A playwright. A bond trader. A college dropout. A teenager. These are the people who walked into the FDA in the late 1980s and early 90s and came out having redesigned how drugs get approved in America.

This is Part 2 of "How Queers Saved Modern Medicine," and it focuses on the activists who didn't just protest, they taught themselves virology, pharmacology, and clinical trial design in their living rooms. Then they sat down with the scientists, argued with them, and won.

Spencer Cox was one of them. He was nineteen years old, had dropped out of school, and was working odd jobs when he joined ACT UP and started reading everything he could find about HIV treatment research. Within a few years he was helping redesign the parallel track system for drug trials, an innovation that allowed people with life-threatening illnesses to access experimental treatments while trials were still ongoing. That system is still in use today. It helped speed the development of cancer drugs and COVID vaccines long after the activists who built it were gone.

Mark Harrington. David Barr. People who refused to accept that expertise was something that belonged only to people with the right credentials.

This is what radical intelligence looks like in service of survival.

Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/4_ThEj30aIQ
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