When the AIDS research collaboration began in Dakar, Senegal, in 1985, the single-room laboratory held a battered microscope, a collection of mouth pipettes, and a lone Bunsen burner. The electricity often failed, and ice shavings were used to protect fragile cells. The researchers prepared microscope slides of infected blood cells on a makeshift, foil-covered countertop.

Today, the laboratory, fully stocked with state-of-the-art equipment, has grown into the largest and most advanced AIDS biomedical facility in West Africa. And the collaboration--comprising scientists from the Harvard AIDS Institute, the Universit Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, and two universities in France--conducts the longest-standing AIDS study in Africa.

In this study, the researchers combine biologic research with epidemiologic and clinical studies to help uncover clues to the two AIDS viruses, HIV-1 and HIV-2. This blend of disciplines has yielded a number of important findings since the studys inception, including the initial identification of HIV-2. The researchers have shown that the rates of transmission and disease development are dramatically slower in people with HIV-2 than in people with HIV-1. They have also found that people with HIV-2 are 70 percent less likely to become infected with HIV-1 than people not infected--a finding that has promising implications for AIDS vaccine development.

The collaboration had its beginnings in 1979, before AIDS itself was identified, when Max Essex, chairman of the Harvard AIDS Institute, attended a workshop in Senegal on a potential hepatitis B vaccine. His commitment to the country grew, and in 1985 he joined with Souleymane Mboup of Universit Cheikh Anta Diop and researchers from the Universities of Tours and Limoges to create the present collaboration.

The study has followed more than one thousand female sex workers in Dakar and in two smaller Senegalese towns, Kaolack and Ziguinchor. In Senegal, prostitution is semilegal; health officials tightly regulate it, to ensure that sex workers regularly report to health clinics. These regulations have enabled the researchers to track first the spread of HIV-2 through this population, then the spread of the later and faster moving HIV-1.

While they expect their research to hasten the eventual eradication of both AIDS viruses, the researchers also try to integrate their work with prevention and treatment of other viral infections in West Africa. They perform diagnostic tests for other infectious diseases, administer drugs, and train West African scientists and physicians to study and treat AIDS.

The formal agreement among the institutions states, in fact, that research results will be integrated with prevention measures for HIV-1, HIV-2, and other sexually transmitted infections in Senegal. Our research is not a leisured pursuit of scientific questions, says Richard Marlink, executive director of the Harvard AIDS Institute. At the end of each day, our work must be good for Senegal.

The study has a training component--sponsored by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health--which has helped generate more immediately practical discoveries as well. In one instance, a Senegalese trainee, Aissatou Guye-Ndiaye, worked with the Harvard studys leader, Phyllis Kanki, to develop an inexpensive and rapid test that screens simultaneously for HIV-1 and HIV-2. Existing tests whose results take less than an hour cost approximately six dollars; the ELISA test, which costs only a dollar, requires at least four hours for results. Guye-Ndiaye developed an assay that screens for both HIV-1 and HIV-2--and distinguishes between them--in less than an hour at 30 cents each, speeding research results at a fraction of the cost.

Each of our discoveries--whether in the laboratory or in the field--represents years of painstaking research and the overcoming of countless logistical hurdles, Marlink says. Our Senegalese colleagues in particular bring ingenuity and critical experience to the collaboration.

Marlink cites the example of a visit he made several years ago to a Kaolack clinic. A physician specializing in AIDS since the epidemic first emerged, Marlink often still had difficulty distinguishing HIV disease from the many other infectious diseases plaguing people in developing countries. When he and Ibou Thior, a Senegalese physician, examined an ailing woman at the clinic, Marlink was stumped for a diagnosis. Thior took the patients temperature, asked a question, sniffed the air, then correctly diagnosed the illness as typhoid. For all of our advanced technologies in Boston, we couldnt be as productive as we are without the talents of our Senegalese colleagues, Marlink says.

The study is not without its frustrations. To ship samples to Boston, for example, the researchers still have to buy large blocks of dry ice from a local beer company, then chip the ice into small pieces themselves. Power outages also are still common in Dakar. Yet now emergency generators kick in, and the scientists are able to continue inputting data undaunted, secure in their ability to handle calamities, determined in their quest to have research findings made useful worldwide.