Administration officials had assured friends and reporters that no gays would serve on Ronald Reagan's AIDS advisory commission. Thus conservatives and liberals alike were astonished last week when the President appointed Cancer Specialist Frank Lilly, an avowed homosexual, to the 13-member panel. Lilly, chairman of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, holds doctorates in organic chemistry and biology and has studied viruses similar to AIDS for 20 years.
Also appointed was John Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of New York, who outspokenly defends his church's teaching that homosexual acts are sinful. Dr. W. Eugene Mayberry, chairman of the Mayo Clinic's board of governors, was named to head the commission's inquiry. Mayberry has confessed that he is "no AIDS expert." Indeed, the makeup of the commission struck many as a recipe for inaction rather than progress. Fumed AIDS Activist Ann McFarren: "President Reagan's appointments are unconscionable." Reagan, however, defended his choices during a hospital tour and even held an AIDS-afflicted baby. "When it comes to stopping the spread of AIDS," said he, "medicine and morality teach the same lessons."
The commission is expected to turn out a preliminary report on the dimensions of the AIDS epidemic in 90 days. Meanwhile, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that the drug AZT prevents patients with only a few symptoms of AIDS from fully developing the disorder. Says Co-Author Margaret Fischl of the University of Miami: "The next step will be to try the drug on people who test positive for the virus but have no symptoms."