Vaccine Research Center 5th Anniversary

[Photos:
Vaccine Research Center, NIH
Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease; Beatrice Hahn, University of Alabama, Birmingham
Gary Nabel, head of the NIH Vaccine Research Center;
David Baltimore, Nobel Laureate, USC
Steve Harrison, Harvard Medical School]

A symposium was held of the campus of the National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD) celebrating the 5th Anniversary of the Vaccine Research Center (VRC). The VRC was commissioned by President Clinton to develop and implement a vaccine against HIV infection. It opened in 2001 and its efforts soon expanded to vaccine research for other emerging or re-emerging pathogens such as West Nile, SARS, and influenza.

There has been notable progress towards developing an HIV vaccine, although this is difficult for many lay persons to see, as a true candidate vaccine still lies far in the distant future. How far, no one, including those speaking today at the symposium, is able to say.