Breakthrough

IMPURE SCIENCE
AIDS, Activism, and
the Politics of Knowledge.
By Steven Epstein.
466 pp. Berkeley:
University of California Press. $29.95.

At the battleship-sized headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration, Oct. 11, 1988, is still remembered as the day Act Up scaled the walls. More than 1,000 demonstrators, many in Washington to view a display of the AIDS quilt, marched on the building in suburban Rockville, Md., to protest the policies of what Act Up and other radical AIDS groups then called the "Federal Death Administration." The AIDS activists were angered by the slow pace of drug approval; among patient-advocacy groups they were not alone in this view, but they were louder than the others.
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