WHAT'S IT WORTH TO FIND A CURE?

By Christine Gorman

Scientists and patients will be celebrating the promising new HIV treatments to be featured in Vancouver next week, but animal-rights activists almost certainly won't be cheering them on. That's because much of AIDS research would be impossible without experiments that animal advocates consider unethical. Their belief, and their willingness to defend it aggressively, has put them on a collision course with many AIDS activists.

Tensions between the two groups exploded last December, when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals assailed an AIDS treatment that involved taking immune cells from a baboon and then killing it for autopsy. Since baboons don't seem to get AIDS, doctors at San Francisco General Hospital had hoped that grafting the animal's cells into Jeff Getty, 38, of Oakland, California, would help him fight the disease. "We believe," a spokeswoman for PETA said at the time, that Getty is "the victim of an exploitative medical industry that has little concern for the beings, both human and animal, in this experiment."

Getty claims that animal-rights activists made harassing phone calls to his hospital bedside while he was recovering. The transplant doesn't seem to have taken yet, but when Getty regained his strength, he launched a counteroffensive. Last month, with a group of nine other AIDS patients, Getty sat down in the middle of a driveway and blocked traffic outside an animal-rights rally in Washington. Whatever PETA says, he proclaims, "is all lies and nonsense."

Would these latest promising treatments have been developed without animal research? Absolutely not, say AIDS researchers. Among other things, such studies help doctors determine what constitutes a safe dose of a drug before trying it out on people. The studies can also help physicians fine-tune treatments. After doctors determined that AZT could block the transmission of HIV to the fetus in some pregnant women, researchers wondered if they could make the therapy more effective. They decided to start by studying how a similar virus is transmitted from pregnant monkeys to their offspring. But animal-rights activists halted that experiment, saying it was redundant. The researchers may yet find their answer some other way. But most of them believe that working without animal experimentation is not an option.

--By Christine Gorman. Reported by Laird Harrison/Oakland

With reporting by LAIRD HARRISON/OAKLAND