Phil Berman's search for an AIDS vaccine

In 2009, the news shocked the biotech industry — research had produced an immunization that was 31 percent effective against HIV, the first time an AIDS vaccine had ever shown significant results.
Yet the surprise of the announcement belied the amount of work that went into it. Dr. Phil Berman had been quietly working to advance this research — at large biotech firms, at small startups, at nonprofits, and finally as professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz — for 27 years.
“I was in Oxford when it was announced, wide awake, jet lagged, in the middle of the night. And BBC News came on and the headline news was this combination of vaccines,” said Mark Akeson, chair of the biomolecular engineering department at UCSC. “I knew immediately that one of them was his. It was an astonishing moment.”