WEBVTT - Episode 7: Lazarus 0:00:00.440 --> 0:00:03.000 Hey, this is Leon Napok. I'm the host of Fiasco, 0:00:03.240 --> 0:00:05.640 but you may also know me from the podcasts Slowburn, 0:00:05.840 --> 0:00:09.240 Think Twice, Michael Jackson, and Backfired the Vaping Wars. I'm 0:00:09.280 --> 0:00:11.880 excited to be sharing with you the next season of Backfired, 0:00:12.000 --> 0:00:15.960 titled Attention Deficit, which is now available exclusively on Audible. 0:00:16.800 --> 0:00:20.280 Backfired is a podcast about the business of unintended consequences. 0:00:20.840 --> 0:00:23.119 In the first season, my co host ri L Pardess 0:00:23.200 --> 0:00:25.480 and I dove deep into the world of vaping and 0:00:25.520 --> 0:00:28.440 how the well intentioned quest for a safer cigarette went awry. 0:00:28.960 --> 0:00:32.879 Now we're tackling ADHD and how the push to destigmatize 0:00:32.880 --> 0:00:35.879 this hard to define childhood diagnosis has led to an 0:00:35.920 --> 0:00:38.720 explosion of stimulant use in kids as well as adults. 0:00:39.000 --> 0:00:41.560 It's a story about the promise of psychiatry to fix 0:00:41.640 --> 0:00:44.640 our brains and the power of the pharmaceutical industry to 0:00:44.680 --> 0:00:47.600 shape how we and our doctors think about what's wrong 0:00:47.640 --> 0:00:50.239 with us. To hear both seasons of Backfired, go to 0:00:50.240 --> 0:00:53.600 audible dot com slash Backfired and start a free trial 0:00:54.040 --> 0:00:59.640 that's audible dot com slash backfired. Previously on Fiasco. 0:01:00.720 --> 0:01:04.680 My main job was to try and develop drugs that 0:01:04.760 --> 0:01:07.000 could treat this devastating disease. 0:01:07.520 --> 0:01:10.959 The FDA announced today it would formerly streamline it's drug 0:01:10.959 --> 0:01:12.000 approval process. 0:01:12.200 --> 0:01:15.000 This thing of hoping for like a magic bullet, that 0:01:15.120 --> 0:01:16.840 you know, we would all be activists for two or 0:01:16.840 --> 0:01:19.040 three years, and then the cure would come, the vaccine 0:01:19.040 --> 0:01:20.480 would come, and we would all go back to our 0:01:20.520 --> 0:01:22.119 lives wasn't going to happen. 0:01:22.400 --> 0:01:32.800 People need medication now, ten years from now, they'll be dead. 0:01:33.440 --> 0:01:36.679 When the virus that causes AIDS was isolated in nineteen 0:01:36.760 --> 0:01:39.520 eighty three, it looked kind of like a time bomb. 0:01:40.520 --> 0:01:43.720 HIV could eat away at someone's immune system for months 0:01:43.840 --> 0:01:48.760 or years before they experienced any serious symptoms. Then one day, 0:01:49.240 --> 0:01:53.760 pretty much any infection could become fatal. In nineteen eighty seven, 0:01:54.200 --> 0:01:57.600 a young chemist at the pharmaceutical company Murk came up 0:01:57.640 --> 0:02:01.040 with an idea for how to disable the bomb. His 0:02:01.200 --> 0:02:02.600 name was Irving Siegel. 0:02:03.320 --> 0:02:06.920 What Siegel took on was really an impossible task. No 0:02:07.160 --> 0:02:11.200 pharmaceutical scientist had ever really taken on such a challenge 0:02:11.200 --> 0:02:11.480 as this. 0:02:12.639 --> 0:02:15.000 David France is the author of the book How to 0:02:15.040 --> 0:02:18.240 Survive a Plague and the director of the documentary film 0:02:18.280 --> 0:02:21.640 by the same name. During the height of the epidemic 0:02:22.080 --> 0:02:24.560 France was an activist and a journalist who covered the 0:02:24.600 --> 0:02:28.120 search for AIDS treatments. He says that after the release 0:02:28.160 --> 0:02:32.520 of the first AIDS drug, AZT, many drug companies scrambled 0:02:32.520 --> 0:02:33.639 to produce knockoffs. 0:02:34.320 --> 0:02:37.720 When AZT had come out in eighty seven, it immediately 0:02:37.800 --> 0:02:41.880 proved that there was a massive and very of financially 0:02:41.919 --> 0:02:46.000 rewarding market for drug companies to exploit. 0:02:46.840 --> 0:02:50.440 But as you've heard, AZT was not a miracle drug. 0:02:51.080 --> 0:02:54.120 Even when AZT seemed to make someone better at first, 0:02:54.760 --> 0:02:58.600 the virus rapidly mutated inside their body, which meant that 0:02:58.639 --> 0:03:03.960 eventually almost everyone who took it still developed AIDS. Irving Seagull, 0:03:04.200 --> 0:03:07.360 the scientist at MERK, was convinced he could build something 0:03:07.400 --> 0:03:11.160 better than AZT, a new class of drug that would 0:03:11.160 --> 0:03:13.840 attack HIV in a totally different way. 0:03:14.360 --> 0:03:18.760 Irving Siegel, he was young, he was charismatic. He pulled 0:03:18.800 --> 0:03:23.679 together a team of very excited researchers, and the very 0:03:23.680 --> 0:03:27.160 first thing that he focused on was a very novel approach. 0:03:27.240 --> 0:03:29.240 No one else was taking it, and that was an 0:03:29.240 --> 0:03:32.440 approach to look at protease inhibitors. 0:03:35.960 --> 0:03:41.080 Maybe you've heard that phrase before protease inhibitors. I definitely had, 0:03:41.280 --> 0:03:43.480 but I also did not know what a protease was 0:03:43.880 --> 0:03:47.240 or what it meant to inhibit it. So as I've learned, 0:03:47.760 --> 0:03:51.120 the HIV one protease is an enzyme that plays a 0:03:51.160 --> 0:03:54.280 critical role in allowing the virus to replicate in the body. 0:03:55.040 --> 0:03:58.960 Siegel believed that the key to treating HIV was stopping 0:03:59.000 --> 0:04:02.840 the protease from doing its job. After getting some initial 0:04:02.880 --> 0:04:05.480 buy in from the higher ups at MERK, Siegel and 0:04:05.520 --> 0:04:08.840 his colleague Nancy Cole started working on it, and just 0:04:08.880 --> 0:04:11.800 a few months later they completed a paper reporting a 0:04:11.840 --> 0:04:17.080 promising result. By inhibiting the HIV protease, it was possible 0:04:17.160 --> 0:04:20.159 to stop the virus from replicating, at least in the 0:04:20.200 --> 0:04:24.479 confines of a lab experiment. The quick turnaround was typical 0:04:24.480 --> 0:04:27.640 of Siegel. His wife Catherine told me he was someone 0:04:27.640 --> 0:04:29.600 who took the stairs two steps at a time when 0:04:29.600 --> 0:04:32.480 he came into work, and was often moving so fast 0:04:32.520 --> 0:04:34.560 that he would forget to button his shirts all the way. 0:04:34.920 --> 0:04:36.920 Can remember very clearly saying to myself, I have to 0:04:37.000 --> 0:04:39.240 keep up with this guy, because he's just he did. 0:04:39.279 --> 0:04:42.160 That's how rapidly he moved, That's how rapidly his brain 0:04:42.240 --> 0:04:42.719 worked too. 0:04:43.480 --> 0:04:46.840 Emilio Emini is a virologist who worked with Siegel as 0:04:46.880 --> 0:04:49.839 the head of Murk's efforts on HIV. He was a 0:04:49.839 --> 0:04:52.640 co author on that first paper about the HIV protease. 0:04:53.160 --> 0:04:54.880 So you can imagine, you know, a very you know, 0:04:55.040 --> 0:04:58.800 thin individual who is constantly moving and whose brain is 0:04:58.839 --> 0:05:01.280 constantly functioning, absolutely extraordinary. 0:05:02.040 --> 0:05:05.279 By December of nineteen eighty eight, Siegel and his team 0:05:05.360 --> 0:05:08.520 were on the cusp of a major advance, producing the 0:05:08.560 --> 0:05:12.120 first three D image of the protease. After more than 0:05:12.120 --> 0:05:15.200 a year of intensive work, they finally had a clear 0:05:15.320 --> 0:05:22.520 understanding of its unique cellular structure. Emilio Emini sometimes compares 0:05:22.600 --> 0:05:28.160 the HIV protease to a pac man, introducing it has 0:05:28.160 --> 0:05:30.720 a wedge like mouth which it uses to chomp down 0:05:30.800 --> 0:05:39.200 on HIV proteins and slice them into smaller pieces. These 0:05:39.240 --> 0:05:45.719 smaller pieces then spawn new HIV proteins throughout the body. Siegel, Emini, 0:05:45.800 --> 0:05:48.560 and their colleagues at MURK wanted to jam the pac 0:05:48.640 --> 0:05:52.680 man's mouth and render it incapable of doing any chomping 0:05:52.800 --> 0:05:59.440 or slicing. They believed that once this happened, the virus 0:05:59.480 --> 0:06:00.800 would stop replicating. 0:06:01.360 --> 0:06:05.480 So if the protease is not functional, or if it's 0:06:05.520 --> 0:06:10.120 rendered non functional and cannot perform this cutting activity, then 0:06:10.400 --> 0:06:14.920 the viral proteins that are produced won't be assembled into 0:06:15.040 --> 0:06:18.919 new viral particles right, and therefore the viral infection cycle 0:06:19.160 --> 0:06:19.920 is terminated. 0:06:23.680 --> 0:06:26.320 The three D image of the protease gave Segel and 0:06:26.360 --> 0:06:29.720 his colleagues a precise map of the enzyme, showing them 0:06:29.760 --> 0:06:32.920 where exactly they had to jam it. Now they could 0:06:32.920 --> 0:06:36.120 move on to the next step developing a drug, a 0:06:36.120 --> 0:06:40.359 protease inhibitor that could be digested by human beings. Siegel 0:06:40.520 --> 0:06:44.160 was confident that it could be done, but then shortly 0:06:44.200 --> 0:06:47.480 before Christmas, Siegel had to travel to London to deliver 0:06:47.600 --> 0:06:51.599 a long scheduled lecture. After three days away from his lab, 0:06:51.800 --> 0:06:54.800 he was eager to get back, so at the last 0:06:54.839 --> 0:07:00.239 minute he decided to change his flight to a red eye. 0:07:00.400 --> 0:07:03.200 Pan Am flight one oh three left London on the 0:07:03.279 --> 0:07:06.560 night of December twenty first, nineteen eighty eight. Less than 0:07:06.600 --> 0:07:10.760 an hour after takeoff, the plane exploded over Lockerby, Scotland, 0:07:11.240 --> 0:07:12.760 killing everyone on board. 0:07:13.480 --> 0:07:16.280 Just after seven this evening, a jumbo jet crashed onto 0:07:16.360 --> 0:07:19.120 the town of locker Bit in the Scottish borders. It 0:07:19.160 --> 0:07:21.440 was a Pan American Boeing seven four seventh. 0:07:21.920 --> 0:07:24.480 I remember very clearly where I was when I got 0:07:24.480 --> 0:07:26.960 the news. I was at home. Actually it was right 0:07:27.000 --> 0:07:29.640 before Christmas. It was right before Christmas in nineteen eighty eight. 0:07:29.840 --> 0:07:32.240 We now know there were two hundred and forty four 0:07:32.280 --> 0:07:34.160 people on board, including three children. 0:07:34.680 --> 0:07:37.560 Irving Seagull was just thirty five years old when he 0:07:37.640 --> 0:07:39.040 died in the locker be bombing. 0:07:39.520 --> 0:07:42.360 It was absolutely devastating, as you can imagine. It was 0:07:42.400 --> 0:07:45.840 devastating for what we were doing collectively, was devastating for 0:07:45.920 --> 0:07:48.680 the science. It was devastating for the whole field. But 0:07:48.720 --> 0:07:51.440 more importantly, it was devastating personally for Irving and for 0:07:51.520 --> 0:07:52.080 his family. 0:07:53.200 --> 0:07:56.520 Seagull's vision of a protease inhibitor would eventually lead to 0:07:56.560 --> 0:07:59.840 a massive paradigm shift in AIDS treatment as part of 0:07:59.880 --> 0:08:03.200 the so called triple cocktail. It would unlock the first 0:08:03.280 --> 0:08:07.280 effective therapy for HIV and AIDS, and it would finally 0:08:07.320 --> 0:08:10.200 make it possible for people who had the disease to survive. 0:08:11.360 --> 0:08:14.440 But none of that would happen until nineteen ninety six, 0:08:15.440 --> 0:08:19.360 nine years after Segel first saw promise in the HIV protease, 0:08:20.080 --> 0:08:23.160 and fifteen years after the first cases of AIDS were 0:08:23.160 --> 0:08:31.920 observed in America. It's impossible to say whether an effective 0:08:31.960 --> 0:08:35.160 treatment might have come sooner if Irving Siegel hadn't changed 0:08:35.160 --> 0:08:38.880 his flight from London. What's clear enough is that his 0:08:39.000 --> 0:08:42.880 death was a major setback, one of many in science's 0:08:42.920 --> 0:08:49.480 long and grueling campaign against AIDS. I'm Leon Napak from 0:08:49.520 --> 0:08:53.800 Audible Originals and Prologue projects. This is fiasco. 0:08:54.840 --> 0:08:58.400 Typically, the stronger the drug, the faster HIV adapts to 0:08:58.480 --> 0:08:58.880 resist it. 0:08:59.120 --> 0:09:01.000 It seemed that everything we had done up to that 0:09:01.080 --> 0:09:02.480 point hadn't been enough. 0:09:02.600 --> 0:09:05.640 Researchers say a new class of drugs are working. 0:09:05.720 --> 0:09:09.040 Where once there was only desperation, there is now genuine hope. 0:09:09.160 --> 0:09:12.000 I'm looking falling through a future, the Lazarus effect that 0:09:12.040 --> 0:09:14.679 people described it felt like a miracle. 0:09:17.640 --> 0:09:20.720 In this episode, the darkest days of the AIDS crisis 0:09:20.720 --> 0:09:24.560 in America followed at long last by a glimpse of light. 0:09:32.400 --> 0:09:36.840 By the nineteen nineties, HIV had spread all over the globe. 0:09:37.080 --> 0:09:39.720 Fourteen million people in the world are now HIV positive. 0:09:39.720 --> 0:09:41.800 The number grows dramatically every year. 0:09:41.760 --> 0:09:44.199 And affected just about every demographic. 0:09:44.520 --> 0:09:48.040 Still, no cure still no vaccine to prevent it. 0:09:48.640 --> 0:09:51.720 In the US, cases among women and people of color 0:09:51.840 --> 0:09:55.440 were climbing at a particularly alarming rate, and as the 0:09:55.480 --> 0:09:58.320 time bomb went off and more and more people, the 0:09:58.360 --> 0:09:59.720 death totals were rising. 0:10:00.000 --> 0:10:03.360 Every year in this country, four hundred thousand have gotten AIDS, 0:10:03.760 --> 0:10:05.720 two hundred and forty thousand have died. 0:10:05.880 --> 0:10:08.360 Whatever we've been doing has not been enough. 0:10:08.559 --> 0:10:11.360 It wasn't until we hit nineteen ninety three and nineteen 0:10:11.440 --> 0:10:15.080 ninety four and nineteen ninety five that the body counts 0:10:15.120 --> 0:10:16.439 became extreme. 0:10:16.880 --> 0:10:18.800 David France again, these were. 0:10:18.760 --> 0:10:23.880 Mass dying events each year. Forty three thousand Americans died 0:10:23.920 --> 0:10:28.040 in nineteen ninety three, fifty thousand Americans in nineteen ninety four. 0:10:28.640 --> 0:10:31.480 So we entered a period of real despair. 0:10:34.000 --> 0:10:37.400 For many AIDS activists, the tragedy wasn't just about how 0:10:37.440 --> 0:10:40.679 many people were dying during this period. It was also 0:10:40.720 --> 0:10:43.160 that many of the dead had been leaders in the movement. 0:10:43.800 --> 0:10:46.600 Nineteen ninety three opened with the death of Bob Ravski, 0:10:46.880 --> 0:10:50.360 who was a key member of Act UP, one of 0:10:50.400 --> 0:10:53.040 its kind of poet warriors. 0:10:52.920 --> 0:10:55.320 Questions, what does a decent society do with people who 0:10:55.440 --> 0:10:58.160 hurt themselves because they're human? Who smoke too much, we 0:10:58.280 --> 0:11:00.800 too much, you drive carelessly, who don't have safe sex? 0:11:00.960 --> 0:11:02.760 And the answer, I think the answer is at a 0:11:02.800 --> 0:11:05.520 decent society does not put people out to pastor and 0:11:05.600 --> 0:11:07.640 let them die because they've done a human thing. 0:11:08.440 --> 0:11:12.520 His death was a trauma for the movement and the community, 0:11:13.120 --> 0:11:15.880 and then by the end of the year, Michael Callen died. 0:11:16.640 --> 0:11:19.720 You met Michael Callen in our second episode. He was 0:11:19.720 --> 0:11:22.679 the singer, an early AIDS activist who spearheaded a safe 0:11:22.679 --> 0:11:25.880 sex campaign in New York and helped create a Bill 0:11:25.880 --> 0:11:27.400 of Rights for people with AIDS. 0:11:28.160 --> 0:11:30.760 It's hard to believe Michael Callen is no longer with us. 0:11:31.240 --> 0:11:33.800 For more than a decade, he made beautiful music and 0:11:33.880 --> 0:11:37.280 worked tirelessly to improve the quality of life for people 0:11:37.320 --> 0:11:40.120 with AIDS, all the while fighting the disease himself. 0:11:40.400 --> 0:11:40.719 We won. 0:11:40.800 --> 0:11:43.520 Michael Callen was the author of a book on surviving 0:11:43.679 --> 0:11:47.880 HIV and if the guy who was a self proclaimed 0:11:48.000 --> 0:11:54.040 long term survivor couldn't survive, then it seemed we were 0:11:54.120 --> 0:11:55.000 all lost. 0:11:55.320 --> 0:11:57.480 I realized that some people could look at my life 0:11:57.520 --> 0:12:00.520 and say, oh, it was so sad when he died 0:12:00.559 --> 0:12:03.800 of AIDS, And isn't that tragic? But what I want 0:12:03.880 --> 0:12:07.560 to come through is that even after all the pain 0:12:07.720 --> 0:12:11.560 and all the torture, and even having AIDS, I can 0:12:11.600 --> 0:12:15.160 honestly say being gay is the greatest gift I was 0:12:15.240 --> 0:12:17.679 ever given. I wouldn't change it. 0:12:17.679 --> 0:12:27.800 For the worlds. 0:12:27.600 --> 0:12:31.080 Amid all of this death, more and more activists started 0:12:31.080 --> 0:12:34.840 to burn out Garantz. Frankie Ruda, who had joined Act 0:12:34.920 --> 0:12:37.400 Up as a teenager in the late eighties, was one 0:12:37.440 --> 0:12:37.960 of them. 0:12:38.120 --> 0:12:41.040 I think people have just had a lot of unprocessed 0:12:41.040 --> 0:12:43.040 grief and we're just really like unraveling. 0:12:43.160 --> 0:12:47.439 Honestly, Like many in the movement, Frankie Ruda was exhausted 0:12:47.480 --> 0:12:50.920 by the lack of progress on medical treatment and by 0:12:50.960 --> 0:12:52.959 infighting among her fellow activists. 0:12:54.040 --> 0:12:58.280 All activist organizations have kind of a half life. They 0:12:58.679 --> 0:13:02.360 burst onto the scene, they're incredibly viral, and then they 0:13:02.400 --> 0:13:04.000 start to sort of change. 0:13:04.520 --> 0:13:07.280 The changes Act UP was going through might have been 0:13:07.320 --> 0:13:11.000 easier to take if Frankie Ruda wasn't also losing friends 0:13:11.000 --> 0:13:12.960 to AIDS on a routine basis. 0:13:13.440 --> 0:13:16.240 A lot of people had been infected around the same 0:13:16.240 --> 0:13:19.520 period of time, and there was a sense amongst a 0:13:19.559 --> 0:13:22.520 lot of people that they were not getting out of 0:13:22.520 --> 0:13:27.480 this alive. Some people were very pessimistic about whether or 0:13:27.480 --> 0:13:31.839 not they were going to see the end of the pandemic. 0:13:33.400 --> 0:13:36.520 The sense of despair deepened in June of nineteen ninety 0:13:36.559 --> 0:13:41.240 three when scientists made a crushing announcement about AZT at 0:13:41.240 --> 0:13:43.760 the International AIDS Conference in Berlin. 0:13:43.920 --> 0:13:47.480 Discouraging news Today about the effectiveness in some cases of AZT. 0:13:48.040 --> 0:13:51.400 French and British researchers had conducted the largest study ever 0:13:51.480 --> 0:13:55.439 on AZT. Their conclusion was that in the long term 0:13:55.559 --> 0:13:57.959 the drug simply did not work well. 0:13:58.000 --> 0:14:02.040 The T yes it was, there no significant benefit in 0:14:02.160 --> 0:14:05.120 terms of survival or profession to AIDS. 0:14:05.559 --> 0:14:08.560 Reading from slides on a big overhead screen, the head 0:14:08.559 --> 0:14:11.880 of the European study told the delegates patients inspected with 0:14:12.120 --> 0:14:15.800 HIV who take AZT before they develop symptoms of AIDS 0:14:16.200 --> 0:14:18.800 are no better off than patients who take it after 0:14:18.840 --> 0:14:20.080 they come down with the disease. 0:14:20.520 --> 0:14:24.360 The limits of AZT were already well known, but according 0:14:24.440 --> 0:14:27.440 to the new study, the drug didn't extend life for 0:14:27.520 --> 0:14:31.800 people with AIDS by a single day. In fact, patients 0:14:31.800 --> 0:14:36.120 in the placebo group actually lived a little longer. After 0:14:36.160 --> 0:14:39.440 the conference, the Washington Post described it as the most 0:14:39.440 --> 0:14:44.320 depressing moment in aid's treatment history. Mark Harrington, the act 0:14:44.440 --> 0:14:47.040 UP member you first met in our previous episode, was 0:14:47.080 --> 0:14:49.560 in Berlin at the time of the AZT announcement. 0:14:50.480 --> 0:14:52.600 I think at that point it was pretty universally felt 0:14:52.600 --> 0:14:54.920 that we were all doomed and anybody that had HIV 0:14:55.040 --> 0:14:58.440 was going to die. We're not going to be changing 0:14:58.480 --> 0:15:01.840 the field fast enough to to save our lives or 0:15:01.880 --> 0:15:03.680 the lives of most of our friends that had HIV 0:15:03.800 --> 0:15:05.760 and most of the other millions and millions of people 0:15:05.800 --> 0:15:09.000 that had HIV. So it seemed that everything we had 0:15:09.040 --> 0:15:11.080 done up to that point hadn't been enough. 0:15:11.880 --> 0:15:15.320 Three weeks after the conference in Berlin, a group of 0:15:15.360 --> 0:15:20.840 AIDS activists channeled their sorrow into a protest in Washington, Free. 0:15:20.640 --> 0:15:24.000 The deaths of years we are taking any harm. 0:15:24.960 --> 0:15:27.440 It was a new kind of protest known as a 0:15:27.440 --> 0:15:28.400 political funeral. 0:15:29.040 --> 0:15:32.560 It got to the point where the community started this 0:15:32.800 --> 0:15:38.280 campaign to show our deaths, to show what AIDS looked like, 0:15:38.640 --> 0:15:41.000 and the most dramatic way that that happened was through 0:15:41.280 --> 0:15:47.040 political funerals, in which the corpses of the fallen comrades 0:15:47.560 --> 0:15:52.080 were taken out into the streets and displayed in these 0:15:52.440 --> 0:16:00.200 these really heartbreaking expressions of anger and rage. 0:16:00.440 --> 0:16:03.480 The point of political funerals was to force an awareness 0:16:03.520 --> 0:16:05.960 of the death toll from AIDS onto those who might 0:16:06.040 --> 0:16:10.400 otherwise find it easy to look away. Mark Harrington says 0:16:10.440 --> 0:16:13.840 that activists didn't want AIDS to be a private epidemic. 0:16:14.680 --> 0:16:18.840 We wanted the American people to see the cost, to 0:16:18.920 --> 0:16:22.360 see the lives that were being lost, and to be 0:16:22.440 --> 0:16:25.440 made aware by us putting it into their faces that 0:16:26.360 --> 0:16:29.040 the people that were dying were loved and were valued 0:16:29.640 --> 0:16:32.920 members of our society. And so this was a sign 0:16:33.160 --> 0:16:39.760 of desperation, of despair, but also a beautiful sign of solidarity. 0:16:40.680 --> 0:16:43.040 It was the summer of nineteen ninety three when an 0:16:43.080 --> 0:16:45.880 act UP member with AIDS named Tim Bailey took a 0:16:45.920 --> 0:16:49.760 turn for the worse. As he lay dying, Bailey told 0:16:49.760 --> 0:16:52.160 his friends that he wanted his body thrown over the 0:16:52.160 --> 0:16:55.120 White House gate. It would be a nod to an 0:16:55.120 --> 0:16:58.480 act UP protest held the previous year when more than 0:16:58.480 --> 0:17:01.240 a dozen activists poured out the ashes of their loved 0:17:01.240 --> 0:17:02.880 ones onto the White House lawn. 0:17:03.360 --> 0:17:06.719 And we're here today to bring home to George Brush 0:17:07.400 --> 0:17:10.000 the results of this murders in action. 0:17:11.200 --> 0:17:14.640 Tim Bailey's idea to have people throw his actual body 0:17:14.720 --> 0:17:17.560 onto the lawn was a little more extreme, and his 0:17:17.640 --> 0:17:21.280 friends demurred, but they promised him they would do something 0:17:21.400 --> 0:17:22.720 in front of the White House. 0:17:27.680 --> 0:17:31.399 True Love. 0:17:33.160 --> 0:17:36.640 On July first, nineteen ninety three, a few days after 0:17:36.720 --> 0:17:40.160 Bailey died, his friends drove his body from a funeral 0:17:40.200 --> 0:17:42.320 home in New Jersey to Washington, d C. 0:17:43.240 --> 0:17:46.280 This was carried out like a military operation. They rented 0:17:46.320 --> 0:17:49.560 a van and they called upon Act Up members around 0:17:49.560 --> 0:17:51.120 the country to meet them in Washington. 0:17:52.160 --> 0:17:54.720 The plan was to meet up at the Capital reflecting pool, 0:17:55.080 --> 0:17:59.000 then marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in a procession, But by 0:17:59.040 --> 0:18:01.720 the time the activist van pulled into a parking lot 0:18:01.800 --> 0:18:05.960 near the Capitol, the authorities were already there. Some were 0:18:05.960 --> 0:18:06.840 wearing riot gear. 0:18:07.000 --> 0:18:10.080 This is this is the last whistles, It's in the will. 0:18:10.440 --> 0:18:13.080 There are legal permits, there are family members here. 0:18:13.440 --> 0:18:17.320 You're going to You're going to interfere with a funeral 0:18:17.400 --> 0:18:19.000 procession in front of. 0:18:18.960 --> 0:18:19.800 All this press. 0:18:19.960 --> 0:18:25.680 It was a showdown of remarkable tension and anger. There 0:18:25.760 --> 0:18:30.080 was rage and tears coming from the protesters, who felt 0:18:30.160 --> 0:18:32.840 that they owed it to Tim Bailey to be able 0:18:32.880 --> 0:18:38.479 to accomplish what he had asked for and yet they 0:18:38.480 --> 0:18:39.240 were being blocked. 0:18:50.520 --> 0:18:53.520 According to one witness, a federal agent at one point 0:18:53.560 --> 0:18:56.800 reached into the van holding Bailey's casket and snatched the 0:18:56.880 --> 0:19:01.200 keys from the driver. Activists surrounded van and sat down 0:19:01.280 --> 0:19:04.720 so it couldn't be driven away. After a tense standoff 0:19:04.720 --> 0:19:08.120 that lasted several hours, they flung open the back doors 0:19:08.240 --> 0:19:09.720 and forced the casket. 0:19:09.359 --> 0:19:16.560 Out, But the pushback from this phalanx of police officers 0:19:16.920 --> 0:19:20.560 was such that the whole casket nearly fell over and 0:19:20.640 --> 0:19:29.000 nearly emptied itself in the parking lot. Everything you wanted 0:19:28.960 --> 0:19:31.760 to do, and now you're fucking hell. 0:19:32.600 --> 0:19:36.560 You have to god damn more. Eventually, the activists regained 0:19:36.560 --> 0:19:39.480 control of Bailey's casket and managed to get it back 0:19:39.520 --> 0:19:42.600 into the van. The police then surrounded the van and 0:19:42.760 --> 0:19:45.600 escorted it onto the highway back towards New Jersey. 0:19:46.160 --> 0:19:51.399 The escort lasted into Maryland to Baltimore, and Tim's body 0:19:51.440 --> 0:19:54.560 was returned ultimately to the funeral home and he was 0:19:54.600 --> 0:19:57.600 given a regular burial after that. 0:20:04.960 --> 0:20:09.160 By nineteen ninety three, activists weren't the only ones losing hope. 0:20:09.920 --> 0:20:12.920 Scientists were also beginning to doubt whether an effective treatment 0:20:12.960 --> 0:20:17.760 for HIV was possible AZT like drugs had proven ineffective, 0:20:18.359 --> 0:20:21.399 and while MIRK was putting its energy behind protease inhibitors, 0:20:21.880 --> 0:20:25.720 there was no guarantee that those would work either. Here 0:20:25.800 --> 0:20:30.960 again is Emilio Emini, the virologist who ran Merk's HIV efforts. 0:20:31.359 --> 0:20:34.720 What was in everyone's back of everyone's mind was, well, 0:20:35.080 --> 0:20:38.320 maybe every single drug we develop against this virus, or 0:20:38.359 --> 0:20:40.760 even an inhibit of the protease, maybe the virus can 0:20:40.840 --> 0:20:44.160 very quickly defeat it by simply becoming resistant quickly. 0:20:44.880 --> 0:20:47.959 Thanks to Irving Siegel and his colleagues, MIRK had been 0:20:48.000 --> 0:20:52.240 early on protease research, but in the years after Siegel's death, 0:20:52.640 --> 0:20:56.360 progress had been slow. It wasn't just because Siegel wasn't 0:20:56.359 --> 0:20:59.200 there to help. Everyone I spoke to said his team 0:20:59.240 --> 0:21:03.200 continued working on protease inhibitors with the same urgency as before. 0:21:04.040 --> 0:21:06.199 It was just that making a functional drug out of 0:21:06.200 --> 0:21:10.400 Siegel's idea was extremely hard. Here's David Franz again. 0:21:11.119 --> 0:21:17.200 It was the most complex pharmaceutical production ever undertaken. To 0:21:17.320 --> 0:21:24.200 create this molecule took fourteen painstaking steps, each one very 0:21:24.240 --> 0:21:27.640 time consuming. Each one depended on the one before it. 0:21:27.720 --> 0:21:31.720 The idea that this would work was certainly far from 0:21:32.080 --> 0:21:32.879 but reliable. 0:21:34.040 --> 0:21:36.520 The drug that Merk was working on would eventually be 0:21:36.600 --> 0:21:40.480 called krick Savan. The scientist in charge of producing it 0:21:40.560 --> 0:21:43.600 happened to also be a chef, and in an interview 0:21:43.640 --> 0:21:47.160 with the Philadelphia Inquirer, he explained that making krick savan 0:21:47.400 --> 0:21:49.800 was like cooking an intricate, multi course meal for a 0:21:49.840 --> 0:21:53.160 thousand people. If you wrote the recipe for krick savan, 0:21:53.280 --> 0:21:57.240 he said, each of the fourteen steps would cover sixty pages. 0:22:00.600 --> 0:22:04.119 The effort seemed to be paying off. Kricks Evan worked 0:22:04.160 --> 0:22:07.960 extremely well in lab trials, so well that, according to 0:22:08.040 --> 0:22:11.840 David France, the team at Merk did something pretty unusual. 0:22:12.280 --> 0:22:16.840 As Merk and the HIV team were getting more and 0:22:16.880 --> 0:22:20.560 more excited about kricks evan from what they saw in laboratories, 0:22:21.040 --> 0:22:24.760 they wanted to push the thing into human trials very quickly, 0:22:25.160 --> 0:22:28.880 and they had such faith that it would work that 0:22:29.640 --> 0:22:34.120 they did something that is not done in pharmaceutical research. 0:22:34.800 --> 0:22:39.240 Typically, after successful lab trials, pharma companies test their drugs 0:22:39.320 --> 0:22:42.400 on healthy animals to make sure the drugs aren't toxic 0:22:42.600 --> 0:22:46.640 and can be absorbed into the bloodstream. According to France's reporting, 0:22:47.240 --> 0:22:48.840 Merk skipped the animal trial. 0:22:49.480 --> 0:22:52.919 Sort of What they did instead was they tested it 0:22:52.960 --> 0:22:58.000 among the scientists. They took it themselves, and so they 0:22:58.040 --> 0:23:02.480 knew that it was safe because they all survived the 0:23:02.520 --> 0:23:06.640 exposure to it. And it's something that has often joked 0:23:06.640 --> 0:23:09.280 about in the pharmaceutical world as a big chimp study, 0:23:09.440 --> 0:23:12.200 in which the big chimp is the scientist himself. 0:23:14.640 --> 0:23:18.040 We asked Emilio Amini about the big chimp trial. He 0:23:18.160 --> 0:23:24.240 declined to comment. I told you a bit ago about 0:23:24.240 --> 0:23:28.040 the devastating AZT announcement in Berlin. It was about six 0:23:28.080 --> 0:23:30.600 months later that Merk ran a trial of krick Savan 0:23:30.720 --> 0:23:33.160 and a group of people who were all HIV positive. 0:23:33.960 --> 0:23:38.360 A week into the study, each patient's viral load fell dramatically. 0:23:39.240 --> 0:23:42.760 Krick Savan appeared to work, at least in the short run. 0:23:43.440 --> 0:23:46.719 What we initially saw was that there was in fact, 0:23:47.119 --> 0:23:51.240 very clear and rapid decline a virus load in those individuals. 0:23:51.440 --> 0:23:53.159 And this was the first time that was seen with 0:23:53.200 --> 0:23:56.840 any drug, you know, for HIV. So it gave us 0:23:56.880 --> 0:23:58.280 a sort of a glimmer of hope that you know, 0:23:58.320 --> 0:24:01.399 we have, you know, something potentially useful here, right, you know, 0:24:01.440 --> 0:24:03.920 we felt, well, maybe there's something special about the proteuse. 0:24:03.920 --> 0:24:07.160 Maybe there's something special that the virus cannot rapidly become 0:24:07.200 --> 0:24:12.320 resistant to this class of drugs, and so we were encouraged. 0:24:12.960 --> 0:24:15.960