AIDS and Questions of Medical Ethics

Doctor Marcus Conant. In the early 1980's Dr. Conant was among the first doctors in San Francisco to treat AIDS cases. Now Dr. Conant heads the largest private AIDS medical practice in San Francisco. After his 1985 study on how condoms block transmission of the AIDS virus, condoms became a household word. Dr. Conant is the director of AIDS Clinical Research Center and the co-director of the Kaposi's Sarcoma Clinic at the University of California at San Francisco.

In the first ten years of the AIDS epidemic, the Food and Drug Administration approved only two drugs to treat the disease. Yet a third drug, approved last month, took only eight months. Health economist Peter Arno's new book, "Against The Odds" tells how AIDS activists have sparked sweeping reforms of the drug approval process, and sped up access to drug development for all illnesses.

On the eve of the 7th International Conference on AIDS, we talk with the man in charge of the previous conference, Doctor Robert Wachter. Wachter's new book, "The Fragile Coalition," chronicles Wachter's struggle to make the conference a forum for both scientists and AIDS activists.