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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."