MAKE UP SEPT 2007


T H E S O U T H E R N A F R I C A N J O U R N A L O F H I V M E D I C I N E                               S P R I N G 2 0 0 7 7

It was in 1983 that I received a call from a man named Ruben
Sher at my rooms in Jeppe Street in Johannesburg. We had
spoken once previously when he was doing research on
hepatitis B prevalence among gay men, and he was now
contacting me about the mysterious ‘gay plague’ that was
hitting gay men in America. It was a
simple, straightforward call. He was
pursuing his doctorate in virology, and
since I had a large gay practice, he asked
if I would help him conduct a prevalence
study, collecting bloods and medical
histories of many of my patients. We
began the study, not certain exactly what
we meant to be looking for. But two
years later, when a commercial test did
become available, we found that over
12% of the subjects were, in fact, HIV-
positive.

Ruben took this news as he would any
other piece of distressing medical
research: a thoughtfully furrowed brow,
a slight shake of the head, following by a
soft, exasperated ‘Acch’. It was not so
much the action of a steely-eyed researcher. There was an
instinctive empathy, a sincerity, that preceded the inevitable
rolling up of the sleeves. The call to get down to business; to
get back to work.

Ruben was neither a fiery activist nor a hardened political
creature, but somehow he managed to inhabit both of those
worlds. One has to remember that back in the early ’80s, the
HIV community was divided into two camps: the stone-jawed,
Robert Gallo politicos on one side and the angry,
confrontational ACT-Up gays on the other. While I tended to
fall into the latter, myself HIV-positive, Ruben couldn’t
understand all the fuss or lack of co-operation. ‘Let’s just get
down to work,’ he would persist, half-frustrated. ‘Let’s just do it.’

And do it he so often did. During those years, Ruben would
drag me into the halls of the Walter Reid Hospital in
Washington or to some top-level research conference, his

hand outstretched like a battering ram to the likes of Gallo, Luc
Montangier, and others. He had what I would often call an
‘aggressive affability’. He was humble, everyone liked him, but
he clearly wasn’t there to score points. Ruben always had an
agenda – sometimes large, sometimes to clarify a simple issue

that confounded him. I remember back
in 1985 going with Ruben to a research
lab in Bethesda, Maryland (I can’t recall
which), where he simply dropped in, as
for tea, and announced that he ‘really
could use some HTLV-3 culture’. The
researcher, clearly off-footed, handed
Ruben a test tube sample, which he
carried back to South Africa – and right
through Customs – in his shirt pocket.

As artless as all this might seem, Ruben
never ruffled any feathers. He used
common sense and humility where
others would confront or manoeuvre. To
Ruben, it didn’t matter if it was a gay
issue, a black issue, or a rich/poor issue.
The facts were clear. People were getting
ill. People were dying. There was no need
to argue. What do we do now?

Upon Ruben’s passing, many in the media have christened him
‘Mr AIDS’. It’s one of those dual-edged distinctions, particularly
when for nearly 20 years it brought him more derision and
frustration – from an unmoving government and, at times, his
own medical colleagues – than respect. At the same time,
there’s a strange tradition in the medical community:
watching an elder colleague as the science progresses and
proclaiming, in hushed tones, that they’ve somehow ‘lost it’. In
looking at Ruben’s slides from the ’80s (yes, slides, no
Powerpoint), it’s clear that in his simple educational message –
condoms, test, treat – Ruben really never lost it. It’s a message
that’s just as urgent and relevant as ever, a chilling reminder of
how far we have to go and how much we still have to learn.

DENNIS SIFRIS

T R I B U T E

REMEMBERING RUBEN SHER

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