Françoise Barré-Sinoussi

Françoise Barre-Sinoussi was born on July 30th, 1947, in Paris, France.  She is a French virologist who was a corecipient, with Luc Montagnier and Harald zur Hausen, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. She and Montagnier shared half the prize for their work in identifying the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), and the cause of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi has always loved nature and spent her school vacations observing animals and plants in the parks of her  home town. According to Barré-Sinoussi herself, it was by pure accident that she ended up working at the prestigious Institut Pasteur

She comes from a humble background, and therefore was forced to choose the shortest and cheapest education available. Barré-Sinoussi began working at Paris’ Institut Pasteur as a volunteer and received her PhD in 1975. Her work with HIV has often been carried out on site in developing countries. 

Barré-Sinoussi earned a Ph.D in 1975 at the Pasteur Institute in Garches, France, and did postdoctoral work in the United States at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

In 1975, she joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and in 1996 she became head of the Retrovirus Biology Unit, later called Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit. From 2012 to 2014 Barré-Sinoussi was president of the International AIDS Society.

Retroviruses are viruses whose genomes consist of RNA and whose genes can be incorporated into host cells’ DNA. In 1983, Françoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montaigner discovered a retrovirus in patients with swollen lymph glands that attacked lymphocytes, which is a kind of blood cell that is very important to the body’s immune system. The retrovirus, later named Human Immunodeficiency Virus, proved to be the cause of the immunodeficiency disease AIDS. This discovery has been crucial in improving treatment methods for those with AIDS.