Surgeon General to Head Health Care Think Tank

U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher has accepted a job as director of the National Center for Primary Care at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. The center is devoted to eliminating racial disparities in health care. Satcher, 60, the nation's 16th surgeon general, was a 1963 Morehouse graduate and served as a professor and a department head at the school of medicine from 1979 to 1982. As director of the CDC from 1993- 1998, he earned a reputation as a consensus-builder who was not afraid of controversy. At the CDC he pressed black churches and medical schools to confront AIDS. His most recent report, on sexual health issues, raised the ire of conservatives by concluding that abstinence-only sex education programs are not effective and that a gay person cannot be reprogrammed to be heterosexual. Satcher's term as surgeon general ends Feb. 13.

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