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When HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS in 1984, ambitious young researchers were confident that they could design a vaccine to protect people against this lethal virus. As Big Shot's story unfolds, Thomas shows how youthful optimism is honed into gritty determination as scientists confront not only difficult scientific challenges, but also do battle with public condemnation of AIDS patients, cautious bureaucrats, conservative executives, hostile activists, and a perennial shortage of money and resources. As she follows the gripping, interwoven stories of a subset of scientists, corporate executives, bureaucrats, and military officers whose lives and complex motivations illustrate the triumphs and frustrations of the quest for a vaccine, she also offers clear, enlightening explanations of how vaccines aim to block the potentially deadly tango of the AIDS virus and the human immune system. Since the mid-1990s, sophisticated new drugs have made life better, and longer, for many HIV patients in wealthy countries. Although political pressure is causing some pharmaceutical companies to lower prices for these medicines in poorer nations, they will still not be available to most of the world's AIDS sufferers. Not until we have a safe, effective, affordable vaccine is there any real hope of defeating one of the deadliest microbes that has ever stalked human kind. Above all, Big Shot is about people who are determined to develop such a weapon. The health of future generations rests on the shoulders of individuals who are as strong, and as weak, as the rest of us. Just as Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action ultimately told us more about human nature than environmental law, Big Shot is about a great deal more than AIDS vaccines.
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When Patricia Thomas set out to chronicle the search for an AIDS vaccine, she expected to find a classic struggle between ingenious young scientists and an exceptionally wily microbe. But she was in for a surprise. She soon learned that although the scientific challenges involved in making an AIDS vaccine are immense, this alone does not explain why the world still doesn't have such a vaccine - twenty years after the pandemic began. In Big Shot, Thomas dramatizes the controversial search for a vaccine – the players, the politics, the money – in a vivid, suspenseful story that reveals how science is done, and not done, in America today.