In an average year, the Harvard AIDS Institute has to deal with far more than just a deadly virus.

Last fall, Institute officials made a bold statement against a U.S. immigration policy that barred people infected with the HIV virus from entering the country, by moving the VIII International AIDS Conference from its planned location in Boston to Amsterdam.

The very nature of AIDS--a disease associated with fear of and discrimination towards victims and bureaucratic frustration for researchers--has meant frequent struggles of this kind for the Institute.

Founded in 1988, the Institute has served both as an advocate for AIDS researchers and as a coordinator of efforts to study the disease in Harvard's various schools and departments.

Dr. Richard G. Marlink, who recently replaced Alan Fein as the Institute's executive director, says that its objectives lie in five different areas: biological research, clinical care and research, biostatistics and epidemiology, health policy and education and international cooperation.

Marlink, a clinical researcher and lecturer on cancer biology at the School of Public Health, says this research demonstrates the Institute's recognition "that the approach to problems in the AIDS epidemic is not one dimensional and requires knowledge of many fields."

The Conference controversy has brought many of these issues to light, and Marlink says that efforts to have the immigration ban on those who are HIV positive--which many have termed discriminatory--lifted will continue.

"There will be no future international AIDS conferences in the United States until there is no restriction," he says. "This is not a temporary issue."

"The President or future administrations will have to deal with the fact that people infected with HIV are not allowed to travel without restrictions," he says.

Now that the Institute has become a more visible leader in the field of AIDS research--in part because of the International AIDS Conference controversy--it is time, Marlink says, to bring these goals up to date and to make them more inclusive.

"Our plan is to reach out individually and collectively to those different people in AIDS research and activities at Harvard and in the Boston area, and with their help, reformulate the future mission," he says.

There is no time better than the present to reevaluate the Institute's focus, Marlink says, noting the epidemic's expansion into new populations as it enters its second decade.

Adolescents, inner-city dwellers and members of developing nations may be in more danger than most people imagine. "The epidemic is up to ten times worse in some countries as it is here," Marlink says.

An important part of reaching out to the rest of the world is the Institute's sponsorship of annual international conferences, which have in the past brought together a broad spectrum of people involved in the epidemic.

AIDS activists have bemoaned the possibility that increased travel costs would mean that local patients afflicted with the disease would not be able to attend the 1992 International AIDS Conference.