Discovering HIV started ‘race against time’ for French scientist
- As the anniversary of the discovery of HIV approaches, Nobel laureate virologist Francoise Barre-Sinoussi describes how that happened
- ‘All levels of society have been affected by HIV/Aids, which has always been a battle on multiple fronts’, Barre-Sinoussi says
When Nobel laureate Francoise Barre-Sinoussi helped identify a mysterious virus that would become known as HIV 40 years ago, she says it kicked off a “race against time” to counter the looming Aids crisis.
The 75-year-old virologist described how she and colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered HIV in 1983, which led to her jointly winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
“It all started in 1982,” when doctors started sharing stories about the first French Aids patients, France’s Barre-Sinoussi said.
“They were convinced that a retrovirus could be responsible for this new disease.”
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For more than a decade Barre-Sinoussi had been working on retroviruses, which on infection convert from the genetic material RNA into DNA, allowing them to easily integrate host cells.