Francosie Barrie Sinoussi
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Read Some Of the Things Francoise Did
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi is a French virologist. Since 1992, she has been the Director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. In 2008, together with Luc Montagnier, who was the director of her laboratory at the Institut Pasteur in the early 80’s, she was awarded the Nobel Prize of medicine for the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 1983
The Research She Did For HIV/AIDS
For the past 30 years, she has been continuously working on HIV/AIDS research and strongly involved in promoting integration between HIV/AIDS research and actions in resource limited countries. As she defines herself as a scientist-activist, she has always been committed to fighting for the rights of patients and against the spread of the AIDS disease. In 2009, she with others wrote openly criticizing Pope Benedict XVI for his dismissal of the use of condoms as a prophylactic.
Questions That She has been Asked
- One way that this changed your life was how, as a PhD scientist, not a medical doctor, you hadn’t expected to work with patients. Yet after your discovery became known, people with HIV started coming to your lab at the Pasteur Institute. Yesterday you mentioned two men in particular. Could you tell that story?
- Are any other viruses this complex, that after 30 years, you still don’t understand?
- When you started out, were there many other women doing this kind of research? How have you seen that change?