Last December 10, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi received the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, in Stockholm. She shares the prize with Luc Montagnier for their discovery of the retrovirus to blame for AIDS, and with Harald zur Hausen, who discovered the human papillomavirus to blame for cervical cancer. Pasteur Institute Professor and INSERM Senior Researcher, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi heads the Retroviral Infection Control Unit (Pasteur Institute) that is working on how the virus is transmitted from mother to child, on the innate mechanisms controlling HIV infections, and on HIV-related simian viruses that infect monkeys. She has published 216 articles in international scientific journals, has presented more than 250 papers at international conferences, and filed 17 patents. ANRS Scientific Committee President and Head of the Southeast Asia ANRS research site, she has forged numerous collaborations with countries that have been hit the hardest by the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Will the Nobel prize change her life as the discovery of the virus did so many years ago? How does she see her role?
Interview by Jean-François Desessard.
BE France - Will the Nobel Prize for Medicine change your life?
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi - Absolutely. Actually, ever since last October 6, it has. Twenty-five years ago, my life had already changed with the discovery of HIV-AIDS. I often say that I had one life before 1983 and one life after the discovery of the virus that literally revolutionized my professional and personal life. Two years later, my discovery of Africa during a visit to the Central African Republic, one of the poorest countries in the world, brought even greater change. I was able to see firsthand the terrible situation - not only of the country and its population - but of its patients, medical and healthcare personnel. For a scientist working mainly in her lab, it is unusual to be faced with physicians and their patients. But the discovery of HIV-AIDS opened my eyes to this world, which in turn gave a totally different bent to my research, focussed more on applications.
That was when I fully understood what is called the "Pasteur Tradition" that encompasses everything from very fundamental research to its applications, and from education to knowledge transfer, to the most underprivileged countries, as well. For twenty-five years, I have been working according to visionary Louis Pasteur's model, an effort that has today been rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Medicine to two Pasteur researchers.
BE France - What does the Nobel Prize mean to you?
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi - I feel a huge responsibility in accepting a prestigious award such as the Nobel prize for Medicine, especially as it offers me the opportunity to be the international spokesperson for a scientific and medical community addressing decision-makers worldwide and the public, and to be heard. It is also an opportunity to kindle young people's passion for research, a topic to which I am very attached. Because those who will be carrying on our work have to be trained, they will be the ones to inject much needed creativity in the coming years. However, creativity involves the emergence of young researchers with a new outlook, i.e., more likely to come up with original ideas. Creativity may also come with the arrival of experienced researchers from other fields such as immunology or genetics.
BE France - Can the Prize also play a scientific role, by speeding up HIV-AIDS research?
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi - It is mainly an opportunity to develop new international cooperation projects and prompt scientists in very different fields to work together on pathologies such as AIDS in particular, and on infectious diseases, in general. I am convinced that current and future research will be multidisciplinary and multi-institutional, which requires and will require increasing specialization. However, if the fields do not work closely together, it will be harder to make research advance. We must not forget that the progress that has been made over the past twenty-five years is the result of a multidisciplinary network that quickly grew up around HIV-AIDS, bringing together clinicians, fundamental researchers, immunologists, and molecular biologists, who marshaled their efforts to deal with the emergency.
