ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
In the early days of the AIDS epidemic back in the 1980s, the medical world viewed HIV as a threat mainly to gay men. But two scientists from South Africa discovered a very different pattern. In their country, it was young women who had the highest rates of HIV. That husband and wife team went on to develop groundbreaking medications women could use to protect themselves from aids. For this lifesaving work, they have received the prestigious Lasker prize, often called America's Nobel. Kate Bartlett has this story.
KATE BARTLETT, BYLINE: Salim and Quarraisha Abdool Karim grew up during apartheid. As Indian South Africans, they describe facing daily discrimination under the brutal system of white minority rule. Here's Salim.
SALIM ABDOOL KARIM: When we went to the post office, we entered by the door that said nonwhites. When we went to the parks, we sat on a bench that said nonwhites.
BARTLETT: He says the message you get over and over is that you're not good enough, that you're inferior because you're not white.
S ABDOOL KARIM: Having grown up in that kind of environment was almost a challenge for us to say, actually, we are good enough.
BARTLETT: And luckily, the couple had families that valued education and some inspirational teachers. Here's Quarraisha.
QUARRAISHA ABDOOL KARIM: They nurtured my sort of innate curiosity about, you know, wanting to know why and how everything worked and why people did X or Y.
BARTLETT: Quarraisha and Salim both went on to study at one of the few universities open to nonwhites. Salim graduated as a doctor and then studied virology, while Quarraisha studied immunology. As well as teaming up romantically, they teamed up to pursue their common research. In the late 1980s, the Abdool Karims were both attending Columbia University. New York at the time was gripped by a frightening new virus that was mainly believed to be infecting gay men.
Q ABDOOL KARIM: We were seeing the face of AIDS in Greenwich Village, in Harlem, in Bronx.
BARTLETT: And they knew it was going to hit Africa too and hard. They returned to Durban in 1988 and threw themselves into HIV research, and that's when they made a startling discovery. They noticed the rates of infection among teenage boys in South Africa were very low.
S ABDOOL KARIM: But if you looked at their counterparts, teenage girls, they had very high rates of infection. And so that was a signal to us that these young women were not acquiring HIV from teenage boys. They were acquiring HIV from men who were about 10 years older.
BARTLETT: The couple started thinking about how to help these women.
S ABDOOL KARIM: Because, you know, condoms were under the control of men.
BARTLETT: So they started looking to develop a technology they hoped would empower women to protect themselves. Little did they know that would take almost two decades to achieve. But after much trial and error, they had their breakthrough.
S ABDOOL KARIM: When we announced in 2010 that we had shown that this drug called Tenofovir - that when used in a gel, that it protected women against HIV, it provided new hope to the field of HIV at the time.
BARTLETT: Their work then spurred the development of another prevention treatment known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. Today, PrEP can be 99% effective against sexual transmission of HIV.
S ABDOOL KARIM: And so we've seen the evolution of this field of HIV prevention from what we originally started with, with gels, to tablets and now to injectables that we hope will be implemented in a way that could really alter the trajectory of the HIV epidemic.
BARTLETT: The Lasker Award comes with $250,000 in prize money. The Abdool Karims say it will go towards new research into preventing HIV. For NPR News, I'm Kate Bartlett in Johannesburg.
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