“The first battle when pursuing a virus is the battle against time. You can’t leave it too late to save the maximum number of people but, for less commendable reasons, you must not be too early either…”
When he wrote these words twenty-five years ago, Professor Jean-Claude Chermann and his team at the Pasteur Institute had just discovered the Aids virus. This discovery marked the beginning of a period spent fighting. For, though the laws of science are immutable, they don’t always correspond with those that govern money and mankind.
Through his interviews with Olivier Galzi, Jean-Claude Chermann reveals the unusual trajectory of a man who built himself on a series of intuitions, choosing the path less trodden, a move that frequently earned him the enmity of people who do not like anyone straying from the herd.
Jean-Claude Chermann feels no bitterness now, no regrets, but a hope: the hope of finding a vaccine. After twenty years of research and nine clinical studies, he now knows why 30% of patients infected with HIV do not develop the illness. In his search to create a vaccine, he is now using these latest findings, findings that seem to be attracting the interest of more and more scientists, particularly in the United States. No one is a prophet in their own country…
Jean-Claude Chermann, seventy years old, was the Director of Research at the INSERM from 1988 to 2000; he ran the unit in Marseille researching retroviruses and associated illnesses (U322). A joint discoverer of the Aids virus, he is continuing his research and is currently developing an anti-Aids vaccine.
Olivier Galzi, thirty-seven years old, is a journalist and major reporter (France 2, France 3 and ABC in the United States). He has been presenting the television news on France 2 for seven years.
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