Once upon a time--way back in 1984--Margaret Heckler of the Department of Health and Human Services announced that an AIDS vaccine would be ready to test in two years. While Patricia Thomas's account of the race for the AIDS vaccine begins about the same time, it took 16 years (and over 400 pages) for a vaccine to begin an efficacy trial, and then only because a group of desperate scientists took it into their own hands to raise the funds and go it alone without government support. While the disease itself has greatly resisted scientific study--it breaks all the rules, is not easily fooled, and continues to develop new strains--that's only one impediment in what has turned into a crawl towards the only real solution to the AIDS crisis. "HIV vaccine research has been a kind of low-prestige backwater that never, until recently, claimed more than 10 percent of federal spending on AIDS," Thomas writes. The development of a vaccine has been hampered by social attitudes and bureaucratic misapprehension, corporate lethargy (vaccine development entails higher costs and liability than therapeutic drugs), and the politics and big egos at such places as the National Institute for Health. Thomas closely follows some of the more passionate and heroic players who have forged ahead even while their companies waffle on vaccine research--young and idealistic biotech scientists like Kathy Steimer of Chiron Corporation, who worked at the cutting edge of immunology until her own untimely death, and Phil Berman and Don Francis (portrayed in And the Band Played On), who left the highly competitive company Genentech to launch the lone large-scale test. There are also the pioneers of naked DNA, such as Margaret Liu at Merck, who bet her rising career on the radical technology despite the fact that her vaccine took a back seat to the company's efforts to develop a treatment that would help far fewer people.

Thomas does an admirable job with a huge and complicated subject, using vivid metaphors to explain such topics as recombinant DNA, antigens, and virology, but unfortunately she seems compelled to tell every last detail, which makes for a sometimes tedious read. While it takes a lot of wading to get through this story, and there's certainly no happy ending, it is an eye-opening account of a vital yet obscured subject and, perhaps more importantly, a much-needed shot in the arm. --Lesley Reed