Medicine: A Brush with EVE

When 150 virologists and public-health experts met in Philadelphia last week to swap shoptalk on the eastern equine encephalitis that flared in southern New Jersey last fall (TIME, Oct. 5), the conference chairman himself was the rarest of medical phenomena: a survivor of the deadly disease who had escaped brain damage.

Almost casually, in highly technical discussions held by the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine, it was disclosed that Chairman Richard E. Shope, 58, virologist of the Rockefeller Institute, had become infected and the subject of a scientific first. Dr. Shope, working in Ocean County where encephalitis was raging,...