Stall and Mills1 speculated on how future historians will view our efforts to combat the global catastrophe of HIV/AIDS. In 1989, Victoria Harden interviewed Anthony Fauci, asking him to speculate on how biomedical researchers would have responded to HIV/ AIDS in 1955. Fauci said, I think it would have been much more frightening than it is now, and it is frightening now. . . . I think we would not have a clue as to how to combat this disease from a basic scientific standpoint. . . . So within the framework of the catastrophe of AIDS, we’re lucky, in the sense that it came at a time when retrovirology, molecular biology, molecular immunology, and immune system studies were at the stage where we could very quickly identify the agent, how it works, the pathogenic mechanisms, its effect on the immune system, etc. If it had happened in 1955, we would have been in very serious trouble.2(p37) Unfortunately, we are in very serious trouble, owing to something that Fauci may not have considered: our refusal to use science-based knowledge that has been shown to prevent new HIV infections. As a society, we have too frequently substituted political and moral judgments about prevention for science. In 2006, we continue to place intravenous drug users at risk by failing to ensure access to clean syringes through pharmacy sales or needle exchanges. Our government’s insistence on abstinence-only education places our youths at risk. Public health professionals must become more skilled at combating the substitution of politics for true science. As an educator in a school of public health, I call upon my colleagues to ensure that we are training a new generation of public health professionals with all the necessary competencies and passion to address the issues catalogued by Stall and Mills. Are we preparing our students to recognize that science does not occur in a vacuum? Will they be ready to answer political challenges to scientific evidence? Are they competent in the use of meta-analyses to examine the evidence from multiple studies, and are they able to make the case when the evidence points us toward effective interventions? Are we training our students to fully understand political forces, the policymaking process, and strategies for advocacy to advance sound public health policies? Are we grounding our students in the values and ethics of public health, which demand that we use our expertise to advance effective, science-based prevention programs and policies? Finally, are we as faculty and administrators modeling for our students the use of scientific evidence to advocate healthy public policies? Stall and Mills’s editorial should prompt schools and programs of public health to assess to what extent they will be part of the solution to the challenges of HIV/AIDS. With true commitment to using science to foster the most effective prevention and treatment, we can change the course of the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.