Martin Delaney

Martin Delaney was an advocate for HIV/AIDS patients.

In the 1980s approximately 150,000 Americans tested positive for HIV every year and the mortality rate rose until 1995. The disease was the number one cause of death in the United States for people aged 25 to 44. Since then the age-adjusted mortality rate dropped by 70%.

What happened? In 1985 a man by the name of Martin Delaney spearheaded a group called Project Inform. The group sneaked in foreign medications and created their own clinical trials on the medicines which ailing patients eagerly tested, no matter what the authorities said or did. When the higher-ups did approve of the drugs, Project Inform pushed the case that HIV sufferers take part in the evaluations of the drugs' effectiveness. The activist group also hastened the pace for delivering medicine to the needy.

Not only did Project Inform save the lives of an innumerable amount of people, this episode helped foment transparency of medical institutions and made community activism important in the sense that elites no longer had a monopoly of knowledge in their field. You didn't have to get a degree from an ivy league school to know a little bit about what you care about to fight for it.

Martin Delaney died on January 23 of this year.