroys the body's immune system. Years ago, he assumed a 
     public role, calmly explaining the latest health scares on 
     talk shows such as ``Face the Nation.'' Through four 
     presidential administrations, he has led efforts that 
     resulted in Congress dramatically increasing funding to fight 
     AIDS.
       Today, as Fauci helps direct the president's emergency plan 
     for AIDS relief in Africa and elsewhere, he also is leading 
     the fight against such infectious diseases as anthrax and 
     tuberculosis. In his $250,000-a-year position, he oversees 
     1,700 employees and a $4.4 billion annual budget.
       ``Fauci doesn't sleep,'' said Gregory K. Folkers, his chief 
     of staff. ``He's the hardest-working person you'll ever 
     encounter.''
       The doctor's curriculum vitae supports that assertion. The 
     bibliography alone is 86 pages, listing 1,118 articles and 
     papers he has written or contributed to. (An example: ``The 
     Role of Monocyte/Macrophages and Cytokines in the 
     Pathogenesis of HIV Infection,'' published in 
     ``Pathobiology'' in 1992.) He has given more than 2,000 
     speeches, rehearsing with a stopwatch to whittle down his 
     remarks. He has received 31 honorary doctoral degrees.
       Vacations are seldom on the agenda. Often, his wife and 
     three daughters accompany him to events. This summer, it was 
     the International AIDS conference in Sydney. But he is seldom 
     found sitting by the pool behind his Northwest Washington 
     home. And retirement, he said firmly, is ``not on the radar 
     screen.''


                           Exceptional Child

       He learned to question early.
       It didn't make sense to him when the nuns at his school 
     said that you had to go to church to get into heaven. His 
     beloved paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Sicily, spent 
     his Sunday mornings cooking. What about him?
       ``I remember going up to him one day. `Grandpa, why don't 
     you go to Mass?' And he said: `Don't worry about it. For me, 
     doing good is my Mass,' '' Fauci said.
       The experience made him determined to do good through his 
     work. He was 7.
       The Faucis lived in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, 
     above the family drugstore operated by his father, Stephen, a 
     pharmacist.
       Fauci's only sibling, Denise Scorce, recalls that he was a 
     well-rounded kid who liked to play ball but only after he did 
     his homework.
       ``He was very normal in every way, but you kind of knew he 
     was special,'' said Scorce, 69, a retired teacher who lives 
     in Northern Virginia. ``Everything he did was perfect.''
       Fauci won a full scholarship to Regis High School, a Jesuit 
     institution in Manhattan. Later, he enrolled in another 
     Jesuit school, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, 
     Mass.
       ``The Jesuit training is wonderful. I don't think you can 
     do any better than that,'' he said. ``I always quote, 
     `Precision of thought, economy of expression.' ''
       Although he had an aptitude for science, he received his 
     1962 bachelor's degree in Greek/pre-med. He took the minimum 
     number of science courses required for acceptance at Cornell 
     University Medical College.
       ``I was very, very heavily influenced by the classics and 
     philosophy, which I think had an important part in my 
     ultimate interest in global issues and public service,'' he 
     said. ``I was interested in broader issues.'' I always tried 
     to look at things at 40,000 feet as well as down in the 
     trenches.''


                         Encounter With ACT UP

       One of the most dramatic episodes during Fauci's tenure at 
     NIH occurred in 1989, when angry ACT UP demonstrators swarmed 
     his building, demanding to be heard.
       Fauci, like many top government officials, was accused of 
     not doing enough to fight AIDS. The tactics were attention-
     getting: smoke bombs, staged ``die-ins,'' chalk bodies drawn 
     on sidewalks.
       ``He was public enemy number one for a number of years,'' 
     said writer and activist Larry Kramer, who led the charge. 
     ``I called him that in print. I called him very strong, 
     hateful things. . . . But Tony was smart enough to sit down 
     and talk with us.''
       Fauci read the leaflets the group distributed and others 
     threw away. ``If you put it in the context of they were human 
     beings who were afraid of dying and afraid of getting 
     infected and forget the theater, they really did have a 
     point,'' he said.
       When police officers moved to arrest the protesters, Fauci 
     stopped them. He invited a small group to his office to talk.
       ``He opened the door for us and let us in, and I called him 
     a hero for that,'' Kramer said in a telephone interview. ``He 
     let my people become members of his committees and boards, 
     and he welcomed us at the table. You have to understand that 
     he got a lot of flak for that.''
       It was worth it, Fauci said. ``That was, I think, one of 
     the better things that I've done.''


                          Doctor as Family Man

       Christine Grady still laughs when she recalls her first 
     meeting in 1983 with the famous Dr. Fauci. An AIDS nurse who 
     had recently joined the NIH after working in Brazil, she was 
     summoned to interpret for a Brazilian patient who wanted to 
     go home.
       Grady was dismayed when the patient responded to Fauci's 
     detailed instructions on aftercare by saying in Portuguese 
     that he intended instead to go out and have a good time. She 
     knew Fauci tolerated no nonsense.
       ``He said he'll do exactly as you say'' is how she 
     translated the patient's remarks.
       She thought she had been found out a couple of days later 
     when he asked her to come by his office. Instead of firing 
     her, as she feared, he asked her out to dinner. They were 
     married in May 1985.
       The Faucis live in a renovated 1920s home in the Wesley 
     Heights neighborhood. Grady, 55, has a doctorate in 
     philosophy and ethics from Georgetown, and she heads the 
     section on human subjects research at the NIH's Department of 
     Clinical Bioethics. Their children are also busy. Jenny, 21, 
     is a senior at Harvard University; Megan, 18, who will attend 
     Columbia University next fall, does community service 
     teaching in Chicago; Allison, 15, is on the cross-country 
     team at National Cathedral School.
       ``He's a goofball,'' said Jenny Fauci of her father. ``He 
     works hard and he does his thing, but he comes home and he's 
     singing opera in the kitchen and dancing around.''
       She thinks she understands what motivates him. ``Work is 
     not really work for him,'' she said. ``It's what he believes 
     in.''
       And so Fauci will leave for the office before dawn and 
     return home long after sunset. It reminds him of that speech 
     he gave this summer at the AIDS conference in Sydney. ``It 
     was called `Much Accomplished, Much Left to Do,' '' he said.

[[Page S15995]]



                          ____________________