E-Mail This Article to a Friend AIDS RESEARCH Will Boston escape Tommy Thompson’s hammer? BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

The call went out last week for submissions of scientific papers to one of the most influential and important AIDS/HIV research conferences in the world, which will take place in Boston next February. All the best cutting-edge research will be presented at the 12th annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).

That is, we hope so. Unfortunately, it’s hard to be confident after the Bush administration restricted participation in this summer’s International AIDS Conference, held in Bangkok.

Scientists from the US actually had to cancel 40 presentations they had planned to give at the July conference, after Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson unexpectedly limited the number of participating HHS scientists. Presentations on drug-resistance tracking, CD4-receptor biology, and racial disparities in HIV care were among those that had to be withdrawn from the conference.

"I think it’s unlikely that there will be a similar thing at [CROI]," says Mario Stevenson, professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, in Worcester, and co-chair of the February conference. He wants to believe that Thompson’s decision was financially driven, and figures it’s much cheaper to send people to Boston than to Thailand.

Stevenson also believes that scientists from other countries won’t boycott this conference in retaliation, although he acknowledges that the HHS withdrawal "was perceived by the chair of the International AIDS Conference as an insult" — as it was by many conference-goers from less-developed countries as well. Thompson’s department, which includes such crucial AIDS-research agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration, was allowed to send only 50 people to the conference.

Democratic congressman Henry Waxman of California, the ranking minority member on the Committee on Government Reform, shot off an angry letter of protest to Thompson in June. "By grounding these experts, you are keeping them from learning from their peers across the world, and you are depriving the world of scientific leadership."

In the letter, Waxman suggests, as others have, that Thompson may have acted in retaliation for his cold reception at the last International AIDS Conference, held two years ago in Barcelona. As Thompson began a speech at that gathering, protesters disrupted the event, rushing the stage holding signs and chanting accusations about US AIDS policy. The protesters drowned out his speech, and Thompson was reportedly booed off the stage.

Thompson has not tried his luck at CROI — in fact, no Bush administration official has. In February 2002, Bill Gates delivered the keynote in Seattle; former president Bill Clinton did the honors here in Boston a year later; and in 2004, Stephen H. Lewis, United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, did the same in San Francisco. No word yet on who will speak in Boston next February. Even if Thompson himself stays away, we can hope that he lets people in his department attend.