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The Current Transcript for March 6, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: I am not here to quarrel with the former attorney general. What I am here to do is to give evidence that what happened last fall is in fact very different from the version of events you heard last week.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Gerald Butts, former principal secretary to the prime minister, speaking this morning as he began testimony before the Commons justice committee. After weeks of controversy over allegations from Jody Wilson-Raybould that she faced consistent and sustained efforts by Trudeau government officials to politically interfere in her decision as attorney general to allow criminal charges to proceed against engineering giant SNC-Lavalin. This testimony is still unfolding and we will give you the highlights and the insights in just a moment. Also today, the London patient, an HIV positive man appears to have had the virus eradicated from his system after a cancer treatment. It's only happened once before with this man the Berlin patient.

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VOICE: Yes I would like to meet hte London patient very much. It's been very useful for science and for giving hope to HIV positive people.

AMT: But is it a cure and how accessible or safe would it be? In an hour, we'll hear both the celebration and the concern over this issue. And her mom became famous for fear of flying, the early 70s feminist novel that sold 20 million copies worldwide. Erica Jong's daughter, Molly Jong-Fast grew up in the glare of that fame. Her own life wound into other novels, not to mention too much information about her parents' sex life.

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VOICE: So she had said oh he had a Menage a Trois and I was like tell me with who and she was like, I can never tell, I will never betray the trust of images that get stuttered out.

AMT: Hear Molly Jong-Fast on a mother-daughter relationship. Her generation's long literary lineage and even gonzo journalism. That's in half an hour. But let's begin with another day of details in Ottawa. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Contradictions in Butts' testimony may mean Wilson-Raybould testifies again: former diplomat

Guests: Rob Russo, Norman Spector

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VOICE: When you boil it all down all we ever asked the attorney general to do was to consider a second opinion. I am not a lawyer, but I have extensive experience in government. When 9000 people's jobs are at stake, it is a public policy problem. It was our obligation to exhaustively consider options the law allows.

AMT: That is Gerald Butts in front of the House justice committee in Ottawa. He is speaking right now and questions are being asked of him. For over an hour, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's former principal secretary, a position he held until his resignation two weeks ago, has been giving his side of the story on the SNC-Lavalin scandal. The CBC's parliamentary bureau chief Rob Russo is with me from Ottawa with the latest. Hi Rob.

ROB RUSSO: Hello Anna Maria.

AMT: What's standing out for you so far?

RR: Well if I was going to take one headline is there are significant contradictions between Mr. Butts testimony and that of Jody Wilson-Raybould and that means that I can't see how they can not recall Wilson-Raybuold how they can not call Jessica Prince her chief of staff, based on some of the testimony Mr. Butts has given. That means this issue will endure if Liberals were hoping that Mr. Butts testimony would begin to smother this, to contain it, I don't see that. I think that there are more questions to be asked. Based on the answers that he's given to questions today and based on his statement as well.

AMT: So he's kind of doubling down.

RR: Yes I mean on the fundamental question of whether or not he pressured her, no pressure. And not only that, as the principal secretary and in effect as the prime minister's distant early warning system, he said that he saw no signs of pressure from Ms. Wilson-Raybould. She never communicated that to him. A significant contradiction based on what Ms. Wilson-Raybould said last week in that she suggested Mr. Butts personally pressured her chief of staff. A key point of testimony when he said her to Ms. Prince, her chief of staff, there is no solution here that does not involve some interference. Denied that flatly.

AMT: He said he didn't, yeah. He doesn't remember ever using the word even solution. You know Rob something else, I mean he says at no time did Jody Wilson-Raybould suggest that there was political interference to him. But Jody Wilson-Raybould testified that she actually did suggest that to the prime minister, the clerk of the Privy Council and the Minister of Finance. Why would she have to tell Gerald Butts, if she's telling his bosses?

RR: Well that's a key question. If Ms. Wilson-Raybould had communicated that a decision had been made, why was this discussion ongoing? And according to Mr. Butts, he said that he had no written evidence of a final decision and that for some strange reason he required written evidence. And the first time he said that he ever got inkling that this was a problem with Ms. Wilson-Raybould was when she told the prime minister that this was probably the cause of her dismissal as attorney general. She believes she was fired and he said that he was floored by that. Again, if I were on the opposition side, I would ask question, what is the logical series of events that leads to your conclusion that because there is an absence at the treasury broad, in other words because Scott Brison has left, I need to move my attorney general. They still have not provided anything beyond. Mr. Butts saying we needed somebody very good in Indigenous Services and there is no logical coherence there.

AMT: He says it was just a simple plan for a small tidy shuffle. I guess that was then and this is now.

RR: It seems like a logical non sequitur. However he did take us inside the sort of back rooms of cabinet making and he said all of a sudden he told the prime minister he had a problem because not only did Ms. Wilson-Raybould say you're demoting me, but I don't want Indigenous Services, I want something else. And at that point there was a fateful warning from Mr. Butts, according to his testimony, he said if you give in to a cabinet minister who is asking to choose her own assignment then you will lose control of your cabinet and in some instances that's what's happened.

AMT: He makes another point. He acknowledges it was and is the attorney general's decision to make on whether to allow criminal proceedings to go ahead against SNC-Lavalin, but then he said you know Canadians have to live with the decision that is made and more than once, I lost track of how many times he said 9000 jobs will be lost in the phraseology, innocent people will lose their jobs. What's is that the spin? What are we hearing there?

RR: Well certainly SNC-Lavalin was making noises about leaving. Again I've been there for all of the testimony, but I have yet to hear somebody say what makes you think they were serious about going to the UK to London in the middle of a time when the UK is in essence erecting an economic moat around itself, walling itself off economically from the rest of Europe. The other thing that people have begun to ask him is if it's true that this decision has been made, why would you need to tell Ms. Wilson-Raybould that she needed a second opinion. He revealed for the first time officially that they had asked Beverley McLachlin, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court to come in and give them an opinion on whether or not a deferred prosecution agreement with SNC-Lavalin was an acceptable way to proceed. In other words, they were trying to use the formidable imprimatur of the former chief justice, a woman who has a great deal of prestige across the country to try and influence the decision or at least present her with another option. Why was that necessar if a decision had already been made?

AMT: And of course we have to remember that one of the top lobbyists for SNC on this file is another Supreme Court justice former Frank Iacobucci.

RR: Yeah and look, if were an SNC-Lavalin shareholder I would say yes absolutely, go ahead and do this. Yes hire Frank Iacobucci, another man everybody believes to be impeccable and unimpeachable character. So did SNC-Lavalin do their job? In some ways yes, they mounted clearly an impressive lobbying effort that convinced people at the highest levels of government, including the prime minister, his principal secretary, minister of finance, that there was a serious risk of SNC leaving. So did they do their job? Yes, but to quote Michael Wernick, it didn't actually go ahead. The question we don't know is why it didn't go ahead. Is it because there was one principal cabinet minister in Jody Wilson-Raybould who became an insurmountable obstacle to that going.

AMT: I want to bring in someone else who has been watching this testimony this morning. Norman Spector has served as the chief of staff to former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney. He's also of course a former Canadian ambassador to Israel, a former publisher, newspaper publisher. Norman Spector is joining us from Victoria. Hi.

NORMAN SPECTOR: Good morning Anna Maria. Good morning Rob.

RR: Great to hear from you, Norman.

NS: Like-wise.

AMT: So what's standing out for you as you watch this so far Norman?

NS: Couple of things. First of all, to pick up on Rob's point, Jody Wilson-Raybould testified that she informed the prime minister on September 17 that she had made a final decision on this matter. Gerald Butts is saying the first he heard of it is around the time of the cabinet shuffle. So there's a huge discrepancy there. Did the prime minister not advise his staff? Did that the decision was final? Why were they continuing to meet? Second point on that is Gerald Butts just gave a quite remarkable interpretation of law. According to him, the meetings and pressure is appropriate until there's been a verdict in the case. In other words, even if the prime minister had told them that the decision was final, there's no such thing as a final decision until the verdict. That's quite an extraordinary interpretation of the law. It's not one that I've heard before.

AMT: It's interesting because he's also made the point that this is a new law. This is the first time it would be used, the deferred prosecution agreement. And he's actually using that as an argument for why they needed to bring in someone to provide Ms. Wilson-Raybould for advice. He actually used the phrase he had to get a seasoned eminent person to input to Ms. Raybould and he says he's not a lawyer, but you heard his interpretation of that law.

NS: It is a new law and I think frankly there is room to bring in a Supreme Court justice because where people have overlooked are the grounds on which the public prosecutor made the decision not to enter the agreement. There's just one report that is in the Toronto Star, according to Ms. Rousselle, it was the provision in the Act that prohibited from entering into a mediation agreement in the national economic interest. She's actually responded to the SNC court chllenge, but his explanation for why they needed an agreement, that it's a new law, Ithink is a pretty bad explanation. If it was a new law, you'd think they wouldn't have slipped it into an omnibus bill, it would've encouraged a lot of discussion had all these matters ired out before the law was passed into law.

RR: And the other thing on Anna Maria on that that might give us pause is that Ms. Wilson-Raybould also said that if needed, if justification was needed for a change and a decision to give SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement that the PMO would arrange for op-eds to appear in newspapers. So when you take that into account that was apparently from Katie Telford, one wonders if they were trying to use the prestige of a former chief justice in order to get a result that they already wanted. And I'd also be curious in hearing from Norman something that astounded for me that there was no sense according to Mr. Butts that the prime minister was completely caught unawares that Ms. Wilson-Raybould was unhappy until he was told by Jane Philpott of all people. That to me was astounding, particularly from somebody who was supposed to be that distant early warning system for a prime minister.

NS: Well that's right. It's not just Gerald Butts, I mean there are people that are liasing with the caucus all the time, there are other staff in the PMO. I thought that was quite a remarkable statement as well that nobody in the PMO knew, that Jody Wilson-Raybould never complained about the pressure, but somehow Jane Philpott knew about it and knew about it to such a degree that when she was called by the prime minister to be advised about her new portfolio and the prime minister shared with her the information about Ms. Wilson-Raybould she told the prime minister that Ms. Wilson-Raybould may see that as connected to the SNC-Lavalin affair.

AMT: I've got a clip I want both of you to hear. This is Lisa Raitt asking Gerald Butts a question. This goes to the whole issue of rule of law and the place of public policy when it comes to criminal prosecutions. Here we go.

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VOICE 1: Are you aware Mr. Butts that political considerations are not to be part of decision making for the attorney general.

VOICE 2: Absolutely. Absolutely.

VOICE 1: So why would the prime minister's office then condone several conversations including the prime minister himself, bringing these elements into your discussions with the attorney general?

VOICE 2: Well I think there's a gray area in what you think is a political consideration.

AMT: OK well Norman Spector, what do you think of that?

NS: What he means by gray area is 9000 jobs, but there's nothing grey about Mr. Badar I think who is alleged to have said we have to get elected and there's nothing the prime minister who is alleged to have reminded Ms. Wilson-Raybould that he's the MP for Papineau.

RR: I thought it was remarkable that he did not deny that those statements were made and if so it does seem to lend credence to the suggestion that this wasn't done for jobs it was done to secure the electoral prospects of the Liberal Party in the province of Quebec.

AMT: It's interesting too that he continued in that answer, he said to Ms. Raitt, you and I are from the same place. He talked about Cape Breton. He talked about imagine if we were children and the mines were closed and we found out that the government hadn't looked at the decision for more than 12 days, imagine how we would feel.

NS: Well I mean there is a point to that, but it's really not relevant to this case. I used to be the head of Enterprise Cape Breton in the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency as well, so I'm pretty familiar with the economy of Cape Breton and a mine closure there truly is devastating.

AMT: I don't think anyone is doubting that, I think it's just interesting. I mean what are we seeing Norman, in terms of he has stepped away from the PMO, but what are we seeing in terms of the signalling of where the prime minister is going to go with the argument?

NS: Well that's a very good question because you know we've seen all kinds of headlines this morning that he was preparing an act of contrition. But as Rob said from the beginning, there are so many contradictions now between what Mr. Butts testified and what Ms. Wilson-Raybould testified that I can't see any thing other than calling her back and calling back some of the other people whom she named in her testimony before the prime minister can even attempt to bring closure to this affair.

AMT: Norman Spector as someone who has worked in the PMO, do you have any, I'm just interested in a little more of your perspective on those inner workings, those backroom conversations.

NS: One thing I can tell you is that I had occasion to instruct the attorney general, the minister of justice on behalf of the prime minister. It was in connection with the Milgaard affair where Kim Campbell brushed off the mother of David Milgaard asking for a review and the prime minister was confronted by the mother in Winnipeg and he directed me to call Kim Campbell, tell her he wanted the case reviewed and I did that. And she wasn't happy. I don't think it was interference in the sense that you know nobody told her who was to do the review and certainly nobody told her what the outcome was to be, but that ended quite happily. I'm one who does not believe that the attorney general is you know completely to be completely isolated from cabinet and from the government and from the needs of the prime minister. If we want to do that we can do what the Brits have done, which is to separate the attorney general and minister of justice or even better what the Israelis have done, that their attorney general is not even an elected official, it's an appointed official who had served on the Supreme Court or is otherwise of unimpeachable integrity, but has no political considerations. But we've not chosen, we've essentialy baked in political direction into our public prosecution system. We have the same system here in British Columbia. It's worked pretty well, but that is a choice that we've made and then you have to be very careful about the norms and the conventions about just how far you go in making your views known to the attorney general.

AMT: Okay well we're almost out of time. Norman Spector what do you want answered?

NS: I would like answered the contradictions between the testimony of Ms. Wilson-Raybould and Gerald Butts specifically, whether anyone was told about the fact that she had made the final decision.

AMT: Rob, what kind of questions do you have as you watch this?

RR: Well I can tell you right now that in the PMO they are calibrating how this is going and they're trying to make their decision as to what comes next. What is the prime minister going to try to do to contain what is clearly a staggering blow to his government. And I'm not sure that there was anything in what we heard today that is going to help him do that, so I'm looking to see what he's going to do to try and put this behind him, if he can.

AMT: And of course Gerald Butts is still testifying, I'm just seeing on the screen there, but we've got the clerk of the Privy Council and the deputy minister for the attorney general also scheduled to testify, do we not Rob?

RR: We do,. Mr. Wernick and Madame Drouin, the deputy minister in justice is up and she has a critical question to answer. Is it true according to what Ms. Wilson-Raybould has testified that she was told that the first conversation that the prime minister is going to want to have with the new minister is going to be about SNC-Lavalin?

AMT: And why is that significant?

NS: She has another critical question. On the front page this morning that she was in agreement with the idea, Madame Drouin herself was in agreement with the idea of seeking an outside legal opinion.

AMT: So all of these are questions to ask when we can get close to them to ask them. Thank you both of you for weighing in on this.

RR: My pleasure.

NS: Very welcome.

AMT: That is Rob Russo, CBC's parliamentary bureau chief. He's in Ottawa. Norman Spector served as chief of staff to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. He's a former ambassador to Israel for Canada as well. He joined us from Victoria. Stay with us the news is next. And then we're talking about an unorthodox upbringing. Writer Molly Jong-Fast looks back on growing up the daughter of Erica Jong, the famous trailblazing author of the 70s classic, Fear of Flying. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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Yazidi children escaping ISIS don't recognize relatives, have forgotten language: reporter

Guests: Jane Arraf

AMT: This is The Current on CBC Radio One. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti.

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Sounds of warfare in Iraq.

AMT: The thundering sounds of warfare around the village of Baghouz, just a few miles inside the Syrian border with Iraq. It's been under attack for a while off and on, this is the place that has been called the final enclave of ISIS. And as the occupants stream out, including another reported five hundred fighters yesterday. The obituaries for the Islamic State are being written around the world, but for many of the lives touched by this militant group the story is far from over, including the many Yazidis, primarily women and children, who have been held captive by ISIS for years, sexually brutalized or forced to be child fighters. Jane Arraf is an international correspondent for NPR National Public Radio. She's been covering Syria and Iraq for years. She was in Sinjar in Iraq as some of those Yazidis arrived home. We've reached her today in Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. Hi Jane.

JANE ARRAF: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: What can you tell us about the situation in Baghouz and the latest fighting?

JA: So they've had to pause the fighting and as you've seen in the history of fighting ISIS here basically their strategy is to use air strikes, artillery, mortars essentially bomb them until they're gone. But because there are civilians there they have paused that, so now civilians have been coming out. And when we say civilians, we mean generally the wives and children of ISIS fighters, but also many Yazidis, the ancient religious minority who have been held captive.

AMT: Is there any estimate of how many people are still inside in terms of fighters?

JA: It's really hard to determine. It's a very small area. It's an active village in eastern Syria just across the Iraqi border and the first thing they're saying essentially it's just the size a couple football fields, but now they've said that there were 5000 people there last week, which prompts the question how could you have that many people. So the numbers are undetermined, but what we do know is that 500 of the ISIS fighters surrendered. Presumably, there are at least several hundred left. And one of the issues Anna Maria is that they're not just in a village, they're in tunnels underneath. That's where some of the captive Yazidis were being held for instance. They're hiding in caves. So it's not immediately clear how many there are, but at least a few hundred and they're clearly going to fight to the death there.

AMT: Many of those who have left have ended up in one particular refugee camp. What's it like there?

JA: Well the International Red Cross has said it's absolutely horrendous. They've said there are 45,000 people there now and it's overcrowded, desperate. There isn't enough food, there aren't enough agents. There are people who are injured, including children and people are very very afraid. It's an incredibly complicated situation because this is a combination of women and children who are part of ISIS families who still believe in the caliphate and ISIS ideology. They presumably have captives with them and they most certainly have children who never had a say in this. All of them to varying degrees, apart from the captives, are considered a security threat. So this is not a normal camp. But in addition to that camp there are others springing up as well because there are so many people around Baghouz.

AMT: And you mentioned the Yazidis who had been held captive, some have gone back to Sinjar across the border in Iraq. Can you describe what that journey is like for people trying to get back to Sinjar?

JA: Well it's extremely traumatic as you might expect and the trauma isn't so much the journey, it's what they've suffered. So five years ago, ISIS came in to Sinjar in northern Iraq, which is the homeland of Yazidis. ISIS decided that Yazidis were infidels and they engaged in a campaign of genocide, which means it massacred possibly at least a couple of thousand people and they took 6000 people hostage, including women and children. The women they held as sex slaves becayse they said that was permissible religiously in their interpretation of religion. So these women who have been coming out, some of them have been held for five years. I spoke to one woman who's 26, whose husband was executed, who had been married three times and by married that basically means repeatedly raped. There are boys who are coming out, one of them was 13-years-old who had been one of many many child fighters. He was being trained on other guns to kill Yazidis, his own people. So they're coming out of that into a very different environment. Some of them don't recognize their families. Some of the families don't recognize them because the children were very young when they were taken. This is just seemingly a never ending tragedy.

AMT: So when they get back home, what they find is not what they expected.

JA: It's very hard to know what they expected because the best case scenario is they've been in a bubble for five years. You know some of them have been beaten, many of them have been raped. Some of the children have been with families who made them forget their original language Kurdish, who made them forget their original names. So it's extremely disorienting. I saw a couple of the kids, one of whose mother is in Canada in Calgary and he was sitting in a corner. He was playing with a phone that someone had given him. He wouldn't make eye contact and that's the case with a lot of those kids. And the problem is they're coming back to immense poverty. The Yazidis are still in camps. Five years later their villages are essentially destroyed. There are almost no services for them. So it's a very tough environment to come back into.

AMT: Jane you were there as they were arriving back? Tell me a little bit more about how they were greeted and what they were telling you.

JA: So when they were freed from Sinjar they were freed in a couple of ways. One is the ones who were freed earlier and have been waiting in Syria to return to Iraq were bought back. So ISIS has been selling them as captives. After a while that stopped a static read you could no longer buyU.S.D. slaves let them leave the territory. So they've been coming back as part of that goose had been freed. They've been held by the PKK which is a Kurdish Turkish. They've been welcomed by the PKK the boys I talked to said they were treated really well. Then the PKK essentially doesn't let them cross across the border until it has enough of them to go in a big group. So when they come across there are lots of relatives who have come to this remote white on the Syrian Iraqi border to meet them. It's both joyous and bittersweet because a lot of these children vertically don't recognize their relatives. A lot of them don't realize that some of their relatives have been killed. Some of them are the only survivors from entire families. They go to the camps in Kurdistan. That's where the liveliest of the welcomes are because even those these Edhi families who haven't had their children back or their sisters or wives back see hope and these ones coming back in their room as it comes back is a joyful thing. So many of them have been missing.

AMT: You know there's been a lot of discussion about the fate of the so-called ISIS brides, the women who went to join ISIS and married fighters. What do the Yazidi women coming out of those situations think should happen to those other women?

JA: That's really interesting because as we've seen a lot of the ISIS brides have said they made a mistake, they didn't know what they were getting in to. Every single woman, every single girl who has been held captive who I've talked to has come back from ISIS and said women were almost as bad as the men. So essentially they were repeatedly raped by the men and then because of that oftentimes their ISIS wives would beat the Yazidi women because they had been with their husbands. They all said these people should suffer what we suffered. They should have no mercy. They should in fact be killed. And fortunately they believe that's what should happen to the children as well because they said as long as ISIS children are alive, ISIS will never die. It's a very grim picture.

AMT: There are an estimated 3000 Yazidis who are still missing and unaccounted for. Where could they be?

JA: So I talked to one of the Yazidi smugglers who is in touch with ISIS fighters. They have actually faciliated getting Yazidis back. He's basically bargained with them to buy back some of the Yazidis. His impression is that a lot of them have been taken to Turkey with ISIS famiilies. Others have then trafficked to Europe. There are credible reports of an organ smuggling ring based in Turkey. He believes a lot of them have probably died in airstrikes. In fact I've heard from some of the children who came back just last week that they knew other Yazidi children who were killed in airstrikes in Baghouz and some of them and this gets way more complicated, some of them have been with ISIS so long that they don't know that they have a home to come back to. They've been to all their relatives will kill them if they come back. Many of them now have children with ISIS fighters and generally they're not allowed to keep the children when they come back. Some of them want to keep their children. Some of them were just physically unable to free themselves from the grip of the ISIS families that they're with.

AMT: You know as I listen to you talk about this, it's just so horrific that like lives completely upended if their lives even exist anymore and so much pain.

JA: Incredible. And the most shocking thing is few years ago I covered the Yazidis coming down from Mount Sinjar where they fled after ISIS came in and they were living in makeshift camps and they were living in construction sites and five years later it's really not much better. When I was in Sinjar a few days ago there had been a spate of suicides where young people were killing themselves because they have nothing they can't get to schools there's no aid there there's only one functioning hospital now and they're terrified still. The tragedy is just incredibly compounded. I mean genocide is an unimaginable tragedy of course to begin with and then after that to come back to have their very survival in question is even more grim.

AMT: You know there's so much talk about the end of the caliphate. How will the average person in Syria and over that border in Iraq actually be affected by this?

JA: It's really the defeat of the territorial caliphate. So we think back to 2014 when ISIS came head in they had in Iraq for instance, entire army divisions collapsed and in places. So ISIS was able to grab a lot of armored vehicles. They actually were able to take over a third of Iraqi territory. Huge amounts of weapons in Iraq and Syria. They were all over millions of people. They had all the trappings of a state tax collection. They had their own ministries you can still see the remnants and places like Mosul where they were driven out of Mosul and they were driven out of Mosul at the cost of destroying the most historic part of the city before they left and a lot of them fight to the death. You can see still sprawled on walls. The Islamic State remains. So it's smart to see that because the ideology is there. That's a concern here. I mean schools many schools many a forum which is conference of government leaders and Iraqi leaders are incredibly worried that there is still an ongoing threat through sleeper cells through a high in the mountains along the desert and more than that. A lot of people are worried because you have the situation of Isa's families there are hundreds of thousands of them here and they're not being reintegrated into society the children aren't being rehabilitated. They're second counts. They can't go to school they're not allowed to go back to their villages. There has been no reconciliation. So a lot of people feel all of that is sowing the seeds for a new form of ISIS.

AMT: Wow, there's so much to ask officials about this as we move forward. Jane thank you so much for your insights and your work.

JA: Thank you.

AMT: Jane Arraf is a correspondent for National Public Radio, international correspondent. She joined us from Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. Stay with us. The CBC News is next and then an unorthodox upbringing. Writer Molly Jong-Fast looks back on growing up the daughter of Erica Jong, the trailblazing author of the 70s classic novel, Fear of Flying. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Why Molly Jong-Fast wrote about the sex life of her famous mother, Erica Jong

Guests: Molly Jong-Fast

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come you'll want to hear what we're doing in about half an hour. It's been over a decade since the so-called Berlin patient was cured of HIV. Now researchers say they have done it again. The procedure involves stem cell transplant, but can we really call it a cure for HIV? In half an hour and we're going to hear more about how it works and we're going to also see just how optimistic the world should be at this latest news. But first, her mother's daughter.

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VOICE 1: I get the information from exploring my own dreams and my own fantasies and from trying throughout a lifetime of wanting to be a writer to become aware of myself. I don't believe that a writer is different from other people. A writer merely has the gift of language, but the fantasies belong to everyone and a writer is the conduit for everybody's fantasies. And so by exploring myself, by writing as honestly as I can about my own feelings, I can tell the truth about other people's feelings.

VOICE 2: What do you feel about men?

AMT: Well that's the novelist Erica Jong in 1975 on NBC's Tomorrow show with Tom Snyder discussing her novel Fear of Flying. That novel sold more than 20 million copies. It became a touchstone of the sexual liberation movement. It also made Erica Jong a very public symbol of the time. Her life and loves became fodder for the gossip pages and that was the world that her daughter Molly Jong-Fast was born into. Molly also grew up to be a writer with two novels and a memoir under her belt and in the latest online edition of The New York Review of Books she reflects on growing up the daughter of Erica Jong and the granddaughter of the Communist novelist Howard Fast. Molly Jong-Fast is in our New York studio. Hello.

MOLLY JONG-FAST: Hi.

AMT: First of all listening to your mom there, I'm wondering what you're thinking. It was kind of rude. Tom Snyder just cut her right off.

MJF: I can't believe how much my mother sounds like a person from the 1970s in that clip. Like even her accent sounded weirdly like that sort of accent of that 1970s intellectual you know the way her speech was. I just thought it was really interesting and yes he totally cut her off. But it's so of the time, like listening to that is like being transported back in time. It's so strange.

AMT: And it is so telling us that as she's giving this intellectual response, he just wants to know what she thinks of men.

MJF: Yeah exactly.

AMT: So remind us how big a deal Fear of Flying was when it was published in 1973.

MJF: Well I was negative 5. So I don't know how you know I wasn't there and I don't know what life pre the sexual revolution really was. I mean it's interesting to me because my mom would always tell me stories of what it was like going on book tours for Fear of Flying and how in the 70s, I mean she would always say that she would go downstairs to have dinner in these hotels and feel so uncomfortable and so worried that people would think she was a prostitute because a woman eating alone was sort of not done then. And I think of that, I mean I'm sure it was occasionally done, but it wasn't the norm and I think of that in the 1970s is just such a strange, I mean it's only 40 plus years ago, but it feels like a different century.

AMT: And of course that's talking about going to a restaurant, that's not talking about what she wrote about in the book. I mean you know somebody, one of my producers actually said to me and he's younger than me, is it fair to say it was the Fifty Shades of Grey of it's time and like I was a teenager. There was much bigger than Fifty Shades of Grey.

MJF: I mean Fifty Shades of Grey was my mom would die if you compare Fear of Flying to Fifty Shades of Grey because she was you know she had almost PhD in English she was very kind of academic and thoughtful person so she really bristled at the comparison to Fifty Shades of Grey, but at that time absolutely. You know at the time there was nothing like it and the things she did and I think it wasnt just the sex because if you look back on it, I think it was also just women really going out there and doing what Henry Miller had done, what Norman Mailer had done and what Henry Miller had done and what men and you know what men had been doing. To be able to do it as a woman I think was almost more dirty.

AMT: What was it like growing up and coming to understand your mother's writing and what it represented?

MJF: You know it's again this idea that no man is a hero to his own valet. We would go places and these women around her age would come over to her and look at her in this bizarre way and say do you know what you did for me. And they'd look at me and they said do you know what your mother did. And I would be like I have no what you're talking about.

AMT: How old would you be at that point?

MJF: Just continuously there always, this woman would come over to me and say, do you know what she did for us. And also they would know a lot of stuff about my life, which was incredibly strange. You know they'd say you know because one book my mother made me twins and the'dy say so where's your twin, where's your twin and I don't have a twin. You know it was very, it was a confusing way to grow up, but it was also I think had I had a different personality it would have been really terrible, but for me because I had a pretty outgoing personality or not outgoing, but I had a personality that was not dissimilar to my mother's in a certain way, I was able to I didn't mind. You know I found it bizarre, but then I sort of adjusted to it.

AMT: Your mom had an open marriage with your dad, but you didn't see it that way, you didn't know that.

MJF: Well you know again and my grandparents all had open marriages. I'm not sure that my dad knew it was an open marriage. You know I think there's open marriages and then there's promiscuity. I'm not sure of those two things are the same. In hindsight every one of them says they had open marriages. My grandparents though are still married whereas my parents did not. What is your interest then. You know don't now I mean I think that you know my mother said Oh we had an open marriage didn't you know and I think they cheated on each other but I'm not sure. I think you know history has a funny way of cleaning things up.

AMT: What's it like for you to write about your parents sex lives?

MJF: You know their sex lives are hilariously awful and 70s ish and I wouldn't have written about it if I didn't feel so particularly hilarious and strange and 1970s ish.

AMT: You write about a threesome they had with a woman you said looked like M.C. Hammer.

MJF: Yes. Well the thing I somehow got my mother was like is terrible at keeping secrets. I mean like amazingly bad at it. So I had said to her, so she had said oh we had a Menage a Trois and I was like tell me with who and she was like I could never tell I will never betray the trust of and then she's like it's da da da. And I was like this woman is so unattractive. I was like I look at pictures of you two and you're attractive, I was like why are you having sex with this terrible looking person. And so I started making fun of them for it. I mean you know the thing is when you have a family where everybody is just doing it and saying stuff I have felt very comfortable making fun of them and luckily for me they you know I mean my father is sort of a private person though his father around him a lot. But you know with my mother I've been able to write about her and she's been very very nice about which I appreciate.

AMT: And she wrote about you so I guess.

MJF: Yeah I mean she's yeah it's good that she, but you know it doesn't always work that way sometimes.

AMT: Yeah, so how has that shaped your life though. I mean you are the daughter of one of America's sexual liberation gurus. How has that shaped who you have become?

MJF: You know I got sober when I was a teenager and so I think some of that I think that was sort of the largest influence. You know I came from a legacy of alcoholism and dysfunction but you know I was very bourgeois for a long time and you know I still am in a certain way. I got married when I was 23. I had a lot of children. I think some of it was having Erica Jong as a mother. Some of it was just having these you know this parents who got divorced and then had endless custody battle and you know so it's hard to know what was why is harder past what happened there but you know the thing that I think from my mother that I got the most was I knew what it was like to have people say bad stuff at that. And so I was sort of better able to handle it when it came for me.

AMT: You said you got sober as a teen.

MJF: Yeah I got sober when I was 19.

AMT: So how long were you, were you alcoholic

MJF: Alcoholic, I did cocaine everything. I was like pretty much in my depths of addiction from about 13 to 19.

AMT: And what made things change for you?

MJF: You know I had one of those moments where I'd just realize that I was that I just had no place to go you know I was walking, it was like one of those nights where it was like four o'clock in the morning and I'm walking around the upper westside and I'm thinking to myself there is no place I can go. There is no I have no place to go. And it was as profound moment and so I end up going to rehab and it got me sober and you know I'm a member of AA and it's been 21 years and it's been probably, it definitely saved my life.

AMT: You started young.

MJF: Yeah. But yeah it's not so unusual. And in fact there are a lot of people who are sober in their teens, in their early teens and I think it's important to talk about because when I got sober I thought I was the youngest person ever to get sober and in fact that's not true at all.

AMT: And worth knowing that for people struggling with at that age. You said that you were lonely, why?

MJF: Well I think it's divorced parents when I was 3 years old and I had this very you know I just think it was an only child with divorced parents and there was a lot of dysfunction. I think that it was a very lonely childhood, but I also think you know there's something about when you have super successful same sex parent who really belongs to the world that is very lonely.

AMT: Cause she's not just yours.

MJF: Right and you she real and you know when you're that, yeah it's not yours.

AMT: How many kids do you have?

MJF: I have three.

AMT: And when you look at your own kids, what does the little girl inside you see?

MJF: It's interesting you know I had had enough therapy and sobriety to know not to relitigate my childhood with them like you know not to want their childhood to want them you know want to punish them because I had this very lonely childhood or to try to make them feel grateful that they didn't have out you know. I try not to bring my childhood into it but I look at a light and I think about my childhood and think about what it's like to grow up how different differently and why it's good that I'm able to stop this. You know to sort of stop some of these apparent but it's also just interesting. Now the thing I do do that's really bad but also hilarious is that when they're really complaining because you know the great thing about kids is they really don't care. How old are they. They're 15 and to 11 so they'll they'll say you know you'll say anything to them and they'll be like oh you know the worst about you know you're you know they're you know kids don't care about your feelings. And so but I do sometimes is the older one also you know you would not last a day and my child you would die to my child. So I think it's funny but do you read about down. You know I have not finished this Bach yet so I dont know I probably read about them a little bit but not in too much detail because they really have a choice to make about whether they want to be public people or not. And even though that the pendulum has shifted and all of us are slightly more public then we were in the 1970s you know because of social media. I dont know what they whine and I dont necessarily want to make that dceision for them. I know one of them really wants to go into politics, so that one will probably be I'm just going to try to be careful because you know part of me hopes that they'll be private people and not public people because I think it's a really kind of a tough way to live.

AMT: I want to talk to you about another part of your literary lineage. We're going to play you a clip. This is from the 1960 movie, Spartacus.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Slaves you were and slaves you will remain, but the penalty of crucifixion has been set aside on the single condition that you identify the body or the living person of the slave called Spartacus.

VOICE 2: I'm Spartacus.

VOICE 3: I'm Spartacus.

VOICE 4: I'm Spartacus.

VOICE 5: I'm Spartacus.

AMT: Molly Jong-Fast your paternal grandfather Howard Fast wrote the novel Spartacus in the early 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism. He worked on that movie. What does that novel say about your grandfather and his politics?

MJF: It's so interesting because I'm rereading his memoir and it's so interesting. In his early life he was obsessed with oppression you know the oppression of African-Americans oppression of the poor the oppression racism oppression the way that society was so unkind to such a great portion of America. And I think that for sure that shaped everything that he did and in fact when you see all these historical novels they're really vehicles to express his rage towards oppression which is interesting to me. So he did all these different historical novels from different historical period as a way to try and fight oppression. You know he he used to stay at their house a light because I was very close with his wife who bore the brunt of a lot lot lot of him cheating on her. And this "open marriage" and every morning around 6:00a.m. you would hear him on the typewriter 5:30. And I actually have the typewriter, but you could hear him in the morning on the typewriter and he was really a fiend. You know he'd sit there and I don't know anyone else in the writers of my life who sat down every morning five and just write for like five hours you know he would write like he was working in a factory. He would just sit there and write over it. I don't think as much as he got into his late 80s, but when he was in his early years, he really was obsessed with trying to right the wrongs of oppression in society.

AMT: What would he make of American politics today?

MJF: He would be enraged. I mean I think of that anger he had toward Bush one. I can only imagine what he would have thought of Donald Trump. I mean first of all his snobbery and you know he came from poverty and he never graduated college but the idea of this enormous oranage reality television star of becoming the president of the United States would have just killed him. And then the regressive policies I mean I think you know he would have been so horrified by the regressive policies. I don't think he would have known what to do and the racism and the neo nazi stuff and alt-right stuff. I don't think he would have been able to tolerate any of that.

AMT: You know I know last week you were at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington speaking of politics. What was that like for you?

MJF: You know what's interesting about it to me was I didn't know, I knew it was bad. I knew there was a lot of that had gone very very Trumpy and I knew that it had always sort of been a little bit provocative and had sort of drawn from the kind of famous MAGA people, but I was not prepared for the level of which there was just so much repetition. You know I got there Wednesday I sat through that sort of Wednesday to mid Sunday afternoon by about the week when I left. Trump was head you know was an hour into the speech and he pointed to the doors and he said this is a good idea because no one's left as an advocate but he said something of is good to be true as you see no one's life now that I have to get out and try and go home and I thought I could just leave and I got up and I left and it was like this singular moment of my experience.

AMT: I noticed that you did write I lost three and a half days of my life so you didn't have to to your readers.

MJF: Yeah. I mean it was interesting and I am not as you know I don't mind conservatives. I have a lot of conservative friends. I enjoy the other side. I love you know Im not. I dont shun them, but in the same sense you know there's only so many times I can be told the Democrats are baby killing harlots who want to take away your hamburgers before I realize that these are not serious people.

AMT: Speaking of taking away your hamburgers. I have a clip I'm going to play for you because you tweeted a picture of former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka and this is a bit of his speech.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about, but never achieved. You are on the frontlines of the war against communism coming back to America under the guise of democratic socialism, which is just the PC term for communism. I want everyone to take to heart Donald J. Trump is never going to let it happen and as he said to Congress, America will never be a socialist country.

AMT: What do you make of that?

MJF: He's just totally ridiculous. I mean he is not a serious person. I enjoy him because he's so flamboyant and strange, but I mean he's just going to say anything and say and Democrats want to take away your hamburgerss. I mean what I thought was interesting was 2006, Democrats want to take away your guns. 2019, Democrats want to take away your hamburgers, like I'm sorry guys we don't want to take away your hamburgers. Like that is preposterous. What I love about Dr. Sebastian Gorka and I use doctor in quotes is that he is such a self-parody and he is so hilarious and he does have this incredible booming speaking voice and he wears these ridiculous outfits and he has this British accent and he I mean you should at the beginning of that speech was him talking about summering in France. I mean he's so pretentious and yet he's speaking to this crowd of people who believe that he is going to bring back you know he is involved in this organization that's going to bring back coal jobs.

AMT: Where are things going? Do you see a way in the future where those kinds of people will not command so much attention and there will be some kind of I don't know a reconciliation of the very disparate views in American politics?

MJF: I hope so. I mean what's interesting to me and I've been writing for this conservative outlet that's a like never Trumpy, very sort of intellectual group and they have got and that has gotten me in a lot of trouble. Even though you know I'm a Democrat, I also write for The Independent and a bunch of other places, but I've been writing for these guys who are very smart. Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes are very very very smart. And I have a lot of respect for them because when their party went crazy they laughed. And so I think the fact that the intellectuals have completely abandoned the MAGA movement, I mean there is literally no more. There are no, I keep saying people tell me a MAGA intellectual because I want to know and there are no intellectuals in the MAGA movement anymore. They have left. So that makes me think that the MAGA movement is in a lot of trouble. And I think what's going to happen is that the MAGA movement is going to have to separate and the real smart conservatives are going to have to start their own thing because there's no room for them. You know there's no room for them in the GOP echo chamber that is this constant Democrats want to murder your babies, want totake away your hamburgers. I mean there's no place for smart thought in that world. There's nothing.

AMT: So where do you go from here?

MJF: I hope, I mean I love doing the gonzo journals. I love it love it love it. I love going to weird places and writing about how insane they are. I'm finishing this memoir, I'm writing this memoir now, but I also really want to do more gonzo journalism so if you're, if anyone wants to send me to someplace crazy I am all, I am game for it.

AMT: Molly Jong-Fast, it's great to talk to you. Thank you.

MJF: Thank you for having me.

AMT: Molly Jong-Fast is an author and contributor to the online publication The Bulwark. You can read about her and her family in the online edition of The New York Review of Books. She joins me from New York City. What do you think? You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Molly Jong-Fast, daughter of Erica Jong. All those millions of copies sold of Fear of Flying back in the 70s. Coming up in our next half hour it's been one of the most sought after medical cures for decades. How close are we really to a cure for HIV though after this week's news that a second stem cell transplant patient is now HIV free. We're looking at the celebration and the concern. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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As 2nd person declared HIV-free, advocate says finding 'functional cure' is key

Guests: Dr. Darrell Tan, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Ron Rosenes

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I believe when you look at my cure, you're really taking a glimpse into the almost 35 years history of this pandemic, the hopes, the dreams, the defeats and victories, the tears and in some cases the times when all you could do is laugh uncomfortably.

AMT: That's the voice of Timothy Ray Brown speaking in 2015 and the cure to which he's referring is a big one. In 2007, he became the first patient to be cured in air quotes of HIV. Now researchers say they may have achieved that feat again. According to a study published in the journal Nature, a second formerly HIV positive patient no longer shows any signs of the virus following treatment. While the results are promising, we're being cautioned not to call it a cure officially because the unnamed patient known as the London patient, was actually undergoing a risky procedure for cancer, which appeared to eradicate the HIV virus as a side effect. There are still many questions in the HIV research community as to how much this means for the future of treatment. Dr. Darrell Tan is one of the many HIV AIDS researchers at a conference in Seattle, Washington where these findings were presented. He is a clinical researcher at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. He's also an associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and Dr. Darrell Tan is in Seattle today. Hello.

DARRELL TAN: Good morning.

AMT: Maybe we should start with just what happened with the London patient who appears to have been cured of HIV?

DT: Sure, I'll do my best to try to explain it in a way that that can be sensible to people. This is an individual that we heard about yesterday who was living with HIV for over a decade now and had been doing well on his HIV treatment. But then he unfortunately developed another medical condition, a serious one, Hodgkin's lymphoma at stage 4, which unfortunately then failed chemotherapy a number of times and so the next line of therapy for that condition which is life threatening very serious is to undergo a type of stem cell transplant like a bone marrow transplant so that that was undertaken. And what's interesting is that the donor for that bone marrow is someone who had an uncommon but well recognized genetic mutation that actually confers resistance to acquiring the infection. Another piece of backing information that's very important to understand what happened here relates to you know the very reason that HIV is so difficult to cure in the first place although we have very effective treatments for HIV that that get rid of it in the bloodstream where it's constantly displaying otherwise HIV is very sneaky and it leads to hide in certain cells in the body. Uncertainty cells in particular memory use are as we call them and the fact that it hides in those cells makes it very difficult to make it impossible up until this point more or less ticks Europe because each of the virus hides in those cells in it it can't really be accessed by the usual medications that we use to treat the rest of the HIV that's including in the body. And so in this interesting case what happened was that because a part of the treatment that this person received for the Lymphoma the bone bone marrow or stem cell transplant that he underwent effectively gets rid of the person's prior immune system that all of their to you Soledad kind of wiped out by that. That includes that kind of reservoir of HIV that's generally so hard to get at. And because the new born there or a new set of immune system effectively the person received was resistant teacher the person had already been on treatment for the HIV for so many years that combination of factors essentially led to the person having what we're now calling sustained remission for over a year and a half.

AMT: Okay. And we heard the voice of Timothy Ray Brown. He's called the Berlin patient. Is that similar to what happened to him 12 years ago?

DT: Yeah very much so. There's a lot of parallels between the two cases that got I think the general scientific community here pretty excited about these findings. You know in science we often we always look for things to be reproducible to see that you know something can happen more than once is really a sign that it's not a fluke that it's something you know real in air quotes if you will and the fact that we've got pretty much the same principle at play here leading to this resolve albeit you know at a very different stage in the game for these two cases it is certainly very encouraging.

AMT: So as an HIV AIDS researcher, how are you processing this?

DT: You know I think it's something that I would classify as something to give us cautious optimism. You know we're not quite dancing in the streets here in yellow today but it's certainly again the fact that this was reproduced at that first case of Timothy Brown about 10 years ago it wasn't a fluke really suggest that you know we're onto something here and that we really need to continue to exploit the biological mechanisms that we do more or less understand that led to this result in order to work towards achieving a cure for other individuals.

AMT: Now I just want to clarify as well that the donor in this case for the stem cell or the bone marrow, they already knew that this person had that mutation that would actually do something to an HIV, would not allow HIV to actually lock into a cell. Like there are a couple of people going through this, they know this is possible.

DT: That's right. So it's a very well characterised genetic mutation. It's something called the Delta 32 mutation in this gene that has the name CCR5. We've known for many many years that the existence of this mutation could render somebodies T cells effectively immune to HIV because that change in this molecule on T cells called the CCR5 receptor, that change causes HIV to be unable to enter those cells, if it's the type of HIV that uses that receptor.

AMT: So there are I think more than 30 people who are sort of going to be recipients, but not all of them are seeing this, am I right? Or we just don't know yet?

DT: We don't we don't have a clear sense around the world of how many times this type of approach has actually been tried in this type of clinical scenario. That's I think very valuable information that we need to better understand and that was pointed out yesterday during the Q and A session after the presentation. But certainly the fact that you know you do see this more than once does suggest hey we're onto something here we need to continue to try to exploit this mechanism in the future.

AMT: And is this this kind of transplant, is it an easy thing to do?

DT: Unfortunately it's certainly not and it's definitely something to emphasize Anna Maria. To undergo the sort of treatment is really something one only does one absolutely has to it was absolutely required in order to try to address serious Hodgkin's lymphoma and other types of it's often used or other types of blood cancer is the key means as well. It in itself is not only extremely costly but it has a lot of other risks and complications potentially associated with it as well. So this is certainly not a strategy that we would kind of literally apply to other individuals were living with HIV and even in this case for example this was you know after already failing several lines of standard chemotherapy for that Hodgkin's lymphoma.

AMT: So in your estimation how close or how far are we from something like a cure that would be relatively available to people who are HIV positive?

DT: You know that's the million dollar question and I wish I had a crystal ball beside me to look into, but I don't. I mean I think there's lots of very bright groups around the world that are aggressively pursuing this line of research and have been for many years. This again is a signal that here is an opportunity that we can explore further. I hesitate to put a number on it I think. I think we can we can be cautiously optimistic that you know that it may happen during my lifetime it would be amazing but I think it's very challenging to say because you know we've been trying awfully hard for an awfully long time already and unfortunately it's a very challenging virus to eradicate for many complicated reasons that we still only personally understand.

DT: You're at a conference with thousands of leading researchers. What's the overall mood in response to this?

DT: You know I think many would probably share my my assessment of the situation. Again you know there is there is always applies after the presentation there were not hoops and hollers. People ask very appropriate and intelligent questions, people are very encouraged by this. You know the feeling means there are lots of other brilliant researchers presenting other relevant findings at this conference and I think we need to keep our minds open our ears open and keep our nose to the grindstone as well.

AMT: Okay well Darrell Tan thanks for taking the time out from that conference to talk to me.

DT: Thanks very much.

AMT: Dr. Darrell Tan, he's a clinical researcher at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. He's also an associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and he is in Seattle today. My next guest cautions against reading too much into the case of the London patient. Dr. Anthony Faycu is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. In that capacity he's advised five presidents on HIV/AIDS, along with other health issues. He's played a key role in developing our understanding of how the virus works and the kinds of treatments for it. Anthony Fauci is in Bethesda, Maryland. Hello.

ANTHONY FAUCI: Hello.

AMT: So we just heard some guarded optimism from my last guest. What's your take on these findings?

AF: Well I don't disagree much at all with what Dr. Tan said. The issue at hand really is the proof of concept that this represents vs. hopefully not a misunderstanding that bone marrow transplant as a procedure will be something that would be a viable approach to curing HIV. Then there is the part that I have skepticism but I totally agree withDr. saying that the proof of concept means that this receptor of the CCR five receptor that when you have it normally the virus binds to it can replicate in the body. When you were genetically born without that intact receptor your refractory to HIV infection. So the thought of if someone is going to need a bone marrow transplant for another reason in this case the patient needed it because he had a Hodgkin's lymphoma very quickly is a reasonable approach to do a bone marrow transplant with the patient's need any way to get it from a person who has this genetic defect so that the virus can't replicate. That is good and that proves the concept that the field of looking at how we can modify CCR5 in a non-risky scalable way is certainly a way forward. However doing it with a bone marrow transplant as Dr. Tan clearly said is a risky procedure that you always have to balance the risk of thatvs. having someone be on a medication that has minimal tomato toxicity that clearly has been shown to effectively suppress the virus and prolong the lives of individuals. So I think we have been good here that it's the proof of concept, but we need to be careful that we don't mistakingly think that a highly risky procedure would replace one pill a day to suppress the virus.

AMT: We should point out that the Berlin patient, the man we heard from there, he actually almost died with the procedure.

AF: Exactly. It is a risky procedure. The risk is clearly worth taking when it's done in conjunction with trying to cure the. For example the Hodgkin's disease that this patient has. The patient head stage four Hodgkins, failed chemotherapy and required a bone marrow transplant. So that was absolutely the right thing to do. But you don't wanna do work in a situation when it's not absolutely necessary when you can have something else. But having said that the idea that this is yet again another confirmation of the concept that CCR5 is really important that is the advance in this case and that's what gives us the cautious optimism.

AMT: Well and Dr. Fauci, you make the point that it's dangerous and risky because there are so many people who are now able to live and be active and be HIV positive, in terms of treatment and prevention, how far have we come?

AF: Well I think this is one of the great triumphs in in medicine in general and certainly in HIV medicine because you know those of us like myself and many of my colleagues when we were taking care of patients in the very early 1980s, we had no therapy and the life expectancy of people with advanced disease was about a year at the most. Now we have combinations of drug which can actually be given in a single pill with three types of HIV drugs in a single pill that if you give it to someone who is let's say early in their 20s and they come in recently infected and put them on therapy and the majority the overwhelming majority of individuals you can projected that person could lead essentially a normal life span not quite about a 50 plus year which would put them in the range of just short of a normal lifespan. That is a phenomenal advance in the therapy of this disease. So from the standpoint of where we've been with HIV clearly the treatment of HIV infected individuals has been one of the great triumphs. What we need to do now and we should not forget. We need to focus on getting people who are not on therapy but who are infected. We need to make sure they have access to an availability of therapy. That is the challenge right now, whether it's in the developing world or even here in the United States we have disparate populations who don't have very good access to therapy and that's what we're trying to remedy.

AMT: It's also worth pointing out I remember we had done a story on the fact that a doctor in China had done a gene mutation on embryos and two twin girls were born and he was actually, he was working on the CCR5 mutation. He actually made sure that that was the hope, we don't know if it worked, that he actually did a gene edit that would affect that protein.

AF: Yeah he did it. It certainly was focusing on the receptor, but it was an unethical experiment because the reason for doing it was not justifiable. I mean he was trying to modify the germ line of the ultimate fetuses in babies so they wouldn't have the receptors to protect them from being infected later in life with HIV. Well there are a lot more less dangerous ways to protect yourself from being infected with HIV. Plus the babies were not infected. So that's an experiment that generated an awful lot of pushback.

AMT: Absolutely it was very controversial, it's just interesting that it's the same protein.

AF: Right exactly. Right receptor, wrong reason.

AMT: Yeah. Well it's so interesting to talk to you about all of this. Thanks for your time.

AF: Good to be with you.

AMT: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the US National Institutes of Health. He's in Bethesda, Maryland. Now the story of HIV AIDS research is one of many discoveries and advances in both the identification and the treatment of the virus through the 80s and 90s and many scientists have been part of that journey. In 2008 Francois Barre-Sinoussi from the celebrated Pasteur Institute in France was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Luc Montagnier. She helped discovered the human immunodeficiency virus in 1983. We have a clip of her in an interview with the conversation describing one moment she'll never forget.

[sc].

Clip of interview with Luc Montagnier.

AMT: There you go. Ron Rosenes has been listening and he has a personal stake in HIV research. He is a community health advocate and researcher who's been living with the virus since its earliest days, almost 40 years now, and Ron Rosenes joins me in our Toronto studio. Welcome back.

RON ROSENES: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: What did you think when you heard this news about the London patient?

RR: Well I was thrilled to hear that our previous guests mentioned that this scientific approach is reproduceable or replicable and that it does give us hope with regard to this direction of research. You know what hasn't been said and I think is interesting is that cure-related research for HIV has really gone along two tracks and one track has been to find, or seek to find, a cure that would eradicate HIV from the body. And as the previous speaker said this is an extremely daunting task regardless of how far we've come on our route in a relatively short period of time and the progress we've made. So that avenue. I noted that when they talked about the Berlin patient and the English patient that nobody is talking about eradicating or an eradicative cure. They're putting it into the category of a functional cure.

AMT: Yeah.The other phrase they use is long-term remission.

RR: Right and this is the preferred terminology these days they're referring to remission so you know the early excitement around Timothy Brown has given away given way to a more practical and I think realistic approach to curing HIV and one that's of great interest to me and I think should be to people that are living with HIV today and that's around and that is of course around a functional cure and how we understand a functional cure as the ability of the body to mount its own immune response in a way that would enable us to coexist with the virus and not have to take drugs which by the way really is the future of treatment.

AMT: And Timothy Brown I should point out, I was reading last night, still takes one pill a day just to make sure like as an added protection against HIV AIDS.

RR: And I do think we want to be cautious as well about how we view whether or not there are any DNA fragments related to HIV still in his body and that we take the time to make sure that you know there is no more evidence or traces of HIV in his body.

AMT: We were talking about this CCR5 and the Delta32. And you have the Delta, it's called the Delta32 mutation? Is that what we call it? What is it?

RR: I do in fact time. I'm a mutant, Anna Maria. I discovered through some theoretical research in which I was in you know as a participant in the 1990s my blood was drawn in an effort to grow some of these CD4 for memory cells protected immune cells in a petri dish and then to reason fuse them into my body with the hope that the cells that were being taken down by the virus could be replaced and regrow in my body. Well that research failed to provide a good result. But in the meantime they discovered that I had the delta 32 mutation. But here's the thing. There are two forms of it: a double mutation and a single mutation. So the understanding is that if an individual who may in fact -- and people can read up about this -- may have genetically been through the bubonic plague. Im not kidding and have developed as a result this double nutation of the delta 32 that they would have conferred immunity to HIV. In my case my blood was found to have a single mutation of the delta of 32. It is thought that my ability to withstand the onslaught of the virus has had a protective factor and enabled me to live as long as I have and with as much health as I have.

AMT: In other words it even though you have it might have been more severe without that mutation?

RR: Much more severe.

AMT: That allows you to do that. And it's interesting because that's the work they're doing now. This is a mutation found mostly in people in Northern Europe apparently. You mentioned the bubonic plague so that again that's some a little bit of evolution .

RR: Exactly.

AMT: But that's where the Bubonic plague was so prevalent in Europe. And so could you have imagined in 40 years, you've seen so many people die and then you've seen so many iterations of drugs and you've seen real advances. Did you imagine in the early days that you could be talking about it forty years later?

RR: Never, never and you know I do often think that I do the work to honor all of the friends that I have lost and I am very passionate about it and I've always done my best to follow the science so I am now a member of a number of different research teams including the Ken cure grant which is major funded grant looking into aspects of cure research and I never would have imagined it. Despite being able to say that we have made relatively enormous progress in a short period of time but I am someone who began treatment in the late 1980s when the first drug available was AZT really a drug that in higher doses proved toxic for many people. So I've seen the evolution of therapy and I see it today in interesting ways. I believe that the evolution and I know my colleagues would agree that we are now moving towards injectable forms of HIV treatment. So the thought is that within the next two to three years we may be able to treat patients on a monthly basis you could have one injection so instead of taking pills 365 days a year whether it's even or only a single pill that you might be able to have a monthly injection, so that would reduce your, you know, treatment moments to 12 per year and that's likely to extend. So that's why I personally think that we are wiser to view the treatment advances that we are making, together with the research to eradicate the virus, as a continuum. And I think that we are really seeing the evolution of treatment that will take us towards the place of what I would again describe as a functional cure.

AMT: Ron Roseness, it's good to get your perspective on this. Thank you.

RR: Thanks for inviting me.

AMT: Ron Roseness is a community health advocate living with HIV and he's with me in our Toronto studio. Let us know what you think of this conversation. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. Q Will revisit Tom Powers' conversation with the author, Zadie Smith. Finally let's just stay on this topic for a minute. Rami Malek's Oscar-winning portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody has raised the profile of the late rock singer and his band Queen to a new generation of fans. It's also brought more attention to the Mercury Phoenix Trust, the HIV AIDS charity organization that the surviving members of Queen created after Freddie Mercury died of AIDS-related causes in 1991. So we'll leave you today with some music from Queen and Freddie Mercury. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Song: "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen]

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Mar. 6, 2019 episode transcript

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