Crash Claims 2 AIDS Crusaders

Drs. Jonathan Mann and Mary Lou Clements-Mann made a pact after they married more than a year ago. The two prominent AIDS researchers pledged to overcome their professional separation--they worked in cities about 100 miles apart--by traveling together to conferences as frequently as possible.

“I’ve never seen a happier couple; they were so totally and absolutely in love,” said Carole Heilman, a National Institutes of Health vaccine researcher and close friend of both. “I remember we were all in India together, right after they’d just gotten married, and he had fresh flowers sent to the room every night.”

On Wednesday night, the couple were traveling on Swissair Flight 111 to attend a meeting in Geneva when the jetliner crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Nova Scotia, killing all 229 people aboard.

“As horrible as this is, I guess I’m glad they went down together,” Heilman said, her voice breaking. “I don’t know how either one could have lived without the other.”

Mann was an early crusader in the international effort to combat acquired immune deficiency syndrome. As the first director of the U.N. World Health Organization’s campaign against AIDS, from 1986 to 1990, he traveled to scores of nations to bring global and political attention to the seriousness of the epidemic.

“It was through his obstinance and brilliance” that the world began “a coordinated international effort on AIDS,” Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said Thursday.

“Mary Lou was also a fighter,” Shalala added. “She was a respected research expert in vaccine development and deeply involved in the worldwide hunt for an AIDS vaccine. These two visionary professionals will be a huge loss to science and to the fight against AIDS.”

It wasn’t unusual for the couple to be heading to Geneva, headquarters of WHO and site of numerous international scientific meetings on AIDS. In fact, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard on Thursday described the regular Swissair flight out of New York as being “like a U.N. airbus” because so many U.N. agencies are based in Geneva.

At least six U.N. staff members or affiliated personnel were believed to have died in the crash. They are Pierce Gerety, an American, and Kathryn Calvert-Mazy of France, who worked in the Geneva office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees; Joachim Bilger and Ludwig Baeumer, both from Germany, who worked in the Geneva office of the World Intellectual Property Organization; Yves de Roussan, a Canadian with the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF; and Ingrid Acevedo, an American, director of public relations at the U.S. Committee for UNICEF.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed deep sorrow Thursday at the deaths of all the victims, and in particular “to the relatives and friends of those who lost their lives in the service of the ideals of the United Nations.”

Mann, 51, was most recently dean of Allegheny University of the Health Sciences’ School of Public Health in Philadelphia. It was a job he took in part to be closer to Clements-Mann, also 51, a professor in the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Previously, Mann had been at Harvard University in Massachusetts, where he was professor of international health and epidemiology in the School of Public Health and director of Harvard’s Francois Xavier Bagnoud Center of Health and Human Rights.

Both had been previously married--Mann had three children, now grown--and had found each other when their work lives crossed.

“Mary Lou took a leave of absence and went off to Boston for a while, but Jonathan felt that he could more easily relocate than Mary Lou could, and he encouraged her to stay at Hopkins,” said Heilman, who is the acting director of the AIDS vaccine and prevention program at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID.

“So he found a place fairly near, in Philadelphia, and some nights he’d take the train back and forth. He used to say it wasn’t so bad, that he could get a lot of work done.”

But recently he indicated some interest in finding a job in the Washington/Baltimore area to be closer to his wife. Also, he was discouraged that the Allegheny University system had recently declared bankruptcy.

“It seems that the goals I came here to pursue have become a rather distant dream,” he wrote in an e-mail Aug. 20 to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, asking to meet with him this fall about possible “new directions and new job opportunities for me.”

Fauci said he immediately responded “absolutely” and encouraged him to come.

“This is shocking,” Fauci said Thursday. “We’ve lost two fine human beings, as well as two major contributors to the AIDS effort who were there from the very beginning.”

“Jonathan believed one should think globally and act locally,” said Larry Kessler, executive director of the Boston-based AIDS Action Committee. “He had an international vision but never lost touch with real people. He would get as excited about a tribal leader in the heart of Africa handing out condoms as he did hobnobbing with prime ministers and ministers of health.”

VICTIMS IDENTIFIED: Swissair released a nearly complete list of the dead. A27