DR. ALVIN NOVICK, BIOLOGIST AND ADVOCATE FOR AIDS VICTIMS, DIES AT 79

Dr. Alvin Novick, a Yale biologist who closed his laboratory in 1982 and
curtailed his 25-year study of the sonar systems of bats to confront a
widening international health crisis brought on by AIDS, died on April 10
at Yale University Health Services in New Haven. He was 79.

The cause was prostate cancer, said a close friend, Dr. Frederick L.
Altice, an associate professor of medicine at Yale.

A professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, Dr. Novick became an early
and enduring advocate for the rights and treatment of people with AIDS.

In seminars, letters to publications and courses he taught, Dr. Novick, who
trained as a physician, reviewed public policies intended to contain the
spread of the virus, and he challenged public officials to face up to the
grim realities of the disease.

He strongly promoted needle exchanges for intravenous drug users and
protection of the privacy and livelihoods of doctors and other health care
workers who became infected. He also pressed for safeguards on blood banks.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1991, Dr. Novick said doctors
with the AIDS virus "see themselves as the target of an inflamed public."
He spoke against mandatory AIDS testing for health care workers and cited
the costs of testing and the rarity of documented cases of
doctor-to-patient transmissions.

Dr. Jeffrey Levi, an associate professor in the department of health policy
at George Washington University, said that Dr. Novick's work "gave a voice
to the voiceless at the policy table" and helped to alert health officials
to the effects of AIDS among women and drug abusers.

"He talked very frankly and starkly to people without offending them, and
was able to reach federal policy officials as a peer and in a language they
heard," Dr. Levi said.

In Dr. Novick's earlier studies of bats in the 1950's, he traveled to
Africa, the Philippines and other destinations to record the sounds made by
different bat species.

In the 1960's and 70's he refined those studies, looking at echolocation, a
process bats use to orient themselves and hunt their prey. Dr. Novick
studied the high-frequency sounds emitted by bats and the echoes that
result, yielding information about food and location.

In 1969, he published a popular book, "The World of Bats," which explained
echolocation and was "an honest and responsible attempt to put a human face
on a category of creatures that was feared in folklore," said Dr. Stephen
C. Stearns, chairman of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology
at Yale.

Dr. Novick also wrote the entry on bats in the Encylopaedia Britannica.

Alvin Novick was born in Flushing, Queens, on June 27, 1925. He earned his
undergraduate and medical degrees at Harvard. He was a research fellow in
biology at Harvard before becoming an instructor in zoology in 1957 at
Yale, where he was appointed a professor of biology in 1983 and continued
to teach until last year.

In 1985, Dr. Novick was elected president of the American Association of
Physicians for Human Rights, now called the Gay and Lesbian Medical
Association. He was chairman of the New Haven Mayor's Task Force on AIDS
from 1986 to 1991, and was editor in chief of The AIDS and Public Policy
Journal.

Dr. Novick's partner was William Sabella, who as Connecticut's first state
AIDS coordinator helped develop a curriculum in the 1980's to teach about
the virus in public schools. Mr. Sabella died of complications from AIDS in
1992.

No immediate family members survive.

Reflecting on public perceptions of the disease in an interview with The
Times in 1987, Dr. Novick said he saw "no reason for people to see AIDS as
an embarrassment or a humiliation."

"We have to stop seeing this as anything other than a devastating
infection," he said. "No one is guilty. Only the virus is guilty."