Global AIDS Community Gathers for Conclave : Science: Some say conference, now in its 9th year, is too unwieldy. Participants defend it as opportunity to interrelate.
They marched along the Kurfurstendamm on Sunday afternoon, hundreds of AIDS activists clogging this city’s most elegant thoroughfare, chanting and whistling past wide-eyed tourists and street musicians and the famous Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church that stands as a bombed-out relic of World War II.
Their presence marked a yearly ritual: the ACT UP demonstration during the International Conference on AIDS, which opens here today. But the protesters--many of whom will attend the conference--are just one indicator that this scientific meeting is in a league unto itself.
Part politics, part medicine, part social affair, the AIDS conference, which has been held for nine years running and this year will draw a record 12,000 participants, is a study in chaos. It has been called a circus and a zoo.
Some, including the editorial board of the British scientific journal Nature, say it is so unwieldy that it should be abandoned.
By purely scientific standards, few breakthroughs are reported here; most researchers would rather publish their findings in academic journals than wait to announce them in the chaotic atmosphere of this conference. “The real science is not going to be any big surprises,” said Anthony Fauci, the top AIDS expert at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
But then, the Ninth International Conference on AIDS is about much more than science.
It is a place to see and be seen, where the global AIDS community--patients, doctors, laboratory scientists and social counselors, each of whom paid roughly $600 to attend--can mingle and keep up with important, if incremental, developments in research.
It is also a time marker, a way for those involved in the fight against AIDS to clock how far they have come and how far they must go in their efforts to outsmart the virus that has thus far outsmarted them.
“This is really more like a social thing from my point of view,” said noted AIDS researcher Flossie Wong-Staal of UC San Diego. “It’s where all the AIDS community, whether they are scientists or behavioral social researchers and even the activists, everybody is sort of gathered under one roof.”
Some say the conference simply reflects the disease itself. “AIDS is a circus. AIDS is political,” said Paul Volberding, a UC San Francisco AIDS expert who is one of the conference organizers. “To try to artificially divorce this from that is impossible.”
This year will be the second-to-last annual gathering. After next year’s conference in Japan, the meetings will be scaled back to once every other year. Organizers hope the hiatus will encourage similar, regional gatherings.
For some, the break is happening none too soon. “AIDS conferences have outlived their usefulness and should be stopped,” Nature editorialized last week, saying that meaningful communication is impossible here.
Others disagree. The exchange of information may come in a happenstance manner--over coffee or drinks, in whispered conversations in the corridors while someone else is lecturing--but, they say, it occurs nonetheless.
“I saved a guy’s life because of an idea a guy gave me at this conference two years ago,” said Eric Neibart, who treats AIDS patients at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. “The fact that there’s no new science doesn’t justify a put-down of the whole thing. There’s a lot of one on one, a lot of, ‘I got this patient. This is happening. What do I do?’ ”
New science or not, there is always news to be found. Dr. Jonas Salk, the polio pioneer, has chosen the Berlin meeting to announce the results of a nationwide trial of his vaccine for those infected with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. Last year, the Amsterdam conference was rocked by reports of a new virus that appeared to cause AIDS but was not HIV--reports that later turned out to be unfounded.
This year, attention will likely focus on recent controversies over when to administer drugs to AIDS patients, as well as on the attempts of researchers to figure out why some people can live years after being infected with the virus.
White House officials, meanwhile, are here trying to push the message that President Clinton is committed to increasing funding for AIDS; Fauci is expected to deliver remarks from Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala in his speech at today’s opening session.
Politics and research aside, for AIDS patients and those who care for them, the conference is an annual exercise in comfort. It is the one place where people trying to cope with the emotional havoc of the disease can find thousands of others who understand.
“In some ways, this conference is good for people’s psyche,” said Neibart, the New York doctor. “It’s really tough taking care of these patients, seeing them all die. This is a way to retool your batteries.”
In spite of that--or perhaps because of it--there is a curious celebratory atmosphere to this event, which focuses on a disease that has caused so much devastation. There will be nightly rock concerts near the Brandenburg Gate, which connects the city’s east to its west. A cultural festival running concurrently with the conference will feature films, puppet shows, art exhibits and dances.
“It’s unique,” said Dr. Alvan Fisher, a Rhode Island infectious disease specialist who has attended every conference since their inception. “Can you imagine the American College of Surgeons having a cultural event?”
“All the people who have power on AIDS are here,” Anna Rousseau, a 23-year-old literature student from Paris, said as she walked in Sunday’s march. “It’s important, when they are discussing what we are going to do in the next years, what the research must do, that we (activists) have some control. It’s a way to take a part of the power inside the conference.”
