Tom Perrault distinctly remembers the time he received an electric shock in the name of science.

“I have a pretty high threshold for pain,” he told SFGATE. But he had never experienced electroporation before, a procedure in which an electric current is used to disrupt cell membranes and make them more permeable to medical treatments.  

The treatment was one of the first interventions in a recent medical trial based out of UC San Francisco. Researchers were trying to retrain Perrault’s immune system to track down and hunt a hidden viral invader: HIV.

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The disease may no longer be a death sentence, but it isn’t yet a medical relic. There were nearly 39,000 HIV infections in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Globally, 1.3 million people contracted HIV in 2024, according to data from the World Health Organization, and 630,000 people died due to HIV-related disease. 

And so, Perrault is part of a cohort of 10 study individuals who took part in a novel medical trial at UCSF that used three different therapies to treat people with HIV. Perrault recalled the warning from his medical team about the electroporation: “It’s gonna be like somebody punched your arm.” 

“So I go in, I’m a little cavalier about it,” he told SFGATE. The medical team held him down on the exam table, startling him, before giving him an electric jolt and a type of vaccine called a DNA vaccine simultaneously. 

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“I screamed,” Perrault recounted. “I’m like, ‘That was not a punch, that was an electric shock, people!’” 

Unfortunately for Perrault, the procedure had to be immediately repeated in his other arm. 

“I started trembling. I’m like, ‘That was bad, that was scary,’” he recalled. The researchers warned Perrault he would need another round of electroporation in a few weeks.

Tom Perrault is pictured at UCSF on Monday, March 9, 2026. 

Many people might give up before voluntarily subjecting themselves to pain like that again, especially with no promise of a cure. But Perrault, a former board chair for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, had longed for this type of study for years. At the end of all these treatments, he would finally be able to pause his HIV medication for the first time in years and see firsthand how close the world is to a cure.

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“Gay men in the ’80s and the early ’90s would have crawled over glass on their hands and knees to get to a pill or a vaccine, “ he said. “... Anything I can do to advance the idea that science is important.” 

In 1981, the CDC published a report of five sick young men who showed up in Los Angeles hospitals dying from a type of pneumonia commonly associated with older adults. Physicians realized their immune systems had essentially stopped working, but they didn’t know why. It was the first ever time the condition known as (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) AIDS was documented as a disease. 

For years, there was little the medical community could do for AIDS patients. In the........

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