The Honored Doctor

Fauci, like many top government officials, was accused of not doing enough to fight AIDS. The tactics were attention-getting: smoke bombs, staged "die-ins," chalk bodies drawn on sidewalks.

"He was public enemy number one for a number of years," said writer and activist Larry Kramer, who led the charge. "I called him that in print. I called him very strong, hateful things. . . . But Tony was smart enough to sit down and talk with us."

Fauci read the leaflets the group distributed and others threw away. "If you put it in the context of they were human beings who were afraid of dying and afraid of getting infected and forget the theater, they really did have a point," he said.

When police officers moved to arrest the protesters, Fauci stopped them. He invited a small group to his office to talk.

"He opened the door for us and let us in, and I called him a hero for that," Kramer said in a telephone interview. "He let my people become members of his committees and boards, and he welcomed us at the table. You have to understand that he got a lot of flak for that."

It was worth it, Fauci said. "That was, I think, one of the better things that I've done."

Doctor as Family Man

Christine Grady still laughs when she recalls her first meeting in 1983 with the famous Dr. Fauci. An AIDS nurse who had recently joined the NIH after working in Brazil, she was summoned to interpret for a Brazilian patient who wanted to go home.

Grady was dismayed when the patient responded to Fauci's detailed instructions on aftercare by saying in Portuguese that he intended instead to go out and have a good time. She knew Fauci tolerated no nonsense.

"He said he'll do exactly as you say" is how she translated the patient's remarks.

She thought she had been found out a couple of days later when he asked her to come by his office. Instead of firing her, as she feared, he asked her out to dinner. They were married in May 1985.

The Faucis live in an renovated 1920s home in the Wesley Heights neighborhood. Grady, 55, has a doctorate in philosophy and ethics from Georgetown, and she heads the section on human subjects research at the NIH's Department of Clinical Bioethics. Their children are also busy. Jenny, 21, is a senior at Harvard University; Megan, 18, who will attend Columbia University next fall, does community service teaching in Chicago; Allison, 15, is on the cross-country team at National Cathedral School.

"He's a goofball," said Jenny Fauci of her father. "He works hard and he does his thing, but he comes home and he's singing opera in the kitchen and dancing around."

She thinks she understands what motivates him. "Work is not really work for him," she said. "It's what he believes in."

And so Fauci will leave for the office before dawn and return home long after sunset. It reminds him of that speech he gave this summer at the AIDS conference in Sydney. "It was called 'Much Accomplished, Much Left to Do,' " he said.