Flossie Wong Staal

Flossie Wong Staal was born in China in 1947. She attended UCLA and after graduation joined the National Cancer Institute. She studied retroviruses which are a family of viruses that also includes HIV. She cloned HIV and is the first person to discover the molecular anatomy of the virus.

She joined the University of California at San Diego's AIDS research team. Presently she is working on how to make a vaccine for HIV. She is trying to obtain a cold virus to imitate HIV and the vaccine could be administered through a nose spray. She is also trying to make the outer layer of proteins surrounding HIV larger. Flossie has made a molecule called the octamer that makes a response up to 500 times the normal HIV cell. She is also trying to make a vaccine from the entire virus. A problem is that this would give the person more HIV instead of only the shell of the   virus.

Flossie Wong Staal has done a great deal of  research and will continue to do more.

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