A genius for activism.

• Author: Blanchard, Bob
• Position: Treatment Action Group Policy Director Mark Harrington; MacArthur Award for AIDS activism

Winning the MacArthur Award hasn't changed anything in my daily life," says Mark Harrington, the thirty-seven-year-old co-founder and policy director of the Treatment Action Group (TAG) in New York City. The MacArthur Foundation gave one of its $246,000 "genius" grants for outstanding creativity (a stipend payable over five years with no strings attached) to Harrington and his group for advancing knowledge about AIDS treatment. Founded in 1992, TAG functions as a watchdog over AIDS research. It monitors what the government, drug companies, and medical researchers are up to.

Harrington's office is the living room of his apartment in New York City's East Village. "It creates a little bit of tension when you want to come home and just relax, and your fax goes off," says Harrington. "There's no separation between home and work; sometimes you wish there was My apartment is not that different from what it was ten years ago when I wasn't doing this type of work. It hasn't grown up as much as I have."

Harrington got his start as an AIDS activist with ACT UP in 1988. "Some friends were beginning to get sick--people were dying--and I really didn't know what to do to help them," he says. His academic background was not in science. As an undergrad at Harvard, his main interests were critical theory and literary history. "I was excited by Foucault and some of the German thinkers from the Frankfurt School. I immersed myself in reading texts about social change and the dynamics of power. When I started with ACT UP, a strong subtext for me was applying some of those lessons."

ACT UP showed him how effective a little agitation could be. One recurrent side effect of AIDS was eye infection. A drug to treat this infection had already been tested but was not yet available. ACT UP did some demonstrations, and the government approved the drug far ahead of schedule. This helped save people's eyesight. A few months later. ACT UP pressured the government to get out a drug called DDI for about 15,000 people. At the time, DDI was an alternative to AZT, the only approved drug for the AIDS virus Again the government gave in, and this helped prolong people's lives

These early activist experiences opened Harrington's eyes. He had discovered his calling. Then in 1992, along with a group of friends from ACT UP. Harrington founded the Treatment Action Group. It split off from ACT UP because of continual infighting about how best to approach the research world.

"There were...