Farewell to AIDS activist Spencer Cox featured in “How to Survive a Plague” documentary

If you’ve seen the outstanding documentary How to Survive a Plague, then you are familiar with Spencer Cox who was among those featured in the film.

Spencer died earlier today at the age of 44 of AIDS related causes.

He was diagnosed with the disease just after graduating from college and he dove into activism. He became a pivotal AIDS activist who co-founded ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and TAG (Treatment Action Group).

Writes How To Survive A Plague director David France: ‘As an AIDS activist, he helped spearhead research on protease inhibitors and played a central role in bringing the drugs to market — and saving 8 million lives. Over the years, he was a frequent and always brilliant source of mine, and a good friend.’

Cox schooled himself in the basic science of AIDS and became something of an expert, a ‘citizen scientist’ whose ideas were sought by working scientists. In the end, he wrote the drug trial protocol which TAG proposed for testing the promising protease inhibitor drugs in 1995. Adopted by industry, it helped develop rapid and reliable answers about the power of those drugs, and led to their quick approval by the FDA.

“You keep going, you keep evolving, you keep progressing until you die – which is going to happen some day,” he says in the final Interview he did with France for the documentary. “You make your life as meaningful as you can make it.”

He certainly did.