PARIS, Oct 6, 2008 (AFP) - The French scientist who on Monday won a Nobel prize for discovering the viruses behind AIDS said it had never even occurred to her she might one day win the prestigious award.
"I must admit that I never for a moment dreamt I would hear such news," Francoise Barre-Sinoussi told France Info radio by telephone from Cambodia. "I don't think I'm the type of person who likes being in the limelight."
"I think I did my share," she added on France Inter radio.
Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier jointly won the award Monday for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS by destroying immune cells, one of the deadliest scourges of modern times.
"We knew it was an important discovery but... we didn't realise the impact of the epidemic on the African continent," she said.
"At the time we spoke of a disease of homosexuals, of hemophiliacs, of drug addicts and we didn't yet have the idea that it was a sexually transmittable disease," she said.
Since the discovery in the early 1980s she has "entirely dedicated my career to research on the virus," she said.
Barre-Sinoussi is currently in Cambodia working for France's ANRS AIDS research agency on a programme investigating HIV co-infections with tuberculosis.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy congratulated Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier for winning the Nobel Medicine Prize, saying their work had allowed treatments to be developed that "benefit millions of people across the world."
In 1983, Barre-Sinoussi and fellow workers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, including co-laureate Luc Montagnier, published a landmark paper in the US journal Science, describing how they had isolated a virus from a patient with AIDS.
AIDS has claimed more than 25 million lives since it first came to prominence in 1981. Today, around 33 million people are living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), 67 percent of them south of the Sahara.
Barre-Sinoussi said 1983 was a watershed in her life.
"There's my life before 1983 and my life after 1983," she said.
In 1988, Barre-Sinoussi set up her own lab at the Pasteur Institute, following several paths of exploration, including comparison of HIV with its monkey equivalent.
"There is not enough money in AIDS research, and we need to bring in new blood, especially young researchers who also want to get involved and bring in new ideas, especially in the field of vaccines, which so far has been a failure," she added.
"To see if a vaccine is feasible, in the coming years, we need to make a return to basic research, we need to know all the factors driving the viral response," she said.
"And there's lots of work to do in this respect."
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