Medicine: No Progress, No Panic

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Peptide T, another promising substance for curbing the virus, received mixed reviews. Last December, Neuroscientist Candace Pert of the National Institute of Mental Health reported that the chemical, a synthetic portion of a protein on the AIDS virus that helps it bind to cells, seemed to prevent the virus from entering cells. In May the FDA approved clinical trials, and last week Oncogen, a Seattle biotechnology company, announced that its researchers had confirmed Pert's findings. But Dr. William Haseltine, a virologist at Harvard's Dana Farber Cancer Institute, said neither his laboratory nor six others around the world had been able to reproduce Pert's results.

Not all was gloomy. Abbott Laboratories has developed a new blood test that, because it directly indicates the presence of the AIDS virus, can immediately show infection. Current tests, because they detect only antibodies, may take weeks to months to indicate the presence of the virus.