TV Reviews : ‘AIDS Quarterly’ Offers the Scientific View of Disease

PBS has made a tradition of placing science into an understandable context for the general viewer. So it’s curious that, until very recently, it has tiptoed around the scientific aspects of AIDS, dwelling instead on its social and human ramifications.

Tonight’s second edition of “The AIDS Quarterly” (9 p.m. on Channels 28, 15 and 24, 10 p.m. on Channel 50) seeks to rectify this with a look at the methods being developed to isolate the virus. This crash-course in biochemistry is given a human dimension with a preceding portrait on Dr. Harvey Makadon, an internist at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, and how he is coping with AIDS’ unparalleled medical challenges. Host Peter Jennings, who allows some concern to trickle into his usual suave delivery, reports that there are three key, anti-AIDS medical strategies--all drugs--in development. The first blocks the virus from attaching to white blood cells, which are used as the entry way into the body’s immune system. The second stops the virus from multiplying once it’s inside the cells. The third tackles infections that emerge once AIDS breaks down the immune system.

Some fascinating points emerge, though the casual listener might miss them. Many of the most effective AIDS drugs have come out of cancer research, pointing to the commonalities in the fight against our society’s two most feared diseases. And many of the drugs are also the product of genetic engineering, which should cause some soul-searching for those opposed to gene-splicing.

Makadon, part of “the first generation of doctors to have AIDS in their future,” seems like a too-good-to-be-true physician. Yet his genuine concern for patients, his optimism in the face of merciless sickness and his faultless bedside manner are the real article. He arrives at a fairly profound conclusion: Perhaps the emergence of AIDS will force medicine to reject clinical emotionlessness and embrace the intimate, nurturing approach of the family doctor.