Its A Beautiful Virus!

Thanks to a dead battery I was about an hour late to my Micro Bio of HIV class last night, I think I have bad car karma but thats another story. So, its a 4 hour class, I figured I only missed a little. Luckily the prof was also late and he had technical difficulty with the audio/visual systems, I walked in as he started.

Opening line - "HIV is a beautiful virus!"

You can imagine the reactions.

"Um, excuse me Dr. Burr, doesnt HIV, well, KILL PEOPLE??" asks a fellow classmate quietly under her breath.

I understand her reaction but I understand Dr. Burr's perspective as well. HIV, as viruses go, has a simple architecture and is built for smart survival. In academic terms it is beautiful. IMHO, the ability to compartmentalize emotions and view the virus in purely academic terms is a necessity to work successfully in this area. Comments like Dr. Burr's usually weed out the people that dont belong ... for their benefit.

Lecture, lecture, lecture. Classes of viruses, gene composition. History - how did it come to be, mutations of immundeficiency virus in monkeys and chimps, leapfroging to humans, patient zero, who's who of the intial research team.

Interesting political slant about how the Reagan regime intentionally kept the epidemic out of the press and contributed zero percent of his budget for research. Necessary political survival for Reagan since he was financially backed by the religous right. But at what cost? Too little too late that he admitted this was his biggest mistake post-presidency.

Even more interesting was that a leading retrovirus scientist of the era, Peter Duesberg , honestly thought that HIV was not killing people but, and I quote, "those queers in San Francisco are dying from their lifestyle - drugs and sex are killing them". (Shuure, where is the scientific proof that poppers cause AIDS?) Apparently the scientific community tolerated him because he was excellent in his specific area of retroviruses. Then he went on to claim that AZT rather than HIV was causing AIDS. He also suspected that the CDC was conspiring with the NIH to propogate the "myth" that HIV caused AIDS to keep their tax dollars rolling. Riiight, what next? Are Scully and Mulder correct in their assumption that the government conspired with an alien race to inject us all with genetic markers disguised as Smallpox vaccines in order to pick out those humans that could be cloned as an slave race pending an alien takeover of Earth?

Scientists theorized that Duesberg's disconnect was that he was an expert in oncoviruses, HIV is a lentivirus. The two families of retroviruses do not behave similarly. That HIV didn't behave as an oncovirus meant others research of HIV ws somehow flawed. Wow, talk about ego!

But wait there's more! Thabo Mbeki, then President of South Africa invites Duesberg to sit on a panel to discuss South Africa's AIDS crisis. LOL, wasn't this guy just totally discredited? Brilliant decision.

Most people believe that Africa has the largest population of HIV cases, so far they are right. However, the largest growing population of HIV cases are in India. 4 million to date, 24 million projected by 2013. Horrific!

We ended our class by watching the first half of "And The Band Played On". The title refers to the fact that while the Titanic was sinking the band was instructed to keep playing as not to alarm the passengers. Clever.

I read the book in the early 90's but passed on the movie when it came out. Alan "Mr. Softy" Alda as an over- ambitious virologist that tries to steal the spotlight for discovering HIV? No. The movie itself is historically acurate in tracing HIV from 1980-85, however the symbolism is beyond heavyhanded. Example: Its 1982, a young gay man is in the hospital, he has KS and obviously dementia, we know he isn't going to make it. Did they need to slow pan from his bed to the window in his room that overlooks a graveyard with miles of white crosses? Sheesh, I think I get it!

Maybe I'll pass on the second half :)