annie lennox: why i am an hiv/aids activist

the $cience of hope

^ NOVA: Personal Genome Project explores the lifesaving possibilities of genetics, the research of which may one day prevent deadly diseases like diabetes and heart attacks.

Scientists Hope Stimulus Will Give Jolt To Research | NPR

Bad Economy Could Affect Future Of Science

The impact could fall hard on individuals like [Anirvan Ghosh's postdoctoral candidate, Stefanie Otto, who attends the University of California San Diego]. But they also can affect the future of science in the United States. Ghosh thinks of both as he looks to the stimulus package to provide his lab — and many others like it — some relief.

"Being able to provide some support right now has an immediate effect in stabilizing the positions of postdocs and graduate students and research scientists now so they don't leave the system," he says. "But in the long run, as we look forward with our regular budgets, one has to think of ways in which this can be sustained."

That's actually the bigger challenge. Sure, labs are eager to get a two-year infusion of cash under the terms of the stimulus package. But if the money disappears just as quickly, labs will be back in trouble again. The NIH's Kington says they're trying to be careful to avoid that hangover.

"The greater the flexibility we're given in the legislation, the more options we have to plan so that we don't have a problem two years down the road," Kington says.

What many textbook Republicans, and especially those figureheads in the Bush administration, failed to realize is that the very institutions that they shat on with apathy in lack of funding in the past decade could have made great strides in such fields as stem cell research, environmental research, and biotechnology. It also helps foster education and a culture of learning and inquiry and who knows how many kids whose inner fire it may ignite that one day they may be authors in curing diseases their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, or friends once suffered or died from.

Let's just hope money will finally arrive.....and continue to arrive.

I posted my own thoughts in the readers' comment section of the above NPR story:

This is disheartening to hear, the possibility of scientific research not getting enough funding by us.

I mean, part of why progress has been made to combat HIV/AIDS is credited to government spending - OUR money being spent on it. This is far, far closer to home for me than you think. Some of my friends have HIV and of course, many of us also suffer from cancer, Parkinson's disease, and other potentially lethal ailments.

Any funding towards scientific research is a chance at lifesaving treatment, or possibly even a cure one day.

my birthday...and my truth, my catharsis

> 10am. Birthday breakfast at the ice cream cafe around the block - coffee, almond croissant, and The Portable Atheist, edited by Christopher Hitchens.

Happy Birthday, alien.

I would have preferred to make a kooky audio blog on my birthday but, as events have turned out, as life as we know it made things turn out, I don't think an initially kooky audio blog ending with the sound of me breaking down and sobbing would have worked.

A few days ago I came clean to N. I could not, will not, submit her to any more snaps, bouts of anger, and avoidance on my part. I love her far, far too much to stupidly yell at her with undeserved anger and frustration. So I sat her down, and told her my story. I brought my brown paper bag full of medicines to the table and showed her each one, saving the two most critical prescriptions for last. "This one," I told her as I held up a vial full of large long white oval pills, "is an antibiotic that helps prevent me from getting pneumonia. This one helps me from catching nasty fungal stuff." Then I held up a container of small pale yellow round pills. "This is for hypertension, like what you have. It keeps my blood pressure under control."

Finally I held up the last two clear brown plastic containers and said, "Now, these two pills are called anti-retrovirals. What they do is prevent a certain kind of virus inside me from replicating. If I stop taking these pills the virus will develop resistance to them and in time the pills will be useless and the virus will reproduce like crazy, kill off all my antibodies.....and I'll die. That virus is called HIV. And I've had it for over 11 years. I'm sorry, N. I'm so sorry."

She sat there nodding, trying to understand. I knew that she knew about AIDS and how nasty it is and how millions and millions have died from it. She seemed a mite stoic at that moment, her profoundly sweet and humble old lady face nodding at the clinical and medical facts I was spouting. But I also sensed that......the very loving, very mortally loving and vulnerable mother in her was crumbling and buckling for me, because of me, her youngest son.

I had broken her heart. I had held back over 11 years' worth of truth, lived 11 years' worth of lies. I kept it from her out of utter fear and out of shame.

Deep inside I knew it was probably just a matter of time before it had to - before it must - surface. She was the last person I wanted to tell. She had been through so much already all these years, worries way, way, waaaay too much for her kids and grandkids, watched her deeply beloved husband, my dad, die after 54 years of a beautiful partnership. The last thing I wanted was to hurt her, and....well, this.

And she still loves me, worries for me. She didn't turn away, didn't push me away as I most gravely feared would happen. And it brought to my mind this piece of art I made years back, a simple picture I took, with words I wrote superimposed on it.

Happy Birthday, alien. Happy bitter yet cathartic truths.