Short abstract
Physician and bat expert who became a prominent AIDS campaigner
In 1982, when the AIDS epidemic was in its infancy, it took an unusually prescient person to recognise that this was a disease like no other. One such person was Alvin Novick, professor of biology at Yale University and a former clinician.
Figure 1.
Credit: YALE UNIVERSITY
The term AIDS had only just been coined. President Reagan had not mentioned the word in public (that took him a further three years), though his press secretary had joked about AIDS in a press briefing. The virus had yet to be identified; the first AIDS drug, AZT (zidovudine), was not to reach the marketplace for another five years.
Alvin Novick, then aged 58, ended his 30 year study of bat sonar systems to confront the crisis. He ceased doing laboratory science and devoted the rest of his life—a further 20 years—to tackling AIDS.
Insightful, decisive, compassionate, and rigorous in everything he did, Novick was ahead of his time on almost every issue. From the beginning, he pressed for safeguards at blood banks. He researched the legal, ethical, public policy, and community development aspects of HIV/AIDS, and he was interested in every aspect of the disease, including AIDS education and prevention; risk reduction for people who injected drugs; the ethical issues surrounding ethnographic research; surveillance; confidentiality; testing; the conduct of clinical trials; tuberculosis and AIDS; the behavioural epidemiology of AIDS; and home and terminal care for patients—he founded Connecticut's AIDS hospice.
Novick wanted drug users included in clinical trials, not least to enhance their access to health care. He also researched post-exposure prophylaxis, the use of law to regulate behaviour, the systematic oppression of people who were vulnerable to AIDS infection or were infected; drug adherence; and vertical transmission.
He served on the US Food and Drug Administration's antiviral drugs advisory committee, and committees of the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, and US surgeon general.
Novick was editor in chief of the AIDS and Public Policy Journal and in 1985 was elected president of the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights (now the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association). He was director of the law, policy, and ethics core of Yale's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, and he taught a graduate course on problems in bioethics, and undergraduate courses on human sexuality, and on AIDS and society.
He was a founder of the New Haven AIDS project and created all the AIDS service programmes, including the needle exchange. Believing that prevention education must “consistently acknowledge the essential importance of sexual intimacy” for gay men as for all individuals, he urged doctors and others involved in HIV prevention not to impose an unrealistic, zero-risk standard on all at-risk people. Rather, he said, “our prevention efforts should focus on reducing risk overall, by helping each individual learn how to maximise fulfilment and minimise risk.”
A further interest was the problems of healthcare professionals dealing with AIDS, and he fought to prevent a backlash against those who were infected. He argued cogently against mandatory testing of health workers, saying in 1991 that doctors with the virus “see themselves as the target of an inflamed public.” He set up a confidential helpline for healthcare professionals with AIDS, and pointed out the rarity of documented cases of doctor-to-patient transmission.
He was concerned about society's stigmatisation and ostracism of people with AIDS and he used his leadership as a physician and Yale professor to open doors for them. He “gave a voice to the voiceless,” arguing that AIDS affected people who were already stigmatised or marginalised, including women, gay men, black and Hispanic people, sex workers, and drug abusers. There “was no reason for people to see AIDS as an embarrassment or a humiliation. We have to stop seeing this as anything other than a devastating infection. No one is guilty. Only the virus is guilty.”
Alvin Novick was born in Flushing, New York, in 1925, the son of Jewish immigrants; his father owned a tyre store. From Flushing High School he did his army service and was a prisoner of war in Germany. He then went to Harvard, graduating in biochemistry and then medicine. After two years clinical work at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston he wanted to pursue more basic science research and the person he most admired was Donald Griffin, the zoology professor, who set him to work on echolocation in bats. For 30 years he worked on them, becoming a leading expert and writing the entry on them for Encyclopaedia Britannica. His research on bat sonar navigation was used by the US military to improve radar technology.
In his spare time he was a dedicated horticulturist and he bred pedigree dogs. His partner, William Sabella, Connecticut's first state AIDS coordinator, died from AIDS related complications in 1992. For the last 10 years Novick lived with his good and dear friend Frederick Altice, clinical research director of the Yale University AIDS programme.
Alvin Novick, physician, biologist, and AIDS policy pioneer, New Haven, Connecticut, United States (b Flushing, New York, 1925; q Harvard 1951), died from prostate cancer on 10 April 2005.