Inside a laboratory at the USC Keck School of Medicine, Dr. Paula Cannon is pursuing one of medicine 's most difficult goals: a cure for HIV. But her path to science didn't begin in a lab. Cannon originally worked in the music industry in Liverpool, England, during the early 1980s, just as the HIV/AIDS epidemic was beginning to devastate communities. "I had friends who developed AIDS and started to die, and it completely changed what I thought I wanted to do," Cannon said.