Steve Scheibel: The Friend and the Visionary
I’m thinking about Steve Scheibel. It’s been five years since he died and there are probably a thousand or two thousand times when I wanted to call him and ask for some advice or talk about some situation or other.
Two stories come to mind.
The other day I got a note from a fraternity brother of Steve’s from the University of Illinois. He’d read a previous blog about Steve and he wanted to tell me a story about how Steve affected lives before he became a physician.
You may remember that Steve was a gymnast. This fraternity brother, now an attorney in Illinois, also was a gymnast and he had a severe back issue.
“Not only did Steve teach me to be a successful student, he convinced me to find out what was the problem with my back,” he said.
The problem was identified later. It turns out he had a defect that wasn’t characterized in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But his point was that “Steve saved me from a life with a more serious spinal issue. He also taught me to learn, allowing me to be what I am today. He was always a great human and I will always see him as a friend.”
Those are my sentiments exactly.
Dr. Steve Scheibel, with then-City Council members Elaine Spaull and Matt Haag, was honored by the city.
Fast-forward to about 1986, when Dr. Tony Fauci becomes the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. This is Fauci’s first big job.
In the height of the AIDS epidemic when Fauci took over that job, he began to put together a network of research units to study AIDS, do AIDS research, drug research, those sorts of things. They had narrowed the list to about 10 finalists, and the infectious diseases unit of the University of Rochester was one of those finalists.
The International AIDS Conference was scheduled that year in Paris. Our infectious diseases chief sent me and Scheibel. Our chief set up a meeting with Fauci and we were to talk up the UR.
We met with Fauci at the conference. I remember he was standing above us, on the steps of the conference center with the Eiffel Tower in the background. It was a very dramatic setting.
We went for coffee and sat down and talked about the UR. Steve and I had practiced this, so I opened with, “What do you think about the University of Rochester as a site for one of these programs.”
He was kind of grouchy that day. He said, “Why would we want to go to Rochester?”
So I stopped. I decided I’d turn it over to Steve to engage him in conversation about AIDS, AIDS research and the details of the AIDS virus. He did exactly that.
Dr. Steve Scheibel.
They talked for about 20 minutes going back and forth about the science of HIV – totally, totally engaged. It was like I wasn’t even there. It was amazing to watch these two brains clicking and bonding over the AIDS virus and its science.
We came back to Rochester and a month later UR was one of the clinical sites designated to be an AIDS clinical trials unit. And that program still exists. So, Steve, you did it.