Near the end of the first act of Jonathan Larson’s iconic musical “Rent,” which opened on Broadway in New York City in 1996, a beeper goes off loudly. Mimi, an exotic dancer struggling with heroin addiction, tells her date (who unknown to her also has HIV), “AZT break!”
Twenty-five years later, living with HIV no longer requires constant reminders to take multiple daily pills with potentially debilitating side effects. These and other advances represent