Flossie

Flossie Wong Staal was born in China in 1947. She attended UCLA (University of California, Los Ángeles) an after graduation joined the National Cancer Institute. She studied retroviruses( which are a family of viruses that also includes HIV). She clooned the HIV and she is the first person to discover the anatomy of the virus.She joined the university of California at San Diego's AIDS (Acquired immune deficiency syndrome) 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 administrate trough 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 for only the sell of the virus.
Flossie Wong-Staal has done a great deal of research and will continue to do more.

Text from
http://library.thinkquest.org/20117/staal.html
This is a mail from Flossie Wong Staal:
My laboratory continues to focus on the human retroviruses as model systems to study gene regulation and pathogenesis, and as targets for genetic intervention. Using techniques to detect both protein/protein and RNA/protein interactions between viral and cellular elements, we have uncovered cellular genes that may play important roles in the function of essential viral regulatory proteins (e.g., Tax of HTLV-1 and Rev of HIV). The mechanisms of action of these gene products are under investigation.
This is a text of:
http://www-biology.ucsd.edu/faculty/wongstaal.html