Oral History Project: Anthony S. Fauci, MD-Interview with Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.

Video Transcription

Video Summary

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci recounts his upbringing and early career path in an oral history interview recorded at NIH in 2015. Born and raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to first-generation Italian-American parents, Fauci describes a close-knit family shaped by his father’s work as a pharmacist who owned Fauci Pharmacy and his mother’s role as a homemaker after college. His education was strongly Jesuit and humanities-focused—first at Regis High School in Manhattan and then at the College of the Holy Cross—where he studied classics and philosophy alongside the science courses needed for medical school.<br /><br />Fauci returned to New York City for medical school at Cornell and trained in internal medicine there. Initially, he envisioned a career as a practicing academic physician rather than a lab-based scientist. Two forces shifted his trajectory: NIH’s prominence as a route into academic medicine and the Vietnam-era draft, which allowed physicians to serve through the U.S. Public Health Service at NIH. Accepted into NIAID in 1968, he trained under mentor Sheldon Wolf, focusing on the “host side” of infectious disease—how the immune system interacts with microbes—at a time when human immunology was still emerging.<br /><br />After a chief residency in New York, Fauci returned to NIH in 1972 as an independent investigator studying immune regulation and immune-mediated diseases. His team achieved major advances in inducing remission in previously fatal vasculitides using immunosuppressive therapies, while investigating how these drugs altered immune function. The interview closes as he describes a pivotal moment in 1981, when early CDC MMWR reports of unusual infections and Kaposi’s sarcoma in gay men signaled the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and redirected his work.

Asset Caption

Anthony S. Fauci is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Fauci was the recipient of the AAI Public Service Award in 2000 and the AAI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005, and elected a Distinguished Fellow of AAI in 2019.

Keywords

Anthony S. Fauci

oral history interview

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)

Bensonhurst Brooklyn

Jesuit education

Cornell medical school

U.S. Public Health Service

human immunology and immune regulation

AIDS epidemic 1981