QnAs with Jan Svoboda.

HIV belongs to a family of viruses known as retroviruses. The ability of retroviruses to synthesize DNA using their RNA genome as a template distinguishes them from other viruses. The synthesized DNA can then integrate itself into the genome of an infected cell, becoming what is known as a provirus. Jan Svoboda, a cell and molecular biologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, has spent over half a century studying the mechanisms of retrovirus infection. His pioneering work in the 1960s with the Rous sarcoma virus, a retrovirus that causes tumors in chickens, provided some of the first definitive evidence for provirus integration into the host cell genome. In his Nobel lecture, virologist Howard Temin of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who proposed the existence of the provirus in 1960 and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1975, acknowledged Svoboda’s independent proposal of the provirus concept (1). Svoboda recently spoke to PNAS about his scientific work, as well as his experiences as a scientist in the Czech Republic both during and after Communist Rule.