Mark Wainberg, dead at 71, was ‘a giant of HIV science’

published on April 21, 2017 by André Picard, in The Globe and Mail

On April 6, at the annual Mark Wainberg Lecture, the namesake researcher quipped, as he did every year, that it wouldn’t be a “prememorial” event forever.

“At some point,” he quoted friends as saying, “you might not be around any more and then it will really be a memorial lecture.”

The audience members gathered at the Canadian Conference on HIV/AIDS Research in Montreal laughed, and none more heartily than the self-deprecating Dr. Wainberg. Then, reflecting on his advancing age, he turned serious and added: “All I can really hope is we’ll have a cure for HIV – or some other way of ending the AIDS epidemic – before I’m banished from the planet.”

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Dr. Julio Montaner, director of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, recalls that Dr. Wainberg “told Mbeki to his face that it was shameful that he wasn’t offering life-saving HIV drugs to his people.”

“He was forceful and unrelenting. If anyone spoke truth to power, it was Mark,” Dr. Montaner said. The Durban conference is seen as a watershed in turning back the tide of one of the worst pandemics in human history. Prior to the conference, ART was virtually unavailable in the developing world; today, 18.2 million people worldwide take antiretrovirals, almost half of the 36.7 million who are infected with HIV-AIDS.

“When I look back on my career, I always feel that the most important contribution of my life was political and not scientific,” Dr. Wainberg said when the AIDS Conference returned to Durban in 2016.

In fact, over time, the two roles morphed into one. “AIDS is going to be the world’s leading cause of death, so it behooves us all to be AIDS activists,” he said in an interview with McGill News, the university’s alumni publication, in 2000.

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Julio Montaner

BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS

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Mark Wainberg, dead at 71, was ‘a giant of HIV science’

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