Salim “Slim” Abdool Karim: Attacking AIDS in South Africa

When Karim met Nelson Mandela for the second time in 2000, he had his camera in tow, ready to capture a photo of him shaking the hand of his hero. Mandela later wrote the foreword to Karim and his wife's book, HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Karim has witnessed the emergence and exponential growth of the AIDS epidemic in his country, along with the concurrent explosion of tuberculosis. To reverse the epidemic, he is following disease progression, testing treatments and prevention strategies (1), and deciding if and how they can be effective in resource-limited settings (2). By monitoring cytokines and T cell responses in the first weeks after infection, Karim has found that a more naive CD8 + T cell response is better in the long run than a more differentiated response that includes a high frequency of memory T cells (3, 4). These studies also revealed that the initial magnitude of HIV-specific, IFN-␥– producing cells does not predict viral load at one year. By screening people with recent HIV infections, Karim has found that the majority of cytotoxic T cells recognize conserved domains in the Gag protein despite differences in host genetic backgrounds and HIV-1 subtypes. Thus host and viral diversity may not constrain the ability of a vaccine to elicit a universal response (5). Karim leads the Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) and is an epidemiology professor at Columbia University in New York. And now that he's helped to convince the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to establish a new research center for HIV and TB in South Africa, he will be directing a research program there as well. Who gave you the nickname Slim? My schoolteacher. Under apartheid in South Africa, we had to take Afrikaans language classes, which I didn't like because I associated the language with racial oppression. My Afri-kaans teacher once scolded me, " Jy dink jy is slim, " which means, " You think you are so clever? " It stayed with me, as the Afrikaans word " slim, " meaning clever, sounds like Salim. Plus, I was quite rotund then, so the name made [ironic] sense and it stuck. Even as a boy you opposed apartheid? Yes. I was born in Durban, the third largest city in South Africa, and at the age of 10, my family was forced to move out of our house and to …