Today we celebrate Flossie Wong-Staal, “a pioneering former NIH scientist, a major figure in the discovery of HIV, and the first to clone that virus.”

Here’s more from the National Institute for Health:

Flossie also discovered molecular evidence of micro-variation in HIV, which led to the use of ‘drug cocktails’ to manage AIDS. And she provided the molecular biology necessary for the second-generation blood test for HIV. She was the most-cited female scientist of the 1980s, with nearly 7,800 citations, according to an October 1990 article in The Scientist.

Concerning her earliest days at the NIH, Bob Gallo said: “She came as a postdoc, and she was the best I ever saw — before, during, or after. She was really sharp in things I needed to be sharper in. We talked every day.” Bob added that, as a result of Flossie’s presence in his lab during the 1970s, “we became among the most productive labs in the 20th century.” Genoveffa Franchini, a senior investigator in the NCI Vaccine Branch, was a postdoc in Flossi’s lab in those heady days of the 1980s. She noted that Flossi’s command of molecular biology was a key reason why Bob and others at the NIH could move so quickly on HIV research.

Flossie was lured away from the NIH in 1990 by the University of California, San Diego, where she would start the Center for AIDS Research. Her research thereafter focused on therapeutic approaches to thwarting HIV, primarily by gene therapy and ribozymes. She had an entrepreneurial spirit, and while at UCSD she co-founded a biopharmaceutical company called Immusol. She retired from UCSD in 2002 and became Chief Scientific Officer for Immusol, which she renamed to iTherX Pharmaceuticals with her husband, Jeffrey McKelvy, a few years later when their research interest turned to finding better drugs for hepatitis C.

Flossie was born Yee Ching Wong in Guangzhou, China, in 1946. In 1952, her family joined the many who had fled to Hong Kong after the Chinese communist revolution. She attended a Catholic school there, where American nuns teaching at the school asked her to choose an English name. As Flossie tells it, she wanted something distinctive, so she asked her father, who suggested Flossie, the name of a massive typhoon that had recently hit the region.

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