Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - Sunday 01 December 2002
Bonny Schoonakker
The March edition of the Medical Research Council's Aids Bulletin named five local women who are at the forefront of the search for an HIV/Aids vaccine.
Both Williamson, an associate professor at the University of Cape Town's Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, and her elder sister, Professor Anna-Lise Williamson, are on the list. The two women even work in the same building on the UCT medical campus.
The bulletin also named Professor Estrelita Janse van Rensburg of Stellenbosch University's Department of Medical Virology, Dr Lynn Morris, head of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, and Dr Glenda Gray, head of a perinatal HIV research unit at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital.
"Right now it seems to be the women scientists leading the dance" in the quest for an HIV vaccine, says the bulletin's editor Michelle Galloway. But why?
"Goodness, I'm not sure," says Carolyn Williamson. But, like any good scientist, she is willing to guess: perhaps it is because men are expected to seek more lucrative careers than those available in basic research.
Carolyn says she and her elder sister often talk about HIV outside of work. "Yes, it's probably very dull for everyone around us," she adds.
With the help of a team at UCT, the Williamson sisters have spearheaded a programme which, Carolyn says, is moving a potential vaccine from the laboratory into production.
For the first time, she says, a vaccine development programme is being driven by South Africans. Also, for the first time, a vaccine is being designed to protect against strains common to South Africa.
The UCT vaccine development work falls under the three-year-old SA Aids Vaccine Initiative, a government-funded programme.
A number of the initiative's principal programmes are headed by women - the two Williamson sisters, Gray, Morris and UCT-based Dr Linda-Gail Becker, who runs the project's testing programmes.
Anna-Lise Williamson, the initiative's "principal investigator", believes "a vaccine that will limit progression of disease is possible".
But for now, she says, weapons in the fight against Aids are limited to education and antiretrovirals. "The time is going to come when there will be so many infected people that it will be impossible not to make the drugs as widely available as possible."
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