From the Lancet online…
John Philip Phair, an Infectious disease specialist and influential HIV/AIDS researcher has died of heart failure. He was born on July 17, 1934, in Paris, France, and passed away on Feb 19, 2024, in Evanston, IL, at age 89.
When the AIDS epidemic erupted in the USA in the mid1980s, John Phair led key parts of the research response to the disease nationally while helping guide local clinical efforts from his position as head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL, USA. In 1983 Phair helped form the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS), a US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)-supported prospective study on the natural and treated histories of HIV infections in men who have sex with men. He was the “unanimous choice to lead the foursite MACS. He had the right background as an infectious disease expert and he had no ego”, said Charles Rinaldo, Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
Dr. John Philip Phair bottom left, standing next to Dr. Rinaldo and his fellow colleagues in Chicago, 2014.
In addition to being a “great person and really smart”, he abated some of the hysteria that marked the early years of the AIDS epidemic by being “very level-headed. He could swim through some very rough waters”, said Robert Murphy, the John Philip Phair Professor of Infectious Diseases at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and Executive Director of the Havey Institute for Global Health.