I have spent a great deal of my time over the past five or six years developing and teaching a VAST course entitled AIDS: A Modern Pandemic. I will offer this course for the fifth time during the spring of 1999. As I developed this course, I became involved in both AIDS Education in general and the administration of the VAST program.

VAST 206 deals with AIDS, primarily in the United States. We discuss the science of AIDS, and that scientific discussion leads us to consider difficult social and moral AIDS related questions. We discover that it is impossible to discuss these questions without a solid knowledge of AIDS science, and conversely that it is not possible to understand how AIDS science was done without a good understanding of how various societies reacted to AIDS. For more details about the course (including a syllabus and a course description) and links to a variety of HIV/AIDS resourses on the internet, please consult the VAST 206 Course Home Page.