Guide to the Catherine M. Wilfert Interview, 2006

Catherine Wilfert was born on 26 July 1936, in Inglewood, Calif. She graduated with distinction from Stanford College in 1958 and then attended Harvard Medical School. Her internship was at Boston City Hospital, and her residency was at North Carolina Baptist Hospital. In 1964, Dr. Wilfert returned to Boston, where she continued to work in pediatrics and medicine. In 1971, she came to Duke University School of Medicine, where she achieved the rank of division chief of Pediatric Infectious Diseases in the Department of Pediatrics (1976-1994) and professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. In 1996, she left Duke to become the scientific director of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

Wilfert's work since the onset of AIDS has primarily been focused on the eradication of pediatric AIDS, and she is considered a seminal investigator in the field. Her clinical trial group demonstrated the efficacy of using doses of AZT to reduce the incidence of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Due to the application of this knowledge, pediatric AIDS in the United States has been reduced by 75 percent. Dr. Wilfert now works to reduce mother-to-infant transmission of AIDS in developing countries around the world. She is also currently the chair of the Perinatal Working Group for the Prevention Trials Network (HPTN), sponsored by National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Wilfert has been on the editorial board of numerous publications and has served as a consultant for private companies as well as U.S. and state governments. She is the recipient of many awards, including the 1997 Award of Recognition for Outstanding Contributions to Advancing the Prevention of Perinatal Transmission at A Global Strategies Conference for the Prevention of HIV Transmission from Mothers to Infants-. She also received a Lifetime Achievement Award in HIV from the Third International Meeting on HIV in India in 2001, and was given the Distinguished Award of Honor for Love of Humanity Especially in the Third World from the Cameroon Baptist Convention on Occasion of Its 50th Anniversary Celebration, in 2004. She was inducted to the Institute of Medicine in 1999.

Collection Overview

Contains audiotapes and transcript of an oral history interview with Catherine M. Wilfert, an award-winning AIDS researcher and former division chief of the Duke University School of Medicine's Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Department of Pediatrics.

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Detailed Description of the Collection

Dr. Wilfert speaks about: family support; her decision to become a physician; her medical degree from Harvard; the atmosphere for women at Harvard; the differences between the Harvard and Duke campuses; scientific collaborations on Duke campus; people in Department of Pediatrics; working with Dr. Rebecca Buckley on Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever cases; practicalities of working in the lab; the welcoming nature of the Duke Pediatrics Department towards women; the names of important women in the medical center; her husband, Dr. Samuel Katz; the direction of Department of Pediatrics under Dr. Katz's leadership; institutional support for the Department of Pediatrics; differences between pediatric medicine and internal (adult) medicine; physicians' reactions to first hearing about AIDS in the 1980s; patients' deaths due to AIDS; Duke's involvement in clinical trials to treat AIDS; Dr. Dani Bolognesi; her own involvement in giving AZT to mothers; the dramatic reduction of newborn AIDS patients due to AZT use by infected mothers; publicity of the initial trial; controversies of the Thailand trial; her personal stand about early international trials with AZT; the entities responsible for international AZT trials; differences between treating patients in the United States and in developing countries; the dramatic decrease in newborn AIDS patients in United States; difficulties of treating AIDS patients in developing countries; the necessity of treating AIDS patients in developing countries, even by imperfect means; her personal passion for the cause of treating AIDS patients in developing countries; her work for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation; her retirement from Duke; the foundational support for her work; the need for financial support in the cause of fighting AIDS; countries on which she focuses the most; her travel schedule; working with national governments of developing countries; the status of pediatric AIDS in the United States; specific cases (not identified by name) that stand out to her; others who are in the fight against AIDS; what Westerners should know about the AIDS struggle in the developing world; dissatisfaction with current system of medical care delivery in the United States; her role as chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases; and interactions with Dr. Katz as chief under his chairmanship.