Anthony Fauci: When I came down to the NIH after my residency, in 1968, it was a period of time when we were just starting to get insight about the human immune system. It was an infant field. It wasn’t what it is now, with all the technologies that we have. I had this dual interest of infectious diseases and the immune system and how the immune system responds. I was fascinated by the intricacies of how the immune system was regulated. Because I became interested in that, even though I was clinically, fundamentally, an infectious disease person, I kind of switched my interest — not giving up the interest of infectious diseases — about studying how the immune system is regulated. And there are a number of diseases of hyperactivation of the immune system, referred to as autoinflammatory or autoimmune diseases. Two or three, in particular, were very lethal, with almost 100 percent mortality. One was called — it used to be called Wegener’s granulomatosis — now it’s called granulomatosis with vasculitis. Strange names. Not rare but unusual diseases — polyarteritis nodosa — some of the other autoimmune diseases. Some of them were highly lethal. You would get pulmonary failure, you would get renal failure, and the patients would die.