Something was happening on the research front.

A few weeks before Sean and his friends got arrested in Albany, two articles and an editorial appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine. New research pointed to a correlation between viral load and disease progression.

Standard and innovative lab techniques were used in the studies. HIV was cultured. Centrifugation spun out the blood. Titers were measured out. Cultures monitored. A process of dilution was implemented - uniformly, incrementally...

These researchers were exploring how to measure viral load in a patient, which they felt could help their understanding of disease progression and also lead to quicker ways of testing drug efficacy. Doctor Ho, et al, concluded in one article, "It should be possible to use this quantitative culture technique to monitor the anti-HIV effect of other chemotherapeutic agents in vivo...." And Dr. Coomb, et al, reported, "Plasma viremia appears to be a useful marker of disease progression, and is a potential marker for evaluating the response to antiviral chemotherapy."

Many activists were excited by this news. Some didn't really notice it. Some would debate the matter, eventually, but not for a couple of years... and when they did debate it, they did so with each other even more than with the Establishment.