Dr. Fauci: His Life and Work

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC INTERVIEWED ANTHONY FAUCI ABOUT HIS PERSONAL HISTORY, HIS CAREER, AND HIS ROLE IN HEALTH CRISES FROM HIV/AIDS TO COVID-19. THE RESULTS: A BOOK (EXCERPTED HERE), WITH PROCEEDS TO BENEFIT CONSERVATION, AND A DOCUMENTARY.

Excerpts from the National Geographic book Fauci-Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward

I WAS BORN ON Christmas Eve, 1940. As my father tells the tale...the obstetrician who was taking my mother through her pregnancy happened to have been at a black-tie cocktail party. And when my mother went into labor, apparently it was pretty quick. My father brought her to Brooklyn Hospital, and he remembers the doctor walking in with a tuxon. He had to get into the delivery room very quickly, so he just washed his hands and put the scrubs over the tux... We always joked about it at home: Just how much had he had to drink before he actually came in to deliver me?

Anthony Fauci was almost five years old in 1945 when the United States detonated atomic bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unleashing catastrophic damage and spurring Japan's surrender to the Allies.

That moment when I saw my mother reading the New York Daily News with the big picture on the front page of the devastation in Hiroshima was a memorable moment for me. I had played war games as a child, where the good guys were the GIS and the bad guys were the Japanese, and when I saw the destruction in Japan, I thought, Wow, hey, that's great.

But I saw in my mother something that puzzled me at first ... Many decades later I still remember that scene in the living room in our apartment in Brooklyn. I can picture my mother sitting on the couch looking at the paper and me looking over her knee. She was really sad. That was a defining moment, understanding that you can feel empathy toward people who are very different from you—even people who might officially be the enemy.