Championing Change: Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and the Fight Against HIV and AIDS
Francoise Barre-Sinoussi is a French virologist who performed some of the fundamental work in the identification of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS. Born in Paris, France, in 1947, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi dedicated her career as a scientist and as an activist to halting the spread of AIDS. Her discovery of HIV led to blood tests that could detect the infection, and ultimately to anti retroviral medications that have turned AIDS from a death sentence to a manageable chronic disease. For the people around the world who don't have access to AIDS drugs, Barre-Sinoussi has been a tireless advocate.
After earning her PhD in 1974, and spending some time in the US at the National Institutes of Health, Barre-Sinoussi returned to Jean-Claude Chermann's lab at the Pasteur Institute. Her unit, run by Luc Montagnier, was studying the link between retroviruses and cancers. After a new disease emerged (not yet named AIDS), a group of French physicians came to the Pasteur Institute to ask the rather simple question: is this new disease caused by a retrovirus? In just two weeks, at age 35, Barre-Sinoussi and her team isolated what would later be named the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. That discovery, in 1983, led to blood tests to detect the infection and finally to antiretroviral drugs that began to keep AIDS patients alive.
Barre-Sinoussi became an outspoken advocate for both AIDS research and public health measures. She travelled to Africa with colleagues in the mid-1980s, and, astonished by the magnitude of the epidemic, she committed to fighting the disease in resource-limited countries. In 1986, at age 38, she helped organise the International AIDS Conference in Paris, and two years later, she and her colleagues formed the International AIDS Society. In 2008, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier were awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Barre-Sinoussi is now the Director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Division and Professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France.
