‘I’m never going to be Tony’: Jeanne Marrazzo, Anthony Fauci’s successor, vows a new direction at NIAID

When Jeanne Marrazzo started her residency at the Yale New Haven Hospital in 1988, the world was a very different place. Marrazzo provided care for dying AIDS patients—mainly gay men and intravenous drug users and their sexual partners. “Stigma was alive and well and thriving, and in fact, really, really ugly at the time,” Marrazzo told an audience of young scientists on 3 March in Denver, just before the start of an HIV/AIDS conference. “You really sometimes had to work hard to get your patients what you needed. That made me interested in political and scientific advocacy and activism very early on.” At the time, AIDS activists had been attacking the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, demanding a more aggressive response to the epidemic, and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci was starting to make peace with them. Marrazzo, an out lesbian, lived in both worlds. “I respected academia, but I was often frustrated by the homogeneity of what I saw as the leadership,” she said during her talk. “I always wanted to be an outsider with an inside track.” She’s no longer an outsider. In September 2023, Marrazzo succeeded Fauci as director of NIAID, the second-largest unit of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with a $6.3 billion annual budget and a global network of collaborators. Her appointment was loudly applauded by researchers and the communities they serve. “As a gay man living with HIV, the fact that Dr. Marrazzo is ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news