AIDS Cure Project PapersThis is an ACT UP Historical Archive. For more up-to-date information, visit our current website. Consider making a donation, getting some merchandise or come to a Monday Meeting.
AIDS Cure Project Papers
The statement is ever-increasingly being made these days that "we can never answer clinically important questions without bringing people together." For the record...ACT UP proposed this in 1994! to bring the best minds together in a central location to find a cure for AIDS quickly. We were generally dismissed by not only the medical establishment but also the AIDS establishment. However, today there is an increasing number of research sites and research advocates talking about the importance of bringing researchers physically together (UCSF's "institution without walls" ... Clinton's vaccine project ... Montagnier's proposed center in Queens... Robert Gallo ... and most recently, press editorials appearing after the 2002 Barcelona AIDS Conference).
AIDS Requires Its Own Manhattan Project
USA Today (excepts) | July 17, 2002 | DeWayne Wickham"As bad as the thought is of Osama bin Laden crawling out of his hiding place to launch new terrorist attacks on this country, the news out of the Barcelona AIDS conference is much worse. Current efforts to combat the spread of AIDS fall way short of what is needed to avoid a human crisis of the magnitude that has not been seen since the days of the Black Death.
"Backbiting and moral finger wagging are counterproductive. What the worldwide fight against AIDS needs is some 'new think' - an approach to combating this crisis that mirrors the Manhattan Project that this country undertook in the 1940s to develop an atomic bomb. To get the job done, the United States marshaled 200,000 people and nationwide resources. A similar approach is needed against AIDS - one that places a higher value on the lives of people in countries hard hit by AIDS than on the financial interests of multinational drug companies.
"The search for an AIDS vaccine and drugs to treat those who are infected should be undertaken by an international force of scientists whose work is given the same priority as that of the men and women who built this country's first atomic bomb.
"AIDS drugs should be made available to every infected person regardless of his or her ability to pay for this medicine, just as the antidote to a biological weapon would be dispensed freely if a terrorist exploded one in this country.
"As costly as this would be for the world's wealthiest nations, the cost of letting AIDS depopulate Africa and spread throughout Asia and Eastern Europe will be even higher. While the worldwide availability of AIDS drugs would slow the disease's spread, only the discovery of a vaccine would cap it.
"'We cannot lose our war against AIDS and win our battle against poverty, promote stability, advance democracy and increase peace and prosperity,' former president Bill Clinton said in his speech at the closing session of the AIDS conference.
"But we won't win this war without some dramatic new thinking about how we wage it."
