Dr. Mark Wainberg, a microbiologist who identified a drug that later became critical to treating people infected with H.I.V., and who later became a leading advocate for giving millions of people with H.I.V. and AIDS in Africa greater access to antiretroviral drugs, died on Tuesday after struggling in the waters off Bal Harbour, Fla. He was 71. His son, Zev, said that he and Dr. Wainberg had been swimming in rough surf when Dr. Wainberg appeared to be drowning. His son pulled him to shore and performed CPR before paramedics arrived. He was taken to Aventura Hospital in nearby Aventura, Fla., where he was declared dead, according to the Bal Harbour police. The AIDS pandemic was spreading quickly in the 1980s when Dr. Wainberg — who spent much of his career at McGill University in Montreal — began to study H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. He spent time working with Dr. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of H.I.V., who provided Dr. Wainberg with the cells and antibodies to grow the virus in his laboratory at McGill. Then, in 1989, after studying the properties of a new antiviral drug called 3TC, or Lamivudine, Dr. Wainberg found that it was effective against H.I.V. It soon became an important part of the so-called AIDS cocktail of drugs that is still used to treat infected patients. But as he studied how H.I.V. mutates to resist the various drugs used to treat it, Dr. Wainberg made finding a cure his goal. “It’s no longer enough to simply have said, ‘O.K., we’ve done a great job and we’ve transformed H.I.V. from a lethal sentence that used to kill everybody into a chronic, manageable disease,’ ” he told CTN, a Canadian H.I.V. research network. “We want to get to zero,” he told the Canadian television network CTV in 2014. Mark Arnold Wainberg was born in Montreal on April 21, 1945. His father, Abe, worked for a glassware company and his mother, Fay, worked in insurance. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from McGill and earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Columbia University. He started his career at McGill as a staff investigator in 1974. At his death, he was the director of McGill’s AIDS Centre and the head of AIDS Research at Jewish General Hospital’s Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research. His move into advocacy crystallized with his outrage at those who had denied the link between H.I.V. and AIDS, such as President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Mr. Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela as president in 1999, cited extreme poverty and the collapse of the immune system as causes. Dr. Wainberg called the deniers “crackpots” who were “contributing to the spread of H.I.V.” As the president of the International AIDS Society at the time, Dr. Wainberg helped select Durban, South Africa, as the site of the group’s 2000 conference, hoping the media would report widely about how few Africans had access to antiretroviral drugs. And he had hoped Mr. Mbeki would change his mind when he spoke at the conference. “It is vitally important that Mbeki tell the truth about AIDS,” Dr. Wainberg said before Mr. Mbeki’s speech. “We are desperately hopeful that he will acknowledge that H.I.V. causes AIDS.” Mr. Mbeki disappointed him. Dr. Wainberg called the speech a “lost opportunity.” The absence of a viable antiretroviral program in South Africa led to an estimated 330,000 deaths from 2000 to 2005, according to a study by Harvard University researchers that was released soon after Mr. Mbeki’s presidency ended in 2008. Dr. Wainberg believed the media attention generated at the conference in South Africa roused governments and assistance groups to purchase H.I.V. drugs for the millions who needed them. “Durban highlighted to the world that it was not acceptable to have two different worlds,” he said in a 25th-anniversary video produced by the International AIDS Society four years ago. “One world in which everybody could take access to antiretroviral drugs for granted and a different world in which the drugs were virtually non-available, which meant that anybody who contracted H.I.V. in a developing country setting was condemned to die.” Linda-Gail Bekker, the president of the International AIDS Society, reminisced during a telephone interview about Dr. Wainberg’s “fearlessness and boldness in calling out the president.” “I remember him feeling so indignant that anyone would even suggest to a virologist the virus was not the cause of AIDS,” Dr. Bekker said. “He was aghast at the implications of that.” Six years after the Durban meeting, when the International AIDS Society held its conference in Toronto, the absence of Prime Minister Stephen Harper led Dr. Wainberg to say, “Mr. Harper, you have made a mistake that puts you on the wrong side of history.” Dr. Wainberg’s shift to activism surprised Catherine Hankins, the deputy director of the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development. “To see a basic scientist move well beyond the microscope and set out to change policy was quite extraordinary,” she said during a telephone interview. “He basically took the credibility he had from science to speak out to try to make things different.” She added, “He made sure to say that AIDS denialism was not worth killing people.” In addition to his son Zev, who is an associate professor of medicine at U.C.L.A., Dr. Wainberg is survived his wife, the former Susan Hubschman; another son, Jonathan; three grandchildren; and his brother Lawrence. Dr. Wainberg — a Modern Orthodox Jew whose H.I.V. research led him to support the L.G.B.T.Q. community and to march in parades to support its causes — last year donated a Torah to an Ethiopian synagogue in Jerusalem in memory of a 16-year-old girl stabbed to death during a gay pride parade. “It was a way for my father to fight intolerance that was consistent with his Judaic values,” Zev Wainberg said. Source
