IN MEMORIAM: Joseph Sonnabend

[MBBCh 1956]

1933-2021

Pioneering AIDS researcher and clinician Dr Joseph Sonnabend died on 24 January 2021 at Wellington Hospital in London after suffering a heart attack on 3 January.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to a physician mother and university professor father, Dr Sonnabend grew up in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He trained in infectious diseases at Wits and the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh.

In the 1960s, Dr Sonnabend worked in London under Alick Isaacs, the co-discoverer of Interferon (a medication used to treat various cancers), at the National Institute of Medical Research. In the early 1970s, he moved to New York City to continue Interferon research as associate professor at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He later served as Director of Continuing Medical Education at the Bureau of VD Control at the New York City Department of Health, where he advocated for a focus on gay men’s health, particularly programmes to reduce sexually-transmitted infections.

In 1978, he volunteered at the Gay Men’s Health Project in Greenwich Village, New York City and started a private clinic for treating sexually transmitted infections. When gay men in his practice began to get sick, he was among the first clinicians in the US to recognise the emerging AIDS epidemic.

“I wrote to the city health department, asking, ‘Are people reporting this? Am I the only one seeing this? Is there something going on in the city that other doctors are reporting to you?’ he told a BBC Radio 4 programme in 2018. “They didn’t even bother to respond to me.”

The US president at the time, Ronald Reagan, came under fire for ignoring the emerging AIDS crisis and when he finally addressed the epidemic — in 1987 — nearly 23,000 people had died of the disease.

In 1983, Dr Sonnabend founded the AIDS Medical Foundation, later to become the American Foundation for AIDS research, with virologist and philanthropist Mathilde Krim. He resigned as chair of amfAR’s Scientific Advisory Committee in 1985, protesting what he believed was the organisation’s over-hyping, for fundraising purposes, of the threat of heterosexual female-to-male HIV transmission. The same year, he would also prove instrumental in helping to write the first ever safer sex manual for gay men, How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, with activists Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen.

“My involvement has been as a laboratory scientist, as a physician, as a clinical researcher, as a community activist, and as a sexually active gay man. And all these involvements have been intertwined over time, and it has been burdensome.”

Dr Sonnabend also pioneered community-based clinical research, helping to launch the Community Research Initiative (now ACRIA). In 1983 he founded and, until 1986, edited the journal AIDS Research, the first professional peer-reviewed publication focused on the epidemic.

From the earliest days of the epidemic, Dr Sonnabend championed the rights of people living with AIDS. He was particularly concerned by the ethical issues around the AIDS crisis, winning the Nellie Westerman Prize for Research in Ethics with his co-authors in 1983 for the article “Confidentiality, Informed Consent and Untoward Social Consequences in Research on a ‘New Killer Disease’ (AIDS)” in the journal Clinical Research. His work inspired the New York State Legislature to pass the first confidentiality protections for people with AIDS. In 1984, he initiated, with five of his patients and the New York State Attorney General, the first AIDS-related civil rights litigation, suing his landlord for attempting to evict him for treating people with AIDS at his office.

In 2005, he retired from medical practice, moved to London and was awarded a Red Ribbon Leadership Award from the National HIV/AIDS Partnership. In 2000, he was recognised as an inaugural Award of Courage Honoree by amfAR. When he accepted the award he said he had felt “the burden of history.”

“My involvement has been as a laboratory scientist, as a physician, as a clinical researcher, as a community activist, and as a sexually active gay man,” he said. “And all these involvements have been intertwined over time, and it has been burdensome.

“I’ve witnessed so much failure,” he said.

In 2018, at the age of 85, he made his public debut as a composer of classical music, although he had been composing music for years to deal with the trauma he saw as a result of his work. He participated in a concert at London’s Fitzrovia Chapel as part of the AIDS Histories and Cultural Festival.

He was pre-deceased by his sister, Yolanda, the renowned theatre designer and artist. A documentary film, Some Kind of Love (2015), documented their relationship. He is survived by his two sons.

Sources: Thomson Reuters Foundation, Wikipedia, POZ.com