Slim Abdool Karim joined the anti-apartheid movement as a boy in South Africa and has had the pleasure of watching the regime fall. Now he's set his sights on taking down AIDS.

Karim has witnessed the emergence and exponential growth of the AIDS epidemic in his country, along with the concurrent explosion of tuberculosis. To reverse the epidemic, he is following disease progression, testing treatments and prevention strategies (1), and deciding if and how they can be effective in resource-limited settings (2). By monitoring cytokines and T cell responses in the first weeks after infection, Karim has found that a more naive CD8⁺ T cell response is better in the long run than a more differentiated response that includes a high frequency of memory T cells (3, 4). These studies also revealed that the initial magnitude of HIV-specific, IFN-–producing cells does not predict viral load at one year.  READ MORE