Stuff You Should Know - How HIV/AIDS Works, Part II

Episode Date: December 3, 2015

In part two of the series on HIV/AIDS, Chuck and Josh explore how the battle against the disease is being fought and won thanks to new treatments and possible cures. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from houseforforks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

Nobody's in here with us, so it's just two of us and you here, listener. We're just freewheeling Bob Dylan. Yep, whoever that is, Bob Dylan, who? Oh, come on. And this is part two of two of a special two-part series. That's right, on HIV AIDS. Yeah, if you didn't listen to the first one,

I would suggest you do that. Yeah, you're gonna be lost. There's probably gonna be a lot of in-jokes and referential jokes back to the first one. We explained it in the first one. Yeah, that's very important, and like the actual nuts and bolts of the disease. Don't skip ahead, don't be lazy.

No. So, Chuck, we left off, you were talking, we talked originally about the different varying levels of risk, depending on the type of intercourse, depending on the type of group you're a member of. We talked about how it works, where it came from. What could possibly be left to talk about as far as HIV is concerned?

There's a lot. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because we did not touch on, and I know you're being coy. Oh, because I see all your notes in front of you. Oh, yeah. Geez, look at all of these. But one thing we didn't talk about

that we're gonna start with is treatment. Yeah, that's a big one. That's a big one. You wanna go ahead and talk about the AIDS cocktail? Yeah, so back in 1991, a very, very, very famous basketball player named Irvin Magic Johnson, played for the LA Lakers, announced that he was retiring from the NBA

because he had been diagnosed with HIV. I remember the day. That was a huge deal. I was at Georgia Southern for some weird reason that weekend. That is weird. It was a big deal. Yeah. I mean, you talked, I think, last episode

about EZE catching it, and that was a big deal. This was probably even bigger. I think Magic Johnson was a bigger name than EZE. We're more widely recognized among more people. He was a sports figure. He was straight. What the heck's going on? And I remember thinking like many people at the time,

oh my gosh, Magic Johnson is dying. Yes, I think a lot of people, most people who are familiar with this thought, well, he's a goner in a couple of years, but he kept living. He kept living, and he kept living. He came back and played more basketball, even. I didn't know that.

You gotta be pretty fit for that. Sure. And he kept living, and everybody thought, what the heck happened with Magic Johnson? And it turned out that he had access to what's now known as the highly active antiretroviral therapy, aka heart, which is now the standard of treatment for HIV. And he had access to it a couple of years

before it became widespread in the, I think 1995. And it has helped keep him alive. He recently, he was 32 when he announced that he was diagnosed with HIV, and he turned 56 in 2015. That's awesome. That's a very, very long lifespan, especially for somebody who was diagnosed

in the early 90s when people were still like, what is going on here? Yeah, so correct. Magic Johnson got a head start, not because he's super famous. Well, that had something to do with it. I think I'm very rich. Well, but he was willing to,

it was still in the experimental phase at that point. Yeah, but I'm sure there were plenty of HIV patients who were like, do whatever you need to do to cure me, but didn't have the money. So he got a jump on it, but he has not, I think a lot of people think that he is getting some other special treatments that no one else is getting,

or he's paying his way into something. Supposedly there's a Kenyan witch doctor rumor. Yeah, he's getting the same treatment that other people are getting, and there are plenty of people that have lived much longer than him. Oh yeah. And he's just the most famous,

and that's a good thing, because he's HIV activist and AIDS activist. For sure, yeah, not to disparage anything about Magic Johnson. Yeah, of course not. He definitely took that label at a time when it was, that was a gay disease, and he became an HIV activist.

We should say specifically, he does not, never has had AIDS. His T-helper cell count never got to the 200,000 or less mark. So he's HIV positive, and he is still. Like we said in the last episode, it's a chronic disease because reservoirs develop. And I believe it was a couple of years

between diagnosis and treatment for him. So those reservoirs had a chance to get a foothold, but he got it early enough that his lifespan is, it's basically that, what was it, 24 years that he's been alive since diagnosis. That's pretty normal for people who were treated with the heart cocktail in a reasonable time after being diagnosed,

which they're finding that window of time is intensely important. Oh yeah, we're gonna get to that, man. That was a great article you sent. So we talking heart? Yeah, heart or cart or just art. Whichever you wanna call it. I call it heart with the double A's.

I call it the AIDS cocktail. Oh yeah, that's another word for it. So each one of these drugs, and we talked about in part one, is very specific to its task to basically disrupt as many stages of the process as possible. Should we go through these? Yeah.

NRTIs, nucleoside, reverse transcriptase inhibitors. Yeah. They basically block the ability to replicate. Yeah, remember the reverse transcriptase takes the RNA, the instructions for the viral creation, and turns it into DNA, which is then inserted into the CD4 plus T cell nucleus. Right?

So you block that. It's a big problem for the HIV virus. It's a big problem. In NRTIs, non-nucleoside reverse transcription inhibitors, they disable a protein, another protein requiring it to replicate. Yeah. Another disruption.

PIs, proteins inhibitors. So proteins was, that was the one that actually cut the polypeptides into their individual components. So yeah. You had a long chain of enzymes that made up these viruses. That's the part I didn't get.

Right, and then you cut them up. So the thing that cuts them up isn't there. You just have all these long chains, and they build up, and it's basically like Lucy's running the chocolate factory assembly line or something there. Then you have entry fusion inhibitors. They block the ability to enter those CD4 cells

to begin with. And then finally, integrase inhibitors. Once they get in that CD4 cell, we talked about the insert of that genetic material, and it basically blocks the ability to do that. Right. So the current cocktail, recommended cocktail, are two NRTIs in the shaker.

One in an RTI and a PI, and then either a integrase inhibitor or a Rytone Naver, which I don't know what that is, do you? No. Let's just say it's the key. Let's say it's the bitters in the cocktail. Nice.

It makes it bright. You put it all in there. You shake it up. You've got your AIDS cocktail. Once you put that into place, if you catch it early enough, you can bring your mortality rate just about to normal. Yeah, like it's a chronic disease.

Yeah. And your immune system will probably not become so compromised that you're going to die from something. Right. You need to be on it for life. Yeah. And everyone is supposed to be on this cocktail, although if you have a recent CD4 count below 500,

or if you are pregnant, then you are given a priority. Right. And it's all going to cost you about $10,000 to $12,000 a year, although that is supposed to increase. Yeah. And the reason why you have to stay on it indefinitely is because we said in the last episode

that HIV produces reservoirs of inactive virions that just spread throughout the body and accumulate. And even when you're treating what amounts to one outbreak, another one can come very soon afterward. And that's what makes it chronic, right? Yeah. With heart, it will eventually get all these reservoirs, but it takes, I think we said 60 to 80 years.

Yeah. It's a very long time, right? Yeah. So there's been some suggestions as to how to eradicate this disease a little faster using heart. Different ideas, which is great. I mean, they're really smart people

are coming up with different strategies. One of them is kind of nuts, but also cool. The one that uses prostratin, I believe is what it's called. It basically goes in and says, oh, you're an inactive HIV cell? Well, I'm going to activate you. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's basically making an HIV outbreak take place,

but you're doing it while you're under heart care, right? Yeah, the way I thought of it was it's like flushing out those invisible reservoirs. But the only way to flush them out is to activate them to get them going. So the T cells actually know it's there. So that's scary sounding. It is.

That the heart treatment also disrupts their function. So it starts them up and apparently they don't stop and go back to sleep or go dormant again once they start up. So it starts them up. The heart treatment keeps them from doing what they want to do normally. And then also the cell that they're infecting

will die sooner than later and just get it over with. So it's basically a way they're trying to figure out to accelerate an HIV infection while in the presence of highly active anti-retroviral therapy. So it keeps you from actually dying from this accelerated HIV infection. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, so that's one strategy. Does they call it anything? They should call it something cool. The wild cat or something. The gunslinger, yeah. The gunslinger. Wild cat. All right, I think we should get to this next.

This is a, you sent an awesome article from the Pacific Standard called Getting to Zero. Are we close to a cure for AIDS? And the city of San Francisco is doing something. They're pretty radical out there in San Francisco. Sure. You know? Yeah.

So what they're trying to do is they're trying to make their city, the first city, with no new infections, no deaths, and no stigma. And they call the program Getting to Zero. And they're doing this in a lot of ways. Some of the background here is, it historically over the past few decades hasn't been a ton of money allocated

toward finding a cure for AIDS. Yeah, and not because. For various reasons. I think a lot of people, especially initially, they were like, well, because it was gay disease. I think as it spread out and started infecting more non-gay people and more non-gay white people, it started to get a lot more funding.

But it also didn't get a lot of funding because a lot of people were like, we can't cure this, it's an incurable disease. Yeah, and I think, I think cynics might also say like, it's you make a lot more money to keep people on drugs for life than you do caring something. But from what I could tell, the main reason was because it was such a new scary thing.

They put all of their efforts into trying to save people who got HIV and coming up with this drug cocktail. Sure. However, things are changing, which is good. In 2008 and 2009, there was a very cool case. Timothy Ray Brown, he was. The Berlin patient.

Yeah, the second Berlin patient. There was another one in the mid-90s. I didn't know that. Yeah, there was a- I know everything. There was an anonymous Berlin patient in the mid-90s who I think got HIV and then no longer had HIV. Wow.

But- What's up with Berlin? I don't know, seriously. It's a cool city. But Timothy Ray Brown was a special case. He's an American that was living there as a translator. HIV positive and started taking medications. And then about a decade later,

found out he had leukemia. So his doctor. Very clever person. Dude. Giro Huter, or hero. Let's call him hero. I think hero. He said he had a very weird, unique idea.

He said, why don't we see if we can take, are there these people out there? 1% of Caucasians. Yeah, 1% of people who have a protein. Caucasian people. CCR5, which basically makes them immune to HIV. They lack that protein. Yeah.

That's a protein on the surface of your T-helper cell that the HIV virus docks with. Can doc, can infect. And very few people have this, 1%. He said, why don't we try and find someone like that who can donate their bone marrow. Which is where stuff like that is produced. Yep.

And to this guy, and basically, basically replace his immune system with this 1%er. Yeah. And not that kind of 1%er. Because I can get to be rich. Right. I got rich bone marrow.

So he did that. They found someone that had that, that was a good match, and it worked. It worked. Like he was functionally cured of HIV. I think like fully cured was like, they keep testing him and testing him. This is I think 2008 or 2009.

Yeah. And they keep testing the guy, no signs. Yeah. I don't know that enough people have been cured of HIV AIDS. So that they, it's like with cancer, I think if you're five years without any kind of growth that's considered remission. I don't think they have a standard like that yet.

No, they don't. But so they keep testing this guy and he's, it's not coming back. These reservoirs are not becoming active again. It doesn't appear that he has HIV or AIDS any longer. Right. And the doctor was excited obviously, but he also knew like, well,

obviously can't go around replacing, you know, people's immune systems with these 1%. Sure. But what it did was it kickstarted new hope. And now all of a sudden, all of a sudden there was new funding for trying to find a cure. And it was what they call a proof of concept.

I think we mentioned last episode, it showed that AIDS can be cured. Yeah. Before this, only about 3% of AIDS and HIV funding went to cure research. And now there are new grants totaling 14.6 million a year. And Obama in 2013 said, you know what? How about another 100 million toward a cure over three years?

What? Is that funny? It's just, what 100 million used to be and what it is today, you know. Oh yeah, it just sounds like, sure. Yeah. Just throwing money around. Go get yourself some nice funding.

So we talked, I believe in the first episode about catching it early. There's another story here. Basically how it works now is, you can get diagnosed with HIV and until your T cell count falls below a certain number, you're just like not on any drugs. Like you have to get sick before you get treated

in most cases. Is that right? Well yeah, that was the old, I mean, that's what it says in this thing. Oh, that was the old, the old, I see. Yeah, that was the old guard. I got you, yeah. The new, the bleeding edge, is that right?

No. Leading edge. Okay, the leading edge is quite the opposite of that. Yeah, because they found if you get to it super early, like those first few days and weeks after you get HIV in the bloodstream is when it's most dangerous. Very critical.

Most easily spread. And they found that if people who take these drugs right then are 90% less likely, 96% less likely to pass it on to a sexual partner. Here's why. Again, one of the insidious, pernicious characteristics of HIV infection is that inactive reservoirs build,

which makes it a chronic disease. And again, when you first are exposed to HIV, your immune system can mount a pretty decent defense on its own. Yeah, you don't have those reservoirs just yet. Right, and it's those reservoirs that eventually overwhelm your immune system and can lead to your death.

If you're treated with heart very early on after infection, those reservoirs never have a chance to build. And that infection that you do have is helped with this extra therapy and your immune system can defend against it. And these people feel like time is such a critical essence that at Ward 86, which is a legendary, the United States at least first dedicated AIDS ward,

AIDS clinic at San Francisco General. They're very cutting edge, they've led a lot of treatment programs for HIV and AIDS over the years. But they have this program now where they will pay for a cab for you to be brought from your doctor's office where you were just diagnosed to Ward 86 to be treated right then with heart to begin treatment.

Yeah, as a doctor, a researcher called Hiroyu Hatano. Another hero. Another hero, you're right. And the program is RAPID, which the first letter also stands for RAPID. I know, I don't think that's okay. Well, we'll give it to them. RAPID is the RAPID anti-retroviral program initiative

for new diagnoses. And like you said, basically it's a treat and a test and treat program. Where as soon as you know you've got it, they wanna knock down any obstacle in your way, including that first cab ride to get there and just get going on that stuff so you're not spreading the disease.

So we got more on treatment and stuff like that. And we'll get to it right after this message. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All right, Chuck, there's a group out there running around too who are saying that they are working on an AIDS, or I should say an HIV vaccine. Yeah. You sent me this one.

They are studying what are called controllers, and these controllers, they get infected with HIV It's in their body and they never get sick from it. Yeah, they're called long-term non-progressors or elite controllers. Elite of it they prefer to be called elite controllers. Sure. And they've estimated anywhere from 1 in 200 to 1 in 500 people. They don't think Magic Johnson is one of these people which we talked about. No, he just responded well.

But there was a thought that he might be. And there's a project called the Immunity Project. It's a nonprofit that seeks a cure by setting the blood of these elite controllers, which I don't know why it's controversial, but I have seen that other researchers are saying, like, don't do that. Or it's not going to work or whatever. Yeah, maybe that's it. Maybe they think it's not resourced well. But they figured, I mean, they feel like they figured out what makes elite controllers, what gives them that trait.

Apparently there's some proteins that show these people signal proteins in their body that show the immune system where the best place to attack an HIV virus is. Yeah, it's just genetic. It is, but it's also like it's not like there's something weird with their own cells. It's like their antibodies are specialized to search and destroy HIV viruses, which is weird. But that's definitely who you want to study. Why not? Throw an extra hundred million at them. This other part of this article from Pacific Standards that was interesting,

that was the case of a French girl. She's now 18. She was infected with HIV from her mother during pregnancy or delivery. Immediately started on antiviral drugs, stayed on for six years, and then she stopped taking the medications for almost a year. Usually when that happens is HIV just like really gets going again and it's back on the move. Because of the reservoirs. Yeah, didn't happen in her case. And so she stayed off them and she's been undetectable for 12 years.

So now they're thinking maybe one thing we can do is get people on the drugs super soon and then wean them off of the drugs at a certain point and see if that works basically. Like keeping a close eye on them, obviously not just being like, alright, we'll see you in a decade. Let me know how it goes. Right. I mean, why not? So that's pretty promising too. There's another potential strategy which is called shock and kill, and that is flushing out the particles into the circulatory system.

So is that part of the one we talked about earlier? I think so, the prostratin where it activates dormant HIV cells to get them to attack. I would say if it's not the same drug or the same research group, it's the same principle. Trying to awaken the sleeping beast and give it some big problems. Patient Zero, we teased that in the first episode. I thought this was super interesting. You referenced the book and movie and the band played on by the book was Randy Schultz about the early days of AIDS and HIV.

There's now a book out called Plain Queer, and that is Plain as in airplane. Terrible. Colin, Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendance. There was a man named Gutan Dugas. Gayton. Gayton? Mm-hmm. Oh, is that an A?

Yeah, G-A-E-T-A-N. Okay. Gayton Dugas. He's Canadian Flight Attendant. He's Quebecois. He's Canadian. The people in Quebec just made me a national hero. In this book, basically there was a big fear that this book wasn't going to sell and get

any attention. So, the book publisher- Yeah, because it's like 600 pages of methodical reporting on the discovery of HIV AIDS. And the editor now, or the publisher, has come out and said, you know what? We kind of resorted to yellow journalism by allowing and leaking this supposed patient zero, this gay flight attendant, good-looking guy who was very sexually active. He claimed to have more than 2,500 partners over a 10-year span from the early 70s to the early 80s.

He's flying all over the world. Yeah. He's a flight attendant. Yeah. And they let the story leak to the New York Times, was it New York Times or New York Post? But not only did they leak the story, they really built up or overstated the guy's role as depicted in the book, too. Yeah.

Basically, this guy brought AIDS to the United States, to the North America. This guy is patient zero. I think in the book, he does compare him to Quebecois Typhoid Mary in a way, because he did say, like, I'm not going to not have sex, are you nuts? There are some stuff that this guy definitely did do, and he was one of the early patients. But to lay the AIDS epidemic in America at this one guy's feet is patently unfair. Yeah, and untrue, because he was not the first person. They did trace early on when they were tracing it around the country.

They labeled patients with LA, as in Los Angeles or New York, like LA4, NY3, as what patient number and where they were. And originally, they said that his designation was O for out of California. Eventually that became zero, and he got unfairly pinned with spreading AIDS. He was part of a smallish group, a very traveled, promiscuous gay men that did help spread AIDS, but he was not the reason. He was not patient zero. He was a reason.

He was a reason. Not the reason. Right, but unfairly labeled. But in the end, it ended up bringing a lot of attention to it at a vital time. Yeah, I think that's why they... So it's weird conundrum. That's why the editor of the book is admitting it now, he's saying, like, you know, ultimately it was a good move because it helped bring a lot of attention to this through promotion.

But it was at the expense of this one guy. Right. And he died in March 30th, 1984 of a kidney failure. Very sad. I think we need one more break, correct? Yeah. And then we'll come back and we'll talk about some other celebrities who have helped put a face to AIDS and the AIDS quilt.

Yeah. Let's go back to the beginning of the book and talk about this for the rest of the week. All right, Chuck, we're back. Yes. So you tease celebrities. Yeah. Everybody loves celebrities. Yeah.

Everyone does love celebrities. And someone who is a celebrity who dies of AIDS is no more important than any other person who dies of AIDS. But they are vital to putting a face on things and to getting media attention and basically slapping people in the face who think, well, I can never get AIDS. You know? Easy E we mentioned. Yeah.

It definitely makes people... It gives people pause. I didn't know...I didn't remember that some of these people died of AIDS. Rock Hudson was a big one. Absolutely. Arthur Ashe, I'd forgotten about that. Oh, yeah. Freddie Mercury, obviously.

I was watching... Have you ever seen Queen live in Montreal? I don't know. Maybe. Was he wearing a white jumpsuit? White jeans in the Superman tank top. It's like Queen's famous concert movie. That was on Palladium the other night.

And I've seen that thing probably a dozen times. Every time I'm knocked out. Oh, yeah. Queen was great. And Freddie Mercury was just such a rock star, dude. It was like...and at the time...when I was a little kid, I didn't know what gay was, you know? Sure.

You just knew you liked Freddie Mercury. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I was the same kid who drew the Village People and Crayon and my mom was like, what's going on there? But Freddie Mercury, he still blows me away. What a fantastic, awesome rock star. I wonder how that movie's going to be.

Sasha Baron Cohen's working on it. He dropped out of that. He came back. Oh, he did? Yeah. Oh, man. Back on, baby. Well, I think he looks enough like him and he can do great impressions, but he's just

tall and lanky. So that's the only thing that bothers me. Wasn't Freddie Mercury pretty tall? No, he was a little guy. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah.

Spitfire. So, you know, whatever. It's not like Kristoff Waltz playing a guy from Nebraska and making big eyes. Oh. Did you see that pile of duty? Yes, I did. That movie bugged me so much. Every moment of it.

I'm just a nice man from Nebraska. It was so great. Like, he didn't even try to copy. He didn't try to hide his accent at all. No, he didn't because Tim Burton probably wasn't even on set most of the time. Why? Because he's phoning it in? Yes.

Yeah, he stinks now. I did look up, though, like why in the world did he cast him and Tim Burton because he got some flak for it. I was like, it was more about the spirit of the guy, not that he had a heavy Austrian accent. Yeah. Missed it a little bit. Maybe redo the character a tad, then there's all sorts of stuff you can do.

Or was it Cameron Crowe who cast, what is her name? The White Girl is an Asian character? What? In it, like the most recent, like his most recent movie. Aloha? I didn't see that. Yes. Who?

I can't remember her names. The Redhead? Yes. From Birdman? Yes. She plays an Asian character? Yes. What?

Yes. Really? I'm going to have to look that up. Yeah. Let's go read about it after this. All right. There was the one tangent for the two-parter. Yeah, we got a lot in there.

So back to celebrities who have passed from AIDS, Liberace, of course. Gia. That was another thing, too. Have you seen Behind the Canal Abra? Yeah, great movie. Great. Agreed. Are you going to say Gia the model?

Yeah. Yeah. That was a big one because that was a woman. Hers was from Needles, right? I think so. She's a pretty big heroin addict. Periella's fashion designer. Okay.

Mr. Brady himself. Oh, yeah. Robert Reed. Yep. Great guy. I remember Pedro Zamora from the real world. That was a big deal because I don't remember that. I think each one of these cases kind of opened the eyes of a different segment.

Yeah. And Pedro, he was, you know, MTV's real world before it got really bad. He was one of the, I guess it was the San Francisco one. He helped open the eyes for a lot of teenagers and kids because it unfolded in real time on television. Oh, I didn't know about that at all. Yeah. It was a really big thing.

Anthony Perkins. Yeah. Psycho. Yeah. Brad Davis from Midnight Express. He was straight, but he was a drug user, so that kind of showed a light on that. And then Keith Haring, the artist, Tom Fogarty of Credence, John Fogarty's brother, got it through a blood transfusion.

Man. So, between he and Ryan White. You're right. Like, those are all really different segments. Yeah. And I think, I mean, that's why I'm mentioning them because I think each segment, like, it just shines a light to a different group of people who might be fans of theirs. So, you're saying we're going to talk about the AIDS quilt, right?

Yeah. Are we there? You got any more celebrities? No. I mean, there are more celebrities than that, but we just went through a handful. Sure. The AIDS quilt. So, have you ever seen the movie Milk?

Yeah. One of the main characters, Cleve Jones, is a real-life person, as was Harvey Milk. Who played Cleve Jones in the movie? I don't remember. I want to say it was, like, the dude from Big Bang Theory, but it's not. I've never seen that show. But it looks a little bit like him. I don't really watch it either, but, you know, I'm aware of pop culture, you know what I'm

saying? Sure. So, anyway, Cleve Jones was a guy who was a friend of Harvey Milk's, and Harvey Milk was very famously assassinated by Dan White. Yeah. And you'll hear him. Who you've played him. The Twinkie Defense.

I recognize the guy, but I don't know what else has been him. He was from the Dogtown and Z-Boys movie, and among many other things. Okay. So, Harvey Milk was killed, and in his honor, starting in 1978, I think, Cleve Jones organized a candlelight vigil for him, and George Moscon, the mayor, who was also killed by Dan White. But Harvey Milk was, I think, the first openly gay politician in San Francisco. So he was a gay rights hero, for sure. So to honor his memory, they would hold, Cleve Jones would organize these candlelight vigils,

and at one in 1985, he found out that about, like, more than a thousand San Franciscans had died of AIDS, and he, during organizing the candlelight vigil, he asked people to write the names of those people down on little cards, right? And then he took the cards, he and some other volunteers at the end of the vigil, and posted them on the federal building wall, and apparently, it looked a lot like a patchwork quilt. Boom. And he thought the little light bulb went off his head, and Cleve Jones said, I think we should make a quilt.

Yeah. Because they've been trying to figure out a memorial for people who had died of AIDS. Yeah. I didn't know how organic it was and how it started, and I just think it's such a neat story. That is so cool, Jones. It is. Very cleave.

In June 1987, he, well, the first panel he created, in memory of his friend Marvin Feldman, and in June of 87, he teamed up with a guy named Mike Smith and some other folks to organize the official names project foundation, and they started pouring in these pieces of quilt, these patches, started coming in from all over the country, then all over the world, and in October of 1987, they displayed it for the first of what would be one, two, three, four, five times in its full glory in Washington, D.C. Yeah. The first big deal.

The first time it was the size of a football field. Yeah. The last time they displayed it, Chuck, was when? 1996, with the last time. And it was much bigger, wasn't it? Yes. It covered the entire National Mall. It really drives it home.

Oh, yeah. Well, which is the whole point. Right. Like, look how massive this thing is. It has been on tour. More than a half a million people visited the first weekend, and since then, it's gone on many tours all over the country, all over the world, and has raised a lot of money, I think, so far over $3 million.

Is that right? Oh, yeah, easily. It seems like it would be more than that. Sure. But it says... This is through this one project. Yes, the Names Project Foundation has raised over $3 million. I'm surprised that it's all.

In 1989, it was nominated. The quilt itself was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. That's so cool. And it's still the largest community art project in the world. And if you have not seen the documentary, Common Threads, Colon Stories from the Quilt, you should. Yeah. 1989, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

And it has become a symbol, and it all grew out of that one neat little idea from that candlelight vigil. Pretty cool. Yeah, pretty cool indeed. And the reason they're not showing it in full anymore, I think is because it's too big, which is sad. Yeah. You know?

Yes, it is. Like there's no space large enough to hold it. Yeah. Well, that's not true. You could probably go out to the desert somewhere. Oh, yeah. You know? Yeah, but then it'd get all sandy.

Yeah. You don't want to do that. You go to the beach, you'd spend weeks shaking that thing out. Yeah. It'd be tough. God, I can't imagine like transporting that. Yeah. I don't know how they do it.

They put pieces. Yeah. I guess they may re-sew the whole thing back together every time. I don't think they sew it. They probably just put it together. Oh, I see. That's my guess. I'm not sure.

Okay. I doubt if they fold it up as one piece though, throw it in the truck, you know? Yeah. Well, it would very quickly reach to the moon. Yeah. Have you ever heard that? You know, like you can fold a paper, normal size sheet of paper several times, and very quickly it reaches right into outer space.

Wait, I thought something couldn't be folded more than a certain amount of times. That's a lie. Is it? Was that a don't be done? Yes. What was the number of times it was supposedly? Seven. And this girl in high school, somewhere in like the early 2000s, proved it as possible.

She did over like 11 or something. Oh, wow. But the paper that she used, like went from, you know, paper thin to that after, you know, 10 folds. So she did the math to see after like 20 or 50 folds or something like that, it would hit the moon. After like 120 folds, it would expand further than the visible universe. Wow.

Isn't that cool? And now she volunteers with the AIDS quilt. Yep. Folding it. That's right. You got anything else? Nope. Nope.

I think you're right though. We could have made a whole entire podcast series out of this, right? Yeah. I hope you did a good job. We tried. We definitely did. If you want to know more about HIV AIDS, you should go research that, especially for this AIDS Day week.

You can start by typing the word AIDS in the search bar at HouseOfWorks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for Listen to Me. Yes. And if you are sexually active, go get tested. Yeah. That's a great way to celebrate AIDS Day. No reason not to. Celebrate?

Yeah. Observe. Observe. Yeah. Yeah. It's a little more solemn than celebrating AIDS Day. I think celebrating awareness is okay to say. All right.

Thanks. I know what you meant. Thanks for letting me off the hook. All right. This is going to be called Listener Mail at the end of the HIV AIDS series. Cool. Hey guys. Just recently came across your podcast.

Thanks to a recommendation from Holly and Tracy. Stuff you miss in history class. That was nice of them. Thanks guys. This is one of the most disturbing medical procedures, and I have a story. My husband recently was diagnosed with Meniere's disease. While he was being diagnosed, he was sent to an audiologist. An audiologist took him to a room no bigger than a closet and strapped him into a chair.

The lights were then turned off and the chair spun while the audiologist, audio, logeist, audiologist. Audiologist. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. You had it right. The chair was then, while she asked him questions, the chair was then reversed in direction.

He was asked even more questions. These were basic questions like what's your wife's name, children's names, et cetera. He was even asked at one point to say a boy's name for each letter of the alphabet starting with A and ending in Z. That'd be a fun little test. Zeke. Anton. I found it amusing because you had mentioned in the podcast how the Whirly chair is no

longer in use and you couldn't find anything about it. Well, today it's called a rotary chair and is used to study the workings of the inner ear. I thought you would find it even more amusing after airing that show, how some people are treating the rotary chair as a new invention. Me. So I think Heather here is saying that the rotary chair is the same thing as the Whirly chair.

It's alive and well. Yeah. Thanks, Heather. Yeah, thanks a lot, Heather. And best of luck to your husband. Yeah, he's still stuck in the Whirly chair going David, Elias, Frank. She's like, Frank doesn't count the short for France's start over. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.