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Dec.
1 was the 30th anniversary of World AIDS Day. ZEIT ONLINE took the opportunity
to remember two exceptional AIDS researchers. There is much that would likely
be different today if they were still alive.

July 17, 2014: A piece of the fuselage is
still attached to the wing lying in a Ukrainian cornfield. A red suitcase has
burst open, spilling its contents onto the ground. The earth is scorched black.
None of the 289 passengers on board have survived.

Sept. 2, 1998: A fully loaded McDonnell Douglas MD-11 falls out of the sky southwest of the Canadian city of Halifax
and plunges into St. Margaret’s Bay. All 229 people traveling in the plane are
killed.

There is a lot separating the two crashes:
Sixteen years, thousands of kilometers and the causes of the disasters. Whereas
MH-17 was likely shot down by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Swiss
Air Flight 111 crashed after a short circuit on board triggered a fire. And yet
there is something that links the two misfortunes: Both planes were carrying
leading virologists, public health experts and activists. The world-famous doctor Joep Lange was
flying onboard MH-17 to an international AIDS conference in Melbourne via Kuala Lumpur, while the Swiss Air flight was carrying Jonathan Mann, a human rights
activist and former director of the AIDS program at the World Health
Organization (WHO).

“When Malaysia Airlines flight MH17
was shot down by pro-Russian rebels in July 2014, the world wondered if a cure
for HIV had fallen from the sky and disappeared among the burning debris,”
writes Seema Yasmin in her recently published book “The Impatient Dr.
Lange.” But would the world really be a healthier place if the two
airplanes had reached their destinations?

The Beginning of the AIDS Epidemic: A Vast Riddle

It is a complete coincidence that the lives
of two of the most significant leaders in the fight against AIDS ended in such
a similar fashion – and science, and scientific writing, generally has no use
for coincidences. Yet the search for answers to the question as to who and what
AIDS research lost when those two planes went down shines a spotlight on two
charismatic doctors who likely saved thousands of lives in the fight against AIDS.
And their stories deserve to be told.

Nobody knew what to do in the beginning. In
the early 1980s, young people, mostly men, began turning up in emergency rooms
around the world suffering from high fevers, lung infections and diarrhea. Many
of their mouths showed the white plaque of a fungal infection, their lymph
nodes were swollen and doctors were diagnosing unusual cancerous lesions on
their skin that would spread from their calves and shins to the soles of their
feet.

Doctors were frequently able to relieve the
infections, but the men had hardly been released from the hospital before they
would return. They lost weight and energy – and would ultimately die. The
strange disease also affected the brain: Young patients would become just as forgetful
and confused as seniors suffering from dementia. Doctors knew that for some
strange reason, the immune systems of the young, mostly gay men were being
destroyed. Otherwise, though, the illness was a complete mystery.

In 1983, two years after doctors around the
world described similar cases (CDC:
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, 1981; New
England Journal of Medicine: Durack, 1981), that changed. Researchers were
able to isolate the HIV virus and slowly, doctors, immunologists and
virologists began to understand that the pathogen slowly but surely destroyed
the immune response of the body it had infected. It did so by hiding in Helper
T cells – which are vital in repelling intruders – and ultimately killing them.
Just as slowly, it became clear that the virus wasn’t just transmitted via sex
between men. It could also be transmitted through heterosexual intercourse,
needles used by drug addicts and blood transfusions and could be passed from
mothers to their unborn babies.