Don Francis

Don Francis is an American epidemiologist who worked on the Ebola outbreak in Africa in the late 1970s, and helped discover HIV and AIDS. He retired from the U.S. Public Health Service in 1992, after 21 years of service. According to him, the White House (then under the administration of George H.W. Bush) wanted him fired, but in order to evade controversy he quietly "retired". He currently lives in San Francisco, California.

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Early life

He was born in the Bay Area of California and grew up in Marin County. His main interest was skiing, and his mother, father and grandfather were physicians. Francis, however, was a poor student as a child, suffering from dyslexia. He has said that he gravitated towards science because he had such difficulty with subjects where fluid reading ability was needed.

Francis completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a member of the California chapter at Delta Upsilon, class of 1966. He received his M.D. from Northwestern University and his Doctor of Science in Virology from Harvard. He did his internship and residency in pediatrics at the University of Southern California Medical Center in Los Angeles and his fellowship in infectious diseases at Harvard. Before beginning his work on AIDS, Dr. Francis was involved in epidemic control around the world. He was instrumental in eradicating smallpox from Sudan, India and Bangladesh. He was also on the front line of the cholera epidemic in Nigeria in the early 1970's, the smallpox epidemic in Yugoslavia in 1972[1], and the Ebola epidemic in Sudan in 1976. Dr. Francis also did some of the early developmental work on the hepatitis B vaccine, both in the United States and in the People's Republic of China.

Later Work

Dr. Francis began his work on AIDS in 1981. He was one of the first scientists to suggest that AIDS was caused by an infectious agent. As director of CDC's AIDS Laboratory Activities, he worked closely with the Institut Pasteur to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS. He was also one of the earliest scientists to realize the impact HIV would have on the United States and has been an indefatigable advocate for a logical public response.

In February of 1992 he retired from the CDC after more than 20 years in the U.S. Public Health Service. At the time of his retirement he was the Centers for Disease Control's AIDS Advisor to the State of California and Special Consultant to Mayor Art Agnos in San Francisco. In the latter capacity he served as the Chair of the Mayor's HIV Task Force.

In 1993, Dr. Francis joined Genentech, Inc. of South San Francisco to help develop a vaccine for HIV. In 1995, Dr. Francis and fellow retrovirologist Dr. Robert Nowinski spun off Genentech's HIV vaccine unit and founded VaxGen, based in Brisbane, California, to continue working on vaccines as an independent company.

VaxGen developed a vaccine dubbed AIDSVAX, which underwent preliminary trials in North America, Europe, and Thailand. However, in 2003 it was announced that these trials had been unsuccessful. Although the vaccine itself was ultimately a failure, many still consider the trials an important achievement.

In 2004, Dr. Francis left VaxGen to pursue the formation of a not-for-profit body for the advancement of HIV vaccine research.

And The Band Played On

In 1993, HBO produced an Emmy winning movie of the AIDS crisis called And The Band Played On, based on the 1987 book of the same name by San Francisco Chronicle jounalist Randy Shilts. The central figure in the movie is Dr. Don Francis (Matthew Modine), veteran of the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication program, and the horrifying outbreak of hemorrhagic fever along the Ebola River in central Africa in 1976. Working at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta with no money and no space, Francis pursues his theory that AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus on the model of feline leukemia. His individual antagonist is Dr. Robert Gallo (Alan Alda), the discoverer of HTLV (the human T-cell leukemia virus), who cuts off assistance when he hears that Francis has shared some experimental materials with French researchers. (Gallo sees the French team mainly as his rivals for a Nobel prize.) Gallo finally claims a French retrovirus discovery as his own and thereby acquires a coveted patent.

Further reading

• [Website] Photographs of the real people from Randy Shilts' history of the AIDS crisis "And the Band Played On"
• Don Francis and the Ebola Virus
• Film Annotations for And the Band Played On
• Dr. Donald P. Francis Talks to Teachers About the Ebola Outbreak
• Movers & Shakers Interview (3rd June 2003) - Dr. Donald Francis, President & Co-Founder, VaxGen Inc.
• Vaccine has no impact; AIDSVAX's failure a blow to treatment
• VaxGen Announces Changes to Management and Board