Sometimes it happened one person at a time--to a student in a class, a member of an audience, a colleague working by his side. At other times the scale was larger: the force of his will and conscience stirring an international health bureaucracy to act against an AIDS epidemic of global proportions; the strength of his conviction and ideas shaping the School and leading to the creation of the first academic center devoted to health and human rights. Almost all of the 13 speakers at a memorial service for Jonathan Mann came back to the same theme: that whatever he did and whomever he met, in both private encounters and in public roles, Mann never left people, organizations, or institutions as he found them.

Jonathan Mann outside the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Building

"In the weeks since his death, countless people have said to me, 'I only met him once...' or even 'I only heard him speak once...but he changed my life!' How lucky we are, gathered here to rejoice in his memory, to have known him well!" said June Osborn, president of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. Osborn added that Mann "made all of us around him think more ambitiously and audaciously about how we might help to change the world."

In his emotional remarks at the September 27 service, former World Health Organization (WHO) Secretary General Halfdan Mahler heralded Mann as "living proof of the old saying that the visionaries are the true realists in human history." Countess Albina du Boisrouvray told the audience, "I have lost my dear friend. I have lost more than that. I have lost a partner in my work." Provost Harvey Fineberg, former dean of the School, recalled Mann's evocative challenge to the status quo: "People say there is no use trying to change the world. But if we don't try, will it change?"

The memorial service at the School was held about three weeks after Mann and his wife, Mary Lou Clements-Mann, a prominent Johns Hopkins vaccine researcher, were killed on September 2. They were passengers on a Swissair jet bound for Geneva that crashe d off the coast of Nova Scotia. Both Mann and Clements-Mann were 51.

News of the couple's death devastated the School's faculty, staff, alumni, and supporters. Mann, who earned his MPH from the School in 1980, was a brilliant, genuinely charismatic presence at the School from 1990, when he was appointed to the faculty, until last year, when he left to become the first dean of the fledgling Allegheny University School of Public Health in Philadelphia. Few people have made such a deep impression on the School in such a relatively short period of time. Eloquent and stylish (he favored colorful bow ties and occasionally sported a bolo tie), Mann imbued the institution with his vision of a new public health philosophy that would combine the field's traditional concerns for disease control and prevention with human rights thought and doctrine. It is because of Mann that graduates of the School are given copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at commencement. With moral and financial support from du Boisrouvray, Mann founded the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights (named for du Boisrouvray's son who died in a helicopter crash in Mali in 1986) at the School, organized two international conferences on health and human rights, and founded and edited the Health and Human Rights journal. Students and young people were especially drawn to Mann. At the memorial service, Sofia Gruskin, director of the Human Rights Program at the FXB Center, described Mann's dynamism and how "the energy would fly around the room" when he was present. "We will stand on his shoulders even as we deeply miss him," she concluded. Daniel Tarantola, the acting director of the FXB Center, edited AIDS in the World II (1996) with Mann, and he referred to a quote in the beginning of the book: " It is not thy duty to complete the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it…" Tarantola said, "Jonathan, the work will never stop, and you showed us how to never desist from it."

Former World Health Organization Secretary Halfdan Mahler shares condolences at the memorial service for Jonathan Mann

Aun Lor, a fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, described how Mann had helped him truly understand his own childhood as a refugee during Pol Pot's "killing fields" regime in Cambodia. Lor said, "My work has just begun, but he will continue to pave the way."

As the first head of WHO's Global Programme on aids from 1986 to 1990, Mann became a central figure in AIDS circles prior to joining the School's faculty. Mahler recruited Mann to WHO, and, with his blessing, Mann built the AIDS program from scratch; it was a feat of astounding organizational ability and political daring as Mann effectively bypassed entrenched interests at WHO. Many of the speakers at the service reminisced about Mann during his time at WHO when he became a hero for pushing aids in to the spotlight as a global epidemic that had to be addressed in a human rights context. Osborn, who met Mann at who, recalled banging away on Wang computers with Mann into the wee hours of the morning, "competing toward the end at who could find the last typo." Mahler credited Mann with opening his eyes to the human rights dimensions of health and motivating him to accelerate WHO's response to the AIDS epidemic. Debrework Zewdie, a World Bank health official, said the early years of the aids epidemic we re a time of unprecedented solidarity between the North and South, "and Jonathan was the reason." Zewdie said that for African health officials working against an advancing epidemic "the Global Programme on aids was our sanctuary." Du Boisrouvray recalled her excitement when she first started reading pieces that Mann had written or heard him being interviewed. "It was not like hearing an international health doctor. It was like hearing an activist. This was someone who wanted to change the world." And he did.