Growing up on 13th Avenue in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, in the 1940s and '50s, Anthony "Tony" Fauci was the precocious son of the corner pharmacist. "They called him Doc," he said. "The pharmacist back then served as the neighborhood psychiatrist, marriage counselor.
So, it was serving the community." The Fauci Pharmacy is long-gone. But beneath the calm façade Dr.
Anthony Fauci has shown the world for more than 50 years, he is still – as he says – "Brooklyn tough." Did he get into fights every now and then? "How could you not?" he said. "How'd you do?" LaPook asked.
"Well, I'm not the biggest guy in the world." "But at 5'7", you were the captain of the basketball team. How did you do that? " "I was very fast and I had a really good shot," Fauci said.
"What killed your NBA career?" "I found out that a very fast, good shooting point guard who's 5'7" will always get destroyed by a point guard who's 6'3". That became very clear!" Fauci laughed. "So, I said, 'Oh, let me just settle for science, whatever.
'" There are millions today who owe their lives to the work of the man who "settled" for science. And as he chronicles in his new memoir, "On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service," Dr. Fauci's career treating infectious diseases at the National Institutes of Health has been bookended by the two great pandemics of our time: AIDS and COVID-19.
When it first widely appeared in the early 1980s, a diagnosis of HIV/AIDS was a death sentence. Dr. LaPook asked, "Looking at your .
