TO OUR READERS

By BRUCE HALLETT/PRESIDENT

Choosing TIME's Man of the Year always gives us a chance to step back from the weekly surge of events and put the year in perspective. This year brought us a national election, but it also brought a medical breakthrough not nearly so well publicized: a significant advance in the battle against AIDS, pioneered by a scientist named David Ho. Says managing editor Walter Isaacson: "Dr. Ho did not make the most headlines, but he helped make history. We'll look back on 1996 as the year when we finally made progress against a plague that has been frightening the world for more than a decade."

The task of coordinating our report on this stage of the AIDS epidemic fell to assistant managing editor Christopher Porterfield, who relished having a wider canvas than weekly coverage usually affords. "We could balance out many points of view," he says. "It's a volatile time. This is a breakthrough, yes, but who knows if it will prove temporary?"

Porterfield adds that however brilliant Ho's work, the researcher is really "an emblem of a key moment, picked to represent the best work of all the AIDS scientists." Ho, a virologist who directs the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York City, did not make it easy for our staff; he was concerned throughout the project that his work be put in the context of all that is happening in the field. It was only when science editor Philip Elmer-DeWitt laid out our comprehensive editorial plans that Ho realized what decision had been made. "Does that mean I'm Man of the Year?" he gulped. "That makes me very uncomfortable." Ho relaxed when convinced that his experiments with the new antiviral "cocktails" would not be touted as a "cure" and that we would also be profiling other prominent scientists.

The job of reporting and writing our package--which includes an update on the worldwide epidemic, a report on the impact of the new drugs on AIDS victims and an essay by playwright-screenwriter Paul Rudnick--went to a team of science journalists already highly informed, having produced a string of AIDS cover stories. Staff writer Christine Gorman, who wrote what she calls the "medical detective story," covered the first international AIDS conference for TIME in 1985. "Back then all the scientists and all the journalists could fit into one room," she recalls. She met Ho six years ago, and was immediately struck by his quiet confidence. "I thought that here was someone to pay attention to." Reporter Alice Park, who conducted the bulk of the interviews with Ho (by phone, E-mail and at his lab), was equally impressed: "I like his serenity and his logic."

If our science staff is a well-run machine, the engine is assistant editor Andrea Dorfman. In addition to making sure all the elements involved--text, pictures, charts--progressed on schedule, she chose the material that makes up the six-page time line of the history of the epidemic. Working closely with her was associate art director Thomas M. Miller and photo editor Cristina T. Scalet, who helped set up the portrait shoots with the skittish Ho and his family, as well as Gregory Heisler's striking cover picture.

For a personal profile, we turned to senior editor Howard Chua-Eoan, who has much in common with Ho. Both are immigrants (Chua-Eoan from the Philippines, Ho from Taiwan) and eldest sons. They share two Chinese dialects (Fujian and Mandarin), and both still do math in their head in Chinese.

Senior writer Richard Lacayo's assignment was to look at how people with AIDS are coping with the new drugs. Lacayo's view is cautious. "It's a time of hoping to hope," he says, "a time of figuring out when it's time to retrieve optimism."

But the hope offered in developed nations is foreclosed to millions in the Third World. Toronto bureau chief Andrew Purvis, recently returned from a four-year posting in Nairobi, Kenya, drew on his African experience to write about those for whom the only cure will be a vaccine. "Most Africans have a completely different attitude toward illness," he observes. "They have an amazing capacity for making do."

"The purpose of Man of the Year is to fulfill TIME's basic mission of telling the history of our time through the people who make it," says Isaacson. "The choice of Dr. Ho is a perfect example."

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Senior correspondent J. Madeleine Nash has won this year's American Association for the Advancement of Science award for magazine writing, one of the nation's most prestigious science-journalism prizes, for her cover story on "Evolution's Big Bang" (Dec. 4, 1995). It is TIME's fifth A.A.A.S. award.