Meet a Modern Researcher

Mention medical research, and listeners right away conjure up images of anemic-looking science types shut away in their labs surrounded by test tubes and yesterday’s sandwiches. Well, laboratory researchers now come in all shapes and lifestyles.

Diana Finzi, 33, has long dark hair, wears small, gold hoop earrings and flashes an engaging smile. Born in Italy, raised in Bethesda, Md. (her father worked for the World Bank), she’s a graduate of Oberlin with an M.P.H. from Yale, and in her fifth year of a doctoral program in immunology at the School of Medicine. At the moment, she’s making waves in the scientific community with her cutting-edge research on the AIDS virus.

Finzi also is the mother of Leo, 5, and Henry, 2 (with whom she speaks Italian). Five days a week she rises at 5 a.m., and by 6 leaves her house on a quiet tree-lined street a short hop from her husband’s D.C. law office. Munching a bagel and sipping coffee in the car, she makes the hour-long drive to the Hopkins campus. Despite her grueling schedule, she exudes calm. Arriving at work at 7, she works straight through until 3, lunching on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich she’s brought from home.

All Finzi’s research takes place as part of a team in the lab of principal investigator Robert Siliciano. “I’m a well-trained assistant,” she says modestly. “The main ideas are generated by Bob.” But Siliciano, associate professor of medicine, contends, “She’s come up with some of our most important discoveries using a very technical and laborious method.”

It’s true that as the only student in her lab who’s also a mother, Finzi is careful to shoulder her share of the work. Her nose-to-the-test-tube attitude has paid off. Last November, she was the lead author of a paper published in Science titled “Identification of a Reservoir for HIV-1 in Patients on Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy.” Among the co-authors was Time’s 1996 man of the year, AIDS researcher David Ho.

The article reports sobering, but significant findings for HIV-positive patients being treated with the AIDS cocktail, a combination of three powerful drugs. They must continue to take their pills—up to 20 a day, with such side effects as nausea and diarrhea—for longer than the three to five years that once was hoped. Although the AIDS cocktail can knock a patient’s viral load so low that by standard measures the virus becomes undetectable, HIV, it seems, can still reside in latent form in resting CD4+T cells. The immune system probably doesn’t recognize those non-active infected resting cells, Finzi explains, and the triple drug therapy that blocks viral replication doesn’t kill the cells where the virus is hiding.

Finzi’s striking research illustrates that when the infected cells are activated in a test tube, the HIV virus comes back. “If people go off the triple drug therapy, and one of these cells is triggered by a cold or other infection, then the HIV virus can flare up again,” she explains. “We have to figure out a way to target these cells and get rid of them, because if we don’t address the problems of latently infected cells hiding the HIV virus, there’s no way to eradicate or cure the disease.”

“I love the science of AIDS research,” Finzi declares. “My life is the lab and my kids. There’s not time for reading novels or traveling or much else. But having children and being in school works for me. It’s not torture. And it happens that AIDS is a problem the world is interested in solving.” - Beth Brophy

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