2023-05-15 10:52:02
The French researcher Françoise Barré-Sinoussi saw the discovery of the AIDS pathogen HIV 40 years ago, in which she was significantly involved, as a medical and personal turning point. The discovery of the life-threatening virus in 1983 triggered a “race once morest time,” said Barré-Sinoussi in an interview with the AFP news agency. “From then on we had a huge construction site”, since many unanswered questions regarding the AIDS pathogen had to be researched at the same time.
“We had to learn everything regarding it,” said Barré-Sinoussi regarding the newly discovered virus: what proteins is the AIDS pathogen made of, what is its genetic blueprint, which cells does it affect, what are the consequences of the infection?
In view of the many AIDS infections and deaths worldwide, time was short to develop an AIDS test and to find effective therapies for the immune deficiency disease. She and her colleagues should therefore have brought researchers from other disciplines and affected patients on board.
In January 1983, under the direction of Luc Montagnier, Barré-Sinoussi and her colleague Jean-Claude Chermann isolated a previously unknown virus at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, which they called LAV. They said at the time that they believed the virus “might be involved.” Their discovery was published in the journal “Science” on May 20. In 1986, the pathogen was given the name Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV for short.
In 2008, Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery. Research on the HI virus Barré-Sinoussi changed his life in other ways too. “In my early days, I was a researcher who never left her lab,” she told AFP. Later, however, she dealt intensively with AIDS patients and experienced things “that I would not have thought possible – such as the public’s lack of tolerance towards certain population groups”.
“Back then, the sick were stigmatized by their families, their friends, and sometimes even by health care workers,” says the Frenchwoman, recalling the first years of the AIDS epidemic. “Some lost their homes, their jobs.” Through contact with AIDS patients, she “learned an enormous amount regarding inequalities, which unfortunately may have worsened in rich countries today.”
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