1983
Françoise
Barré-Sinoussi
Discovering HIV
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi didn’t plan on
becoming a scientist; she fell into her ca-
reer as a virologist only after volunteering
at the Pasteur Institute in her hometown of
Paris. She ended up earning a Ph.D. there
and went on to play a pivotal role in identi-
fying the human immuno deficiency virus,
or HIV, responsible for AIDS. In 1983, with
Luc Montagnier, she extracted the virus
from the swollen lymph nodes of patients
suffering from the then mysterious illness,
and discovered it was a previously un-
known retrovirus that attacked human im-
mune cells.
She shared the Nobel Prize in 2008 for
her work, which led to the development
of life-changing anti-HIV drugs that have
saved millions of lives. But Barré-Sinoussi
knows her work isn’t done. Nearly 40 years
after her discovery, 38 million people
around the world are still living with HIV.
Not all of them have access to medications,
and even if they do, they need to take them
for life. So she continues to search for new
ways to prevent and control HIV. “We can-
not cure HIV yet,” she told TIME in 2014.
“The epidemic is not over, and the treat-
ments are not perfect. There has been a lot of
progress, but it’s not enough.” —Alice Park
1984
bell hooks
Expanding feminism
Gloria Jean Watkins, who writes under the name bell
hooks, turned 18 in 1970. That year, Toni Cade Bambara’s
anthology The Black Woman featured emerging black
women whose voices would shift the way America thought
about gender, race and class, Alice Walker and Toni
Morrison among them. Those novelists, along with play-
wright Ntozake Shange and essayists Paule Marshall and
Michele Wallace, spent the decade turning the literary
world inside out. hooks’ work embodies the fullness of
these thinkers who influenced her but is singular in the
way it articulates a complicated set of intersecting oppres-
sions. In 1984’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,
she critiqued the way mainstream feminism sidelines
women of color. “Throughout the work my thoughts have
been shaped by the conviction that feminism must become
a mass based political movement if it is to have a revolu-
tionary, transformative impact on society,” she wrote.
If hooks had believed in behaving, she would have
stayed in academia. Instead, she became that rare rock
star of a public intellectual who reaches wide by being
accessible. For generations of black girls, hooks has
been a rite of passage. I read her seminal essay collec-
tion Ain’t I a Woman as a film student reading Laura
Mulvey’s essays about the male gaze and writing about
NWA’s misogyny. Like a superfan, I began publishing my
name in lowercase. Today, as we push back against those
who wish to stymie progress on every front, the clear way
she unpacks what it means to be a black feminist, a praxis
that requires we take on class and race and gender, could
not be more important. —dream hamptonhampton is a writer and an award-winning filmmakerBARRÉ-SINOUSSI, JEAN-CLAUDE CHERMANN
AND MONTAGNIER AT THE PASTEUR INSTITUTE
1980s74 Time March 16–23, 2020 BARRÉ-SINOUSSI: SYGMA/GETTY IMAGES; HOOKS: MONTIKAMOSS—WIKIMEDIA COMMONS