Professor David Cooper on fighting HIV/AIDS for three decades

In the early 1980s, David Cooper was a young immunologist starting research work at the Dana Faber Cancer centre in Boston.

Blood samples began to arrive from very ill, young gay men in New York. The samples revealed the devastating early effects of the AIDS virus on the body's immune system. 'I remember when my boss was sent some samples, he was absolutely amazed,' says Professor Cooper.

'I thought well, I'm coming back to Sydney to St Vincent's Hospital to a staff specialist job. I know where St Vincent's is. If the key risk groups are the same, which I'm sure they are, then we were going to be seeing it at St Vincent's.'

Sure enough, when Professor Cooper returned to Sydney, the virus was there.

'There were all these young men who had symptoms of what was known as a pre-AIDS complex. This really puzzled us.'

'The usual story was these men had gone to the United States for a vacation, they spent a lot of time in San Francisco, often going to the bath houses. The next part of the vacation was getting over it with a week in Hawaii on the beaches of Waikiki.

They came back and said, "My holiday was ruined because I had this awful viral infection that knocked me for six while I was on the beach in Honolulu."

'By the time they got back to Sydney it was all over, they were infected.'

Professor Cooper and his colleagues went to medical practices on Oxford Street in Sydney and enrolled a number of young men in a study. The results led to Professor Cooper's pivotal paper in The Lancet, which described HIV's initial encounter with the human immune system.

Meanwhile, Professor Cooper's ward at St Vincent's Hospital was filling up with young, dying men. 'It was completely devastating and we just couldn't keep up,' he says.

'They were extraordinary people. I remember Michael Kirby coming to the ward to visit a friend who was very sick and this friend said to Michael, "If I had known the rules, I would have obeyed them."

'That really rang home to me. People didn't really know how to protect themselves.'

As director of the St Vincent's AIDS Unit and the head of Australia's national HIV research centre, Professor Cooper threw himself into the crisis, and his family came with him.

Fighting against the stigma and prejudice associated with the virus in the early days of the epidemic, Professor Cooper and his daughters became Mardi Gras regulars, dressing up as pills fighting the virus.

'They were teenagers at the time and all their friends from school came to watch,' he says. 'It was terrific.'

Friendships were also forged—a key collaborator was Dr Brett Tindall.

'He was admitted under my care at St Vincent's Hospital. He was very sick with the illness. He was a medical student at the University of Newcastle at the time and once he learned what he had, he worked with me from 1985 until he died of AIDS in 1994. He was seminal is doing some of our prospective studies and cohort work.'

'I still do my clinics twice a week. I talk to patients, particularly those who just made it to get the triple therapy, and we talk about the people who didn't make it and maybe missed out—like the late Brett Tindall—by a year or two.'

Professor Cooper says being Jewish perhaps helped him relate to his patients and the stigma they faced. As a 15 year old medical student at the University of Sydney, the value of life was never taken for granted.

'There were a lot of Jewish kids in the medical school ... I think that my values were very much formed around these young people whose parents were Holocaust survivors—we were Jews, we were different, and we were persecuted because of that.'

'I saw the same sort of thing in the vulnerable patient populations that we dealt with.'

In the space of three decades, HIV has become chronic manageable disease, treatable with one pill once a day. People with the virus can have a normal life expectancy.

'That is a modern medical miracle,' says Professor Cooper.

'The advocacy from the gay community—they really pushed government hard to do something, particularly in the United States. If it wasn't for the gay community I don't really think we'd be where we are.'

Professor Cooper has also been an influential figure in the fight against HIV/AIDS in the developing world. In 1996, he and his close friends, Professor Joep Lange and Professor Praphan Phanuphak, the head of the Thai Red Cross AIDS Research Centre, established a joint research centre in Bangkok called HIVNAT. Their common goal was preventing HIV from taking hold in Asia the way it had in Africa.

'The N is for Netherlands where Joep was my opposite number, head of the national HIV research centre, the A for Australia and T for Thailand.'

Professor Lange and his partner were among the almost three hundred people killed when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down on the Russian-Ukraine border.

Professor Cooper says he is determined to carry on Professor Lange's legacy, and continues to support the centre's work in South East Asia.

Sunday Profile features major players in Australian life, with background information and detailed analysis complementing in-depth interviews.