Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008, answers questions from journalists on August 19, 2010 at the end of a meeting in Matignon on supervised consumption rooms for drug users. PIERRE VERDY/AFP
INTERVIEW – The scientist, who chairs Sidaction, recalls that in France, 170,000 people live with HIV and just over 5,000 people discover their HIV status each year, 23% of whom are over 50 years old.
In May 1983, a French research team described for the very first time the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) responsible for the epidemic which then worried the whole world. Since the discovery made by Professor Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and her colleagues, which earned them the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008, the fight against HIV has been marked by many advances.
LE FIGARO.- You had been doing fundamental research on retroviruses at the Institut Pasteur for about ten years when the AIDS epidemic began. How did you come to work on this disease?
Françoise BARRÉ-SINOUSSI. – Clinicians were really helpless when faced with this new disease and at the end of 1982, Professor Willy Rozenbaum came to give a lecture on AIDS at the Institut Pasteur. He had the idea that it was a retrovirus that was involved. Françoise Brun-Vezinet, who knew the work of the team in which I worked then, with Professor Luc Montagnier…
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