Martin Kettle in Washington
An international group of doctors said this week it would try to accelerate the fight against Aids by volunteering to become human guinea pigs in a trial of a vaccine containing the HIV virus.
The announcement immediately triggered extensive offers from members of the United States public to join the volunteer group.
Some 50 members from several countries of the Chicago-based International Association of Physicians in Aids Care said they had signed a pledge offering themselves as volunteers in tests of the attenuated viral vaccine, a genetically weakened version of the vaccine.
Other Aids charities immediately urged caution. But the Chicago group insisted its proposal was not a publicity stunt.
We cannot sit around after 16 years and continue to debate how quickly we can do trials, said Dr Gordon Nary, the associations executive director and one of the volunteers. There are 8 000 new cases of Aids a day, and 1 000 children a day are born with the disease. A vaccine is the only significant type of scientific intervention that is going to have any impact.
Nary said the group had been swamped with offers to join the programme. Aids organisations were compiling lists. It has touched a nerve among the public, he said.
Aids vaccine development is a slow process because of the safety measures and rigorous animal testing which are observed before humans are injected with a trial vaccine. Research in the past decade has tended to focus on vaccines which do not involve a live strain of the HIV virus, because of fears that even a weakened strain might cause Aids or other complications.
Advocates of the human guinea pig programme say Dr Ronald Desrosiers, of the Harvard Medical School, has developed a vaccine that seems to protect monkeys from the primate equivalent of HIV. The group wants to use that vaccine in its experiment.
The researchers will have to obtain permission from the federal Food and Drug Administration before going ahead with the plan on a nationwide basis. It may, however, be legal to proceed within the state of Illinois whose laws govern Chicago more quickly. Another option is to conduct the research outside the US.