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Financial crisis threatens medical research: Nobel winner

Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 12-Oct-2008 00:10 hrs

French virologist Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, one of the joint winners of this year's Nobel Prize for medicine, has said the current financial crisis could have a negative impact on the world's health, particularly in poorer countries.

One of the joint winners of this year's Nobel Prize for medicine said the current financial crisis could have a negative impact on the world's health, particularly in poorer countries.

Françoise Barre-Sinoussi, who shared the 2008 award with two of her fellow researchers for her discovery of the AIDS virus in 1983, told RTL radio the current economic conditions could have a terrible knock-on effect on the health and research sector worldwide.

"When there are financial problems in the world, we know there will be an impact on the health sector, on research," she said.

Asked why she had kept out of the limelight, while her colleague Luc Montagnier has been well-known for more than a quarter of a century, Barre-Sinoussi said she preferred to concentrate on her work rather than become a celebrity.

"I'm at my happiest when I'm in my laboratory in Pasteur, interacting with clinicians and researchers, and visiting the countries most affected, in Africa or in Asia," she said.

Barre-Sinoussi, 61, is a professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.

She also called for a greater injection of money into AIDS research, claiming the poor salaries awarded to young researchers in France is hindering progress in the field.

Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier shared one half of the award for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, one of the biggest scourges of modern times.

Harald zur Hausen of Germany won the other half of the award for going against the then-current dogma and claiming that a virus, the human papilloma virus (HPV), causes cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.

The Nobel Medicine Prize website — AFP