The Barbara Mc Clintock Project to Cure AIDS: Act Up’s Detailed Plan for an All Out Research Effort to Find a Cure for AIDS

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3. Is such a facility feasible in terms of the time and money it would take to create?
Existing AIDS research facilities most likely could not physically support the McClintock
Project. More importantly, these facilities do not have the needed equipment for research and
communications, and have no priority for obtaining it. While it will take time and effort to
build the laboratories, office space and communications facilities needed, this can occur in
parallel with the planning and recruiting for the project.
Quick construction is possible: "In mid-November 1942, Los Alamos was little more than a
large ramshackle main house and a group of log cabins set among the poplars just below the
timberline. By July 1945...more than 4,000 people -- mostly scientists, engineers and their
families were living there." The Pentagon, intended as a "temporary structure" was built in
only 16 months. It has an outside circumference of one mile, the world's largest telephone
system, and a staff of 32,000. It follows that physically creating a central facility for
McClintock is feasible within a short amount of time.
Research spending for AIDS in the past decade has been roughly $3 billion. Compared to this,
the Apollo Project cost $94 billion in 8 years, the Osprey (a vertical take-off aircraft)
optimistically budgeted at $22 billion, will more likely cost 3 to 4 times more, and the "Star
Wars" program currently costs $4 billion a year. A fraction of these funds could find a cure
for AIDS.
The McClintock Project would require adequate funding and the same top purchasing priority
that the Manhattan and Apollo projects enjoyed; that is, the Project would receive the first
specialized machines out of manufacturing lines, and would be the first to get the raw and
semi-worked materials it needs. This type of priority can only work for a "project" with an
intended goal, a project which will terminate after the goal is achieved. It cannot be employed
indefinitely by any "institute".
In truth, it is neither feasibility nor cost that is the issue. If the U.S. government could find the
funds for the Manhattan and Apollo projects, and for the war in the Persian Gulf, to "serve the
national interest", it can do the same to find a cure for AIDS, which is most certainly in the
national interest. All that is missing is the will and the vision to make it happen.