Nobel Scientist to Academy Girls: Bring Passion to Your Work

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When Dr. Francoise Barré-Sinoussi, co-winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine, first asked about the possibility of obtaining a position at the prestigious Pasteur Institute in her native France, a director was cruelly dismissive.

“I won’t mention his name,” the Nobel laureate told a rapt audience of girl students from Dominican Academy at St. Catherine of Siena Church Nov. 12, “but he looked at me from the feet to the head and said, ‘Thinking about making a career in science? Not at Pasteur. You need to totally re-think your agenda. You should either try to find another institution or re-direct your career in an other area because a woman never made anything in science.’”

After Dr. Barré-Sinoussi won the Nobel Prize along with her colleague, Luc Montagnier, for their discovery in 1983 of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), she received a call of congratulations from that director. He had totally forgotten about the earlier encounter, but Dr. Barré-Sinoussi hadn’t and she reminded him of it.

“I was quite young. I was a little shy so I didn’t answer him,” she recalled of their first meeting. “But I was thinking, OK, I’m going to show you what a woman can do in science.”

Today Dr. Barré-Sinoussi is the director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Division of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and president of the International AIDS Society. A parent of one of the students, a consultant with the Pasteur Institute, arranged her visit.

The crux of the message she brought to the girls of Dominican Academy? A woman’s place is in the lab, though she warned it still would not be an easy road for a woman embarking on a career in science.

“It has not been easy for me and for women in general in society,” she acknowledged. “When I started at the Pasteur Institute it was the maximum of five women as professors. All the others were male and the females were the lowest positions. Today we’re not far from 50 percent women, 50 percent men. So there has been a lot of progress over the years, but it has been very hard.

“To be competitive in science as a woman you have to multiply your efforts by at least let’s say 50 times as a male. But you’ll succeed. You have to be persistent.” She urged the young women gathered before her to always be mindful of whom they were working for.

“If you are passionate, if your driving force is the patients, do the science not for you, not for the C.V., but for the impact your work has for others,” she urged.

Dr. Barré-Sinoussi considers herself more than a scientist. She calls herself an “activist” and an advocate for her patients all over the world living with HIV. While she said antiretroviral drugs have vastly improved the lives of those affected by HIV, raising their life expectancies to almost that of an unaffected person, more research was required so that eventually patients can be fully cured and taken off the drug regimen.

“We still need a treatment that the patients can stop,” she said. “We have to answer to that expectation and continue to work for them and with them. We have to fight also against stigmatization and discrimination.” Another urgent issue that needs to be addressed, she said, is the uneven distribution of the expensive drugs, especially in the countries of the Third World.

She said her fierce activism resulted from meeting dying AIDS patients in the early ’80s and befriending them.

“Knowing at the time they were dying and they would not have time to wait for treatment, it was very, very hard,” she said. She has taken on politicians either for not doing enough or for doing the wrong things.

In 2009 she wrote an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI challenging his assertion, made during a visit to AIDS-ravaged Cameroon, that HIV/AIDS “cannot be overcome by the distribution of prophylactics.” She didn’t back away from her position in addressing the students.

“She’s going to say what she wants to say. She’s going to speak her mind,” said Kaitlyn Lipuma, a senior and co-president, along with senior Samantha Hamilton, of the school’s Science Club.

Following the talk, Sister Barbara Kane, O.P., the principal at Dominican Academy, told CNY that she would speak to the students to put the doctor’s comments “into context.”

“I think when you have a speaker and you haven’t heard them before you have to trust that what they say is something of value,” she said. “I’m not worried about that, but think we have to explain where she’s coming from. She is a woman who has achieved a great deal and that’s what we want our girls to be able to do—to achieve.”

Ms. Lipuma said she found the renowned doctor’s talk inspiring and a little “daunting.”

“What I hoped to get out of it was a new insight into what it would be like as a woman in the scientific field and she fulfilled that immensely. I learned so much from her and it was such an honor having her here,” said Ms. Lipuma who told CNY she would like to major in biology in college. Ms. Hamilton hopes to study biochemistry. Both are looking forward to careers in science.

“I want to go into the medical research field and help people. She really showed it’s not only about the research that you do, it’s about the people you are helping and if you are really passionate about what you are researching you can go above and beyond,” Ms. Hamilton said.