"Campus activism can be critical," says Marc Jacobson, a member of SGAC and a student at the Kennedy School. "Students have shown in the past to be leaders on other issues. They are really motivated by moral concerns."

Although the magnitude of the AIDS epidemic in Africa has been known for years, both HAC and SGAC were formed just this year.

Wikler, who says he was not involved with AIDS activism until this fall, says he is not sure why there has been an upswing in interest. He speculates that increased attention in the media has played a role.

The issue of AIDS in Africa has also been taken up by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan. Last month, President Bush pledged $200 million for a global trust fund to fight AIDS. Congress budgeted $460 million for global AIDS programs this year.

"The public attention has risen tremendously in the past year for many reasons, including the work at Harvard, but of course mainly because of the rapid advance of the pandemic and the availability of life-saving drugs that are still not being used," Sachs writes in an email.

Sachs says he has "detected a large shift in views during the past year in favor of a much more radical global response."

Behind that response, however, are countless personal stories of what drew people to the cause.

"I think what motivated me to work on it was the sense that this is the greatest threat to human life in our time," he says. "And it costs so little to do it."

"We saw a rising interest in Harvard students," Duncan says. "Harvard is not a very activist campus, so we were emboldened by it."

Amir Attaran, an international health researcher at Sachs' Center for International Development, praises the student activism on the issue of AIDS.

"Students can be very, very effective in influencing how American aid money is spent-or not-on diseases of the poor," Attaran writes in an e-mail. "We are really glad to see their efforts underway."

Sachs says student activism is "having a big effect in our community, on campuses around the country, and it is increasingly being heard in Washington and Africa."

Duncan, who will be in Cambridge this summer working at Global Justice, similarly couched the cause in moral terms.

"What we're doing is finishing the work of the civil rights movement," she says.

--Staff writer Jonathan H. Esensten can be reached at esensten@fas.harvard.edu.