 Dr.
Richard Krause was director of the National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases when AIDS burst onto the scene, but
his studies of infectious diseases had begun decades earlier
when he was a 19-year-old U.S. Army medic during World War II.
There, during a four-month stint in a venereal disease control
program, Dr. Krause first began to appreciate the range of efforts
required to prevent and treat infectious diseases. During a
year’s leave of absence while in medical school, he worked
with the late Dr. Charles H. Rammelkamp on the epidemiology
of streptococcal infections and rheumatic fever. He gleaned
from this experience the conviction that infection and immunity
were opposite sides of the same coin.
Bringing a broad background in microbiology and immunology
from his 20 years at Rockefeller University, Dr. Krause took
over NIAID’s reins in 1975. He remembers the feeling
of many then was, “Now that we’ve conquered infectious
diseases, and we don’t have to worry about them any longer,
we’ll worry about heart disease and cancer and so forth.”
Dr. Krause argued against this lack of concern, and struggled
successfully to build the Institute to the level needed to
confront future infectious epidemics.
In 1982, he published The Restless Tide, a book that
predicted we would not see an end to infectious diseases in
humans. He completed the book in 1980, and his foresight would
prove frighteningly accurate as AIDS emerged one year later.
Dr. Krause recalls the years leading up to the appearance
of AIDS and the steps taken by NIAID to understand and mobilize
against the new infectious threat. He is currently a senior
investigator at NIAID and a senior scientific advisor at the
Fogarty International Center at NIH.
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