ALD23: Professor Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Virologist

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Professor Françoise Barré-Sinoussi

Françoise Barré-Sinousi is a French virologist who, alongside colleagues at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 1983. Now Emeritus Professor at the Institut Pasteur, Barré-Sinousi has dedicated her career as a scientist and activist to helping stop the spread of AIDS.

Barré-Sinoussi grew up in Paris, where she was born in 1947. As a biomedical science student at the University of Paris, she began volunteering in Jean-Claude Chermann’s lab at the Institut Pasteur. She later returned to this lab after earning her PhD, where she researched the link between retroviruses and cancer.

In 1982, Barré-Sinoussi’s unit at the Institut Pasteur received a call from a French clinician. A mysterious and devastating new illness was driving people, predominantly gay men, into Paris hospitals. The clinician wanted to know whether a retrovirus could be behind this unknown disease. By the following year, the 35-year-old Barré-Sinoussi had detected enzyme activity that suggested – for the first time – that AIDS symptoms may be caused by a virus.

Working with Chermann, Luc Montagnier and others, Barré-Sinoussi isolated and grew a retrovirus from a biopsied swollen lymph node of a patient at risk for AIDS. This would later be named the human immunodeficiency virus. The team’s findings were confirmed in 1984, a step that allowed blood tests to be administered to diagnose and help control the spread of HIV. Their discovery also laid the groundwork for antiretroviral medications, which transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a chronic but manageable disease.

In the mid-1980s, Barré-Sinoussi travelled to Africa to see how AIDS was affecting patients across the continent. Her experiences there motivated her to work extensively in Africa and southeast Asia throughout her career, contributing to AIDS education and helping establish test and treatment centres. She co-founded the International AIDS Society (IAS) in 1988, setting up her own lab at the Institut Pasteur the same year. She has described herself as an activist as well as a scientist, saying: “There has been enormous scientific progress – and yet people are still dying of AIDS. How can I accept this? I cannot. It’s a matter of equality. Everybody has a right to live.”

In 2008, 25 years after they identified the cause of AIDS, Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. “Never before has science and medicine been so quick to discover, identify the origin and provide treatment for a new disease entity,” read the award’s announcement.

Barré-Sinoussi authored and co-authored 270 original publications over her career, furthering understanding in areas including mother-to-child HIV transmission and the adaptive immune response to viral infection. French mandatory retirement laws forced her to cease active research when she turned 68 in 2015, but she remains a tireless advocate for people with AIDS, holding senior positions in organisations including the Institut Pasteur and Inserm (the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research).

Barré-Sinoussi’s research and activism has enabled life-saving scientific advancements and shaped policy on the treatment of people living with HIV. But when reflecting on her individual contribution to the fight against AIDS, she is pragmatic. “We are all in it together, and we each make up a tiny piece of the puzzle,” she has said. “That’s all I am: a piece of the puzzle.”

She has received more than 10 major awards in addition to her Nobel Prize, and is a Grand Officer in France’s National Order of the Legion of Honour.

Further Reading

Written by Moya Crockett, with thanks to Stylist for their support.

ALD23 Books: Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World & How to Stop the Next One, Devi Sridhar

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Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World & How to Stop the Next One, Devi Sridhar

Professor Devi Sridhar has risen to prominence for her vital roles in communicating science to the public and speaking truth to power. In Preventable she highlights lessons learned from outbreaks past and present in a narrative that traces the COVID-19 pandemic – including her personal experience as a scientist – and details a vision for how we can better protect ourselves from the inevitable health crises yet to come.

In gripping and heartfelt prose, Sridhar exposes the varied realities of those affected and puts you in the room with key decision-makers at crucial moments. She vibrantly conveys the twists and turns of a plot that saw deadlier variants emerge (contrary to the predictions of social-media pundits who argued it would mutate to a milder form), countries with weak health systems like Senegal and Vietnam fare better than countries like the US and the UK (which were consistently ranked as the most prepared), and the quickest development of game-changing vaccines in history (and their unfair distribution).

Combining science, politics, ethics and economics, this definitive book dissects the global structures that determine our fates, and reveals the deep-seated economic and social inequalities at their heart. It will challenge, outrage and inspire.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk. 

About the Author

Devi Sridhar is an American public health researcher who is also a Professor at the University of Edinburgh, where she holds a Personal Chair in Global Public Health. She is Founding Director of the University of Edinburgh’s Global Health Governance Programme and holds a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award.

The recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, Devi holds an MPhil and a DPhil from Oxford University as well as a B.S. from the University of Miami’s Honors Medical Program. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University, and an Associate Professor in Global Health Politics and Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford University. Following the West African Ebola virus epidemic, she worked with the Harvard Global Health Institute and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to assess international responses to the outbreak and use this information to inform preparations for future pandemics.

Devi is the author of two previous books: Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? (OUP, 2017) and The Battle Against Hunger: Choice, Circumstance and the World Bank (OUP, 2008). Her work has been published in Nature, Science, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and The British Medical Journal.

You can follow Devi Sridhar’s work here:

Twitter: @devisridhar
Wikipedia: wikipedia.org/wiki/Devi_Sridhar
Instagram: @profdevisridhar

With thanks to Synergy for their support.

ALD23: Professor Patrizia A Caraveo, Astrophysicist

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Professor Patrizia A Caraveo

Professor Patrizia A Caraveo is an astrophysicist and Director of Research at the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica (IASFC, the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics). Her research played a key role in the discovery and understanding of Geminga, a neutron star in the constellation Gemini, through multiwavelength astronomy. She has also worked on several international space missions, including Cos-B, INTEGRAL and NASA Swift.

Caraveo graduated with a degree in physics from the University of Milan in 1977. Her first decade of research, conducted at IASFC, was devoted largely to analysing and interpreting data collected from the gamma astronomy satellite COS-B, as well as X-ray astronomy.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Caraveo identified the pulsar Geminga through multiwavelength astronomy. She conducted this work with her partner and collaborator, the Italian physicist Giovanni Bignami. While the pulsar was first spotted by gamma-ray satellites in the early 1970s, it remained a mystery for years, not having been identified in visible light. Caraveo and Bignami picked up X-rays from Geminga using the powerful Einstein Observatory satellite in 1983, and  in 1992 used data obtained by COS-B to work out that Geminga was 370,000 years old. At least one news report at the time assumed that Caraveo must be a male scientist, attributing this discovery to Bignami and “Patricio Caraveo”.

Caraveo and Bignami also co-authored research showing that Geminga had the key qualities of a neutron star, and was the closest known pulsar to the Earth. These investigations made use of a huge range of space and ground-based astronomy, pre-empting a surge in the study of unidentified X-ray sources by astrophysicists around the world.

Caraveo is currently Director of Research at IASFC, a position she has held since 2002. She is adjunct astronomy professor at the University of Pavia and has worked on several international space missions dedicated to particle physics, including the European INTEGRAL mission, the NASA Swift mission, the Italian AGILE mission and the NASA Fermi mission.

Her awards include the Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society (shared with colleagues in 2007, 2011 and 2012 for their work on the Swift, Fermi, and Agile projects); the Italian National Presidential Prize in 2009 for her contributions to understanding high-energy neutron stars; and the “Outstanding Achievement Award” from Women in Aerospace-Europe in 2014. She is a member of the 2003 Group for Scientific Research and 100 Women Against Stereotypes.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @CaraveoPatrizia

Further Reading

Written by Moya Crockett, with thanks to Stylist for their support.

ALD23: Jeanne Villepreux-Power, Marine Biologist & Inventor

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Jeanne Villepreux-Power

Known as the “mother of aquariophily”, Jeanne Villepreux-Power was a French marine biologist and the inventor of the glass aquarium. At a time when women were excluded from the scientific establishment, she made revelatory discoveries about aquatic species, notably that the Argonauta octopus produces its own shells.

She was born Jeanne Villepreux in September 1794 in Juillac, Corrèze, a rural part of southern France. Legend has it that she walked all the way to Paris at the age of 18, where she eventually became a successful dressmaker and married the merchant James Power in 1818. The couple then moved to Messina in Sicily, a harbour city that would become the site of Villepreux-Power’s astonishing scientific achievements.

In Sicily, Villepreux-Power – who had no formal education but was able to read, write and sketch – could pursue her voracious interest in subjects including geology and natural history. She made careful observations and collected specimens of local flora and fauna during walks around Messina, becoming particularly fascinated with molluscs and one of their most mysterious predators: the small octopus Argonauta argo.

This cephalopod had been the subject of myth and conjecture since the time of Aristotle, who believed it may have travelled along the surface of the ocean like a boat (with its sail-like membranes propelling its shell across the water). In Villepreux-Power’s time, the prevailing theory was that the Argonauta acquired its spiral shell from a different organism, much like a hermit crab. But through groundbreaking research, she proved that the Argonauta produces its own shell.

This wasn’t a simple discovery. “As soon as [the Argonauta] perceives that it is being observed, it withdraws its membranes into its shell in the blink of an eye and flees to the bottom of the cage or the sea, reemerging to the surface only when it thinks it is safe from all danger,” Villepreux-Power wrote. And so she devised the first glass aquarium in 1832, an invention which is recognised as her greatest contribution to marine biology. Her design was a forerunner to the model still used to study marine life today and it allowed her to observe the octopus without it being aware of her presence.

After five years of studying the Argonauta, she concluded that it grew its own shell, which it could repair using its own substance and broken shell pieces. Villepreux-Power reported her results to multiple European scientific societies, and the respected biologist Sir Richard Owen presented her research to the London Zoological Society in 1939. Some male scientists cast doubt on her (correct) claims, but soon, they were published across Europe.

Villepreux-Power published two books about her experiments, as well as the first studies into Argonauta reproduction. Overall, her research laid the groundwork for later discoveries about octopus intelligence and consciousness. She was also interested in conservation and is considered a pioneer in aquaculture, today recognised as an environmentally responsible form of fish farming.

During her lifetime, Villepreux-Power became a member of more than a dozen esteemed scientific academies and institutions, an achievement almost unheard of for women at the time. Tragically, most of her scientific collections, writings and other materials were lost in a shipwreck in 1838. Evidence of her work survived, but she stopped publishing and divided her later years between Paris and London – returning to her hometown of Juilliac shortly before her death on 25 January 1871, aged 76.

In 1997, the Magellan probe discovered a new crater on Venus. It was named Villepreux-Power, after the woman whose own discoveries opened up new vistas of scientific understanding.

Further Reading

Written by Moya Crockett, with thanks to Stylist for their support.

ALD23: Sarah Al Amiri, Engineer

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Sarah Al Amiri

Sarah bint Yousef Al Amiri, سارة بنت يوسف الأميري, is chair of the the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Space Agency and the UAE Council of Scientists. She played a central role in the historic Emirates Mars Mission, which saw the UAE become the first Arab nation to reach the red planet in 2021.

Born in 1987, Al Amiri grew up in Abu Dhabi. Her fascination with space was sparked at the age of 12 when she saw a photo of the Andromeda galaxy. When she finished school, however, she chose to study computer science at university – believing that “higher education careers or studies in space exploration [was not] a realistic option”, as the UAE did not even have a space programme at the time.

Al Amiris’s career path opened up when she completed her master’s in 2009 and was hired as a software engineer by the Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (now the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre). She would later be promoted to head of research and development, working on the UAE’s first and second Earth observation satellites during her time at the centre.

The United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) launched in 2014, and Al Amiri established a project that resulted in the successful 24-hour flight of a prototype pseudo-satellite vehicle – reaching the highest altitude of any unmanned aircraft over UAE airspace. The same year, she was named deputy project manager and science lead of Al-Amal (Hope), the UAE’s inaugural Mars mission and its most ambitious space project yet.  The goal was to send a probe to Martian orbit by 2021 to coincide with the UAE’s 50th anniversary.

The Mars mission was not Al Amiri’s only focus during these years. She was appointed head of the Emirates Scientist Council in 2016, aged just 29, and in 2017 was given her first post in the UAE government (becoming the cabinet minister responsible for the advanced sciences). A year later, she was made chair of the UAE Council for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a term used to describe 21st century technological advancements including artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and quantum computing.

The UAE’s Mars mission launched to global fanfare in July 2020. The same month, Al Amiri was appointed chair of UAESA, making her the youngest person ever to lead a space agency. When the Hope spacecraft successfully orbited Mars in February 2021, the UAE became the fifth nation ever to reach the planet.

Some of Hope’s major contributions to science include the sharpest and most precise mapping of a “discrete aurora” on Mars’s nighttime side, and the detection of dramatic variations in atomic oxygen and carbon monoxide in the planet’s dayside atmosphere. The mission has also been significant in terms of gender representation. Women made up 80 per cent of its science team, as well as a relatively high 34 per cent of the mission team.

In May 2022, Al Amiri’s governmental brief was expanded when she was made Minister of State for Public Education and Advanced Technology. She has helped assemble a team focused on women in sciences, addressing what she describes as the “leaky pipeline” that can see women drop out of STEM programmes before beginning their careers. And she is currently overseeing work on the UAE’s next major mission: a flyby of Venus and seven different asteroids, due to launch in 2028.

For her contributions to science, technology and engineering, Al Amiri has been honoured as one of the World Economic Forum’s 50 Young Scientists in 2015; one of the BBC’s 100 Women in 2020; and on the 2021 Time 100 Next list.

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @SarahAmiri1

Further Reading

Written by Moya Crockett, with thanks to Stylist for their support.