Dr. Flossie Wong-Staal was a molecular biologist and virologist known for her pioneering work in HIV research.  While at the US National Cancer Institute, her team was the first to clone HIV and annotate its genome.  Dr. Wong-Staal was also a mentor to young scientists.

Dr. Wong-Staal is a named inventor on over four dozen patents.  The first, U.S. Patent No. 9,328,391, was filed in 1985 and related to the cloning and expression of HIV-1 DNA.  It was assigned to the United States of America.

Dr. Wong-Staal was born in Guangzhou, China, in 1946.  She moved to Hong Kong with her family at the age of 7, then emigrated to the United States at 18.  She graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in bacteriology and a Ph.D. in molecular biology.  She was the first woman in her family to obtain higher education. Shortly after graduating, she joined Robert C. Gallo as a Research Fellow at his Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology in the National Cancer Institute.

Dr. Wong-Staal was initially interested in retroviruses that caused leukemia in animals, but pivoted to focus on human retroviruses.  At the time, there was widespread skepticism about the existence of human retroviruses.  Despite that skepticism, Dr. Wong-Staal proved that human retroviruses can cause cancer through her work on the human T-lymphotropic virus.

Later, Dr. Wong-Staal discovered variations in HIV among infected persons, leading to the realization that HIV mutates in response to immune pressures—a key insight for creating effective “drug cocktails” to manage AIDS.  Dr. Wong-Staal also was instrumental in creating a novel blood test for HIV that was based on detection of the HIV genome rather than its antibodies.  She would ultimately publish more than 400 papers on human retroviruses and AIDS.

In 1990, Dr. Wong-Staal left her position as Section Chief at the NCI to join the University of California, San Diego as its Florence Seeley Riford Chair in AIDS Research.  She retired in 2002 to become vice president of Immusol (now iTherX Pharmaceuticals), a company she cofounded to pursue treatments for hepatitis C.

Dr. Wong-Staal passed away from a pneumonia infection in 2020.  She was the most-cited female scientist of the 1980s, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, named one of the 50 most important women in science by Discover magazine, and, in 2019, was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. This Asian American Month, we celebrate Dr. Wong-Staal and her contributions to the fields of molecular biology and virology.

Author: Jake R. Dinkins