10 Female Scientists of Color You Should Know

Flossie Wong-Staal (Photo via National Cancer Institute/Bill Branson)

Flossie Wong-Staal

Born Yee Ching-Wong, Flossie Wong-Staal is a Chinese-American virologist and molecular biologist. As a young child, she emigrated to Hong Kong in the late 1940s, after the rise of communism in China. During her childhood in Hong Kong, she excelled in the sciences, to such an extent that her teachers encouraged her to continue her studies in the United States. Those same teachers urged her family to pick an English name for their daughter, in order to help her transition more easily into American society. Her father chose “Flossie”, after a storm that had recently moved through the region.

After graduating high school, Flossie Wong-Staal attended UCLA, where she would earn a bachelor’s degree in bacteriology and a Ph.D. in molecular biology. She continued postdoctoral work at UC San Diego and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

At NCI, she began researching retroviruses, a class of viruses that reproduce through reverse transcription. In 1983, Wong-Stall and her team of scientists identified HIV as the cause of AIDS, simultaneously with French virologist Luc Montagnier.

Wong-Staal would later become the first scientist to clone HIV, and developed a complete genetic map of the virus. Her work made it possible for HIV tests to be developed and implemented throughout the world.

By the 1990s, she had moved back to UCSD, where she focused on gene therapy trials for HIV patients. In 1994, she became the first chairman of UCSD’s Center for AIDS Research. After her 2002 retirement from UCSD, she became Chief Scientific Officer of Immusol, a biopharmaceutical company she had co-founded. After realizing the need for better hepatitis C treatments, Wong-Staal shifted the focus of the company and renamed it iTherX Pharmaceuticals. She remained a Research Professor at UCSD.

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