The 2010 Claude Bernard International Lecture
Presented by Prof Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Head of the Unit “Regulation of Retroviral Infections” at the Institut Pasteur, Paris.
Prof Barré-Sinoussi started her research on HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s, demonstrating that the disease was caused by a retrovirus. The results of the successful isolation, amplification, and preliminary characterisation of the virus were published in Science in May 1983. This marked the beginning of a distinguished research career at the Institut Pasteur, culminating in receiving the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008, which she shared with Luc Montagnier and Harald zur Hausen.