Serth Berkley On The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative | Big Think

Serth Berkley On The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative

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The mission of the IAVI is to try to accelerate the development of an AIDS vaccine for use throughout the world.

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Seth Berkley:

Seth Berkley, President and founder of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, is a medical doctor specializing in infectious disease epidemiology and international health. The author of over 85 publications, the opening line of one of his articles encapsulates his life's work: "History will not judge HIV/AIDS kindly...the harshest words will be reserved for how the world responded, or rather failed to respond, to the epidemic."

Prior to founding IAVI in 1996, Dr. Berkley was the Associate Director of the Health Sciences Division at The Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Berkley is also an adjunct Professor of Public Health at Columbia University and an adjunct Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University and trained in Internal Medicine at Harvard University. He has worked for the Center for Infectious Diseases of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and for the Carter Center, where he was assigned as an epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health in Uganda. He sits on a number of international steering committees and corporate and not-for-profit boards and has consulted or worked in over 25 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

He is also an opinion leader, speaking frequently on health technology, development, AIDS and international health. In his words, "It is long past due to add HIV/AIDS to the list" of eradicated diseases.

Prior to founding IAVI in 1996, Dr. Berkley was the Associate Director of the Health Sciences Division at The Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Berkley is also an adjunct Professor of Public Health at Columbia University and an adjunct Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University and trained in Internal Medicine at Harvard University. He has worked for the Center for Infectious Diseases of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and for the Carter Center, where he was assigned as an epidemiologist at the Ministry of Health in Uganda. He sits on a number of international steering committees and corporate and not-for-profit boards and has consulted or worked in over 25 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

He is also an opinion leader, speaking frequently on health technology, development, AIDS and international health. In his words, "It is long past due to add HIV/AIDS to the list" of eradicated diseases.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How did you arrive at the IAVI?

Seth Berkley: I was interested in science actually and decided to go into medicine as an area of science that could do some good. I started out in the area of internal medicine, seeing patients, something I liked; got involve din setting up and working in some of the first community health type projects and enjoyed that but wanted to expand into public health. After I did my residency, I went to the Centers for Disease Control and did infectious disease work. After that, I went to Massachusetts and worked in the state health department to understand how things worked at the state. There, I was going to settle down and do some teaching and work in the state but President Carter and the Taskforce for Child Survival asked me if I would go to Uganda to help President Museveni who had just taken over to try to rebuild the health system of Uganda, which was an absolute tattered mess after 15 years of kind of craziness. It was an amazing opportunity to go do it. I took a look at it. I did not go to do AIDS but when I was there, of course, I started asking questions like what’s the male/female ratio of cases so far, what’s the age distribution -- simple things. People hadn’t looked at that so I began to look at it. Then we set up the first surveillance system for AIDS and my moment, my epiphany came when we did a suro [ph?] survey, a survey of the population, random, and took blood and looked to see whether people were HIV positive.

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