They visit, among other places, the university where Ms. Volterra's dad studied physics and the Jewish ghetto in Venice, where he was raised.
Dad studied law "almost by accident," she told me, but her husband, whom she first met on the day of their arranged marriage, stymied her career.
The same scientists also pointed out that the studies on which GSK relied for casting doubt on the DAD study were themselves not powerful enough to discount a link between the drug and the risk of heart attacks.
Scientists involved in the DAD study, however, believe that a possible biological mechanism is that abacavir is converted into a potentially toxic substance called carbovir once it gets into the cells of the heart.
However, Professor Jens Lundgren of Copenhagen University, who led the DAD study, said that his team is actively pursuing this proposal as a possible explanation for the doubling of the risk of heart attacks seen in abacavir patients.
My immediate family ultimately kept us as agnostic as possible; religion went only as far as my mother praying to the American concept of a guardian angel and my dad "studying" Zoroastrianism.
To coincide with the Lancet publication, GSK issued a statement to its investors playing down the association between abacavir and heart attacks, saying that the findings of the DAD study were unexpected and that no possible biological mechanism to explain it has been found.
Didier Lapierre, GSK's vice president of clinical development, said in the statement to investors at the time of the April DAD study that the increased relative risk of heart attacks remained low in absolute terms and that patients should not discontinue treatment without medical advice.
The first public sign that abacavir may be linked with increased risk of heart attacks emerged this April when The Lancet published the worldwide "DAD" study into the adverse reactions to anti-HIV drugs, involving clinical observations of 33,347 Aids patients across Europe, Australia and the United States.
