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SPEAKER 1: 30 years ago this month, the state's first HIV/AIDS clinic opened at a public hospital in Saint Paul. There was no fanfare or even much of an effort to promote it. In Minnesota, as in the rest of the world, fear of AIDS patients was rampant. The deadly disease had no cure, and there was confusion and misinformation over how the virus spread.

The situation was all the more controversial because HIV struck primarily gay men and IV drug users. It wasn't an ideal scenario for launching the new clinic. Carving out a space to treat HIV and AIDS cases risked driving other patients away from the hospital. As Lorna Benson reports now, the young doctor who founded the clinic Forged On convinced it was the best way to get ahead of a disease that appeared hopeless at the time.

LORNA BENSON: Dr. Keith Henry still remembers the first patient he lost to AIDS. It was late spring of 1984, and a young college faculty member showed up at his hospital with an aggressive AIDS-related pneumonia. The man's intelligent banter impressed Henry.

But before long, his patient was silenced by a ventilator. And within weeks, he was dead. It hit Henry hard. He was almost the same age as the patient.

KEITH HENRY: That young person's life was snuffed out, and that pretty much sealed the deal for me that this was going to be a worthwhile effort to focus my career on.

LORNA BENSON: By the following January, his new clinic was open for business. Henry didn't have a lot to offer. There were no drugs available to treat HIV and AIDS, so he focused on what he could influence.

He encouraged his patients to keep their strength up by eating healthier foods, and he gave them preventive medications to minimize their risk of contracting a deadly pneumonia or other infections. But most of Henry's patients were diagnosed with AIDS so late in their disease. They were too sick to get much benefit from his efforts.

KEITH HENRY: Back in the early days, you'd no sooner get a new patient you would see, and then the patient would die. The death rate was so high that the clinic really didn't grow too much.

LORNA BENSON: A few months later, the prospects for HIV/AIDS care improved slightly when the US Food and Drug Administration licensed the nation's first HIV test. The new test meant that people could learn their HIV status much earlier before they experienced symptoms of AIDS. Henry offered the test in his clinic, and his patient load grew steadily.

He estimates his treatments gave his patients another year or so of life. It was better than nothing, but hardly a victory. And that wore on him.

KEITH HENRY: The days would just blow by, often to be quite exhausted because it was emotionally draining as it was intellectually draining. In the first 10 years, it was almost overwhelming.

LORNA BENSON: Henry found himself deeply involved in his patients' lives. Many of them had lost everything, including jobs, housing, even the support of their families. If his patients couldn't afford their medications, sometimes Henry would pay for the drugs out of his own pocket. Former gay rights activist, Phillip Wilkie, says Henry fought fiercely for his patients during a time when there was a lot of hostility toward people with AIDS and anyone who helped them. He remembers attending some tense funerals with the young doctor.

PHILLIP WILKIE: When I was working with Keith we'd say that was the worst funeral yet where we'd been blamed. The preacher pointed over there, them-- pointed at us. We were the bad ones? We were there fighting for the person.

LORNA BENSON: Henry wasn't the only Minnesota physician advocating on behalf of patients with HIV. There were a half dozen or so well-regarded doctors working in hospitals and other newly-created HIV clinics, mostly in the metro area. Dr. Frank Rhame was one of them.

FRANK RHAME: And a lot of us are good clinicians, but what he's unusual at is being able to find research questions in these issues and find answers to those research questions.

LORNA BENSON: Rhame says Henry conducted dozens of studies answering a wide range of questions about HIV and AIDS.

FRANK RHAME: One of his colleagues made a comment that I thought was very telling. He said, if Keith Henry were stuck on a deserted island, he'd still find something to publish on. [LAUGHS] And it's true.

LORNA BENSON: Henry was involved in early studies to find safer needle disposal systems to protect health care workers. His research into an AIDS-related eye disease led to a treatment technique that's still used to this day to prevent blindness. He had many discouraging findings along the way, too. Things changed, though, when researchers discovered that HIV drug combinations called cocktails were effective at suppressing the virus. Henry didn't dare believe it until he saw the results in his own patients.

KEITH HENRY: 1996 was that seminal year. That brings goosebumps to me, just thinking about what happened that year. Literally, I had scores of patients that rose from the dead.

LORNA BENSON: Bill Kimker was one of those patients. He was 51 years old and living in a Stillwater hospice, unable to walk or even bathe himself when Henry gave him the new drug cocktail. He didn't notice much for the first few months, except that he was still alive after being told he would be dead in two or three months.

Gradually, feeling returned to his right leg and arm. His appetite improved, too. 16 months after he entered hospice, Kimker stepped out of his wheelchair and went home.

BILL KIMKER: I was the first person to ever walk out of Hope House on my own two feet and not being carried out on a stretcher.

LORNA BENSON: Kimker is now 69 years old. He lives in Palm Springs, California, and spends his days tending his flower gardens and fruit trees.

BILL KIMKER: I had prepared myself to die, and here I am. [LAUGHS]

LORNA BENSON: Today, Dr. Keith Henry's bustling HIV clinic looks nothing like it did in the early days. It's located in a different hospital, in a different city, and it has a different name, the Positive Care Center.

KEITH HENRY: Alrighty, if you don't mind making a copy of this and faxing this in for her, I don't know, FlexAccount or something.

SPEAKER 2: OK.

KEITH HENRY: And that'd be great.

LORNA BENSON: Gone is his cramped basement office in Saint Paul. Henry now shares a ground floor communal office with more than a dozen other colleagues at Hennepin County Medical Center's blue building in downtown Minneapolis. Henry has changed, too. His once thick mane of Brown hair is thinner and completely gray, but his mood is bright. On his schedule is a patient who will be switching to a new HIV pill that only needs to be taken once a day.

KEITH HENRY: All right. Hi, there.

CHAUNCEY: Hey, buddy.

LORNA BENSON: Chauncey is a personal trainer and life coach. MPR News has agreed to withhold his last name because Chauncey's family does not know he's HIV positive. The 39-year-old Minneapolis man says dropping two HIV pills from his busy routine will make his life much easier.

CHAUNCEY: I'm excited. This is a major deal.

LORNA BENSON: Today's drug treatments are so effective that Henry believes HIV could be wiped out in a generation if everyone who has the virus gets treatment for it. But so far, that's not happening. In the past decade, new HIV cases in Minnesota have held steady at around 300 infections annually, a depressing fact that Henry attributes to denial and lingering fears about HIV in some ethnic communities. He's frustrated about the situation, but Henry tries to keep it in perspective by remembering how far his clinic and many of his patients have come.

KEITH HENRY: People kind of wonder why I walk around the clinic and smiling when it's a crappy day outside and bad things are happening. And I go, yes, but you don't know what things used to be like. And we can keep doing this to new patients and prevent all of that in the first place. And it's just been an amazing phenomenon.

LORNA BENSON: Lorna Benson, Minnesota Public Radio News.