Arrests, Pleas Mark Opening of AIDS Talks : Health: At least 75 protesters are taken into custody. Conference chairman calls for patience and cooperation.

SAN FRANCISCO —  The international AIDS conference opened here Wednesday as activists rushed police barricades outside the Moscone Convention Center and researchers inside pleaded for respect for the scientific method and a recognition of a common purpose unifying scientists and patients.

Dr. John Ziegler, a UC San Francisco professor of medicine and the conference chairman, called for patience and cooperation among protesters and researchers. While crediting AIDS activists with impressing upon researchers the urgency of the epidemic, he beseeched them not to disrupt the scientific dialogue.

“You ask, ‘Where are the treatments? Where is the vaccine?’ The scientific method seems frustratingly arcane and the progress painstakingly slow,” he said. But, he added, “In our haste for answers and solutions, however, we cannot compromise the scientific method. There are no shortcuts to new knowledge.”

“To the scientists and clinicians, I ask: Listen to our patients,” Ziegler said. “. . . To the persons with HIV infection and their advocates, I say, welcome. We hear your message. . . . But please respect the scientific process and do not obstruct the flow of information. The scientists and activists share a unity of interest. Our common enemy is HIV.”

As of early Wednesday, about 9,500 delegates and 1,500 journalists from 121 countries had registered for the four-day conference. The registration fee is as high as $550. One hundred agencies and community organizations are boycotting the meeting to protest U.S. restriction on travel by foreigners infected with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus.

During the two-hour opening ceremony late Wednesday, organizers and speakers wore red armbands protesting the federal immigration policy. Activists complained bitterly that President Bush had turned down an invitation to speak, instead attending a fund-raiser for North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, the author of the immigration restrictions.

Outside, the demonstrators, demanding free access to the conference as well as access to new drugs to fight the disease, surged forward into a wall of about 80 helmeted and mounted police. At least 75 protesters were arrested.

Those arrested were cited for interfering with a police officer. The arrests continued for about an hour as new activists filled the gaps left by those loaded into jail buses. “I have HIV infection and I want action,” said Patrick Leach of San Francisco, as he was being taken away. There were no reported injuries.

Inside, Peter Staley, a member of the activist group ACT UP/New York invited to speak in the ceremony, criticized what he described as federal researchers’ failure to explore AIDS drugs other than AZT. Staley also cited the documented underrepresentation of women and minorities in federally funded experimental drug trials.

“Can we all, before it’s too late, begin to understand each other?” Staley asked. “Will we realize that we share similar motivations? Can we try, at least this week, to bridge the widening gap between us?

“While at times we may offend you, remember as well that like you, ACT UP has succeeded in prolonging the lives of thousands of people living with HIV disease,” Staley told the researchers, physicians and health care workers.

Staley rallied the delegates to protest the federal immigration policy, leading a chant, “Change the law.” The hall responded, but less vociferously when Staley segued into another chant, “Three hundred thousand dead from AIDS. Where is George?”

San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos, too, criticized the federal response to the epidemic. Comparing the federal response to AIDS to the response to the Oct. 17, 1989, San Francisco earthquake, Agnos asked, “Where is our retrofit for AIDS?”

More San Franciscans have died of AIDS than died in World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam wars “combined and tripled,” Agnos said. “There is something wrong when our nation’s leaders would rather debate how to protect the fabric of the flag than how to protect the fabric of people’s lives.”

Also speaking was Dr. June Osborn, chairwoman of the National Commission on AIDS. Osborn argued that the AIDS epidemic has simply exacerbated long-simmering problems and inequities in the health-care system, the economy and society at large.

“The only new thing we face is the virus,” said Osborn.