Freethink
After spending more than 30 years of his life fighting the AIDS crisis, Wayne Koff found himself coming to a startling realization: namely, that we understand far more about how the HIV virus evolves and adapts over time than we do about how our own immune system responds to it.
“I spent a long time on HIV vaccine development,” says Koff, adjunct professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “None of them worked, and slowly, over time, we began to see that we understood a lot about HIV at the molecular level, but we didn’t know anything about ourselves. And the reason is that the immune system is incredibly complex.”