The End of AIDS

موضوع: The End of AIDS الأحد أكتوبر 16, 2011 9:03 pm

Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 budding (in green) from cultured lymphocyte.
This image has been colored to highlight important features.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library

One June afternoon in 1992, a dancer named Matthew Sharp died eight
times. A siren shrilled as he repeatedly dropped to the street and let
strangers draw a chalk outline around his body. Then he stood up, took
the chalk, and each time wrote the name of his partner, Johnny Franklin,
inside the empty space—just like a cop at a crime scene.

Franklin had succumbed to AIDS in Oklahoma City two years earlier,
and now Sharp was marching with the AIDS awareness group Act Up along
Market Street in San Francisco’s annual gay pride parade. “Die-ins
were a common form of AIDS activism in the 1980s and 1990s,” Sharp
recalls. “They were conducted in complete silence every seven minutes
while we were marching, because that was how often someone died of AIDS
back then.”

After Franklin’s death, Sharp nearly became another victim when he
came down with extrapulmonary tuberculosis. “I felt I was knocking on
death’s door,” he says. “So I quit my ballet company, took the life
insurance money Johnny left me, and moved to San Francisco, which was
ground zero for HIV,” the AIDS virus. “For the next 20 years I stayed
alive by participating in clinical trials of new drugs before they were
released. I was aggressive about preventing opportunistic infections.
When I began to die of wasting syndrome, I joined a trial for human
growth hormone. I got an experimental thymus transplant. Combination
therapy in 2008 finally brought my viral load down to undetectable.”

Then came an invitation to participate in a novel form of gene
therapy, one that could mark a first step toward a true cure for AIDS...