Flossie Wong-Staal

Chinese American virologist and molecular biologist (1946–2020)

Wong Staal was born as Wong Yee Ching in Guangzhou, China, in 1946. The third child in her family of four, she grew up with two brothers and a sister. In 1952, her family was among the many Chinese citizens who fled to Hong Kong after the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. During her time in Hong Kong, Wong attended Maryknoll Convent School, where she excelled in science. Although no women in her family had ever worked outside the home or studied science, her parents supported her academic pursuits. Throughout her time at the school she was encouraged by many of her teachers to further her studies in the United States. Her teachers also suggested she change her name to something in English. Her father chose the name "Flossie" for her after a massive typhoon that had struck Southeast Asia around this time. Two years later, Wong Staal became the first researcher to clone HIV. She also completed genetic mapping of the virus which made it possible to develop HIV tests. This led to the first genetic map of the virus, which aided in the development of blood tests for HIV. In 1990, Wong Staal was recruited from NCI to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where she started the Center for AIDS Research. Wong Staal continued her research into HIV/AIDS at UCSD. Wong Staal's research focused on gene therapy, using a ribozyme "molecular knife" to repress HIV in stem cells. The protocol she developed was the second to be funded by the United States government. In 1990 a team of researchers led by Wong Staal studied the effects that the Tat protein within the viral strain HIV 1 would have on the growth of cells found within Kaposi's sarcoma lesions commonly found in AIDS patients. The team of researchers performed tests on a variety of cells that carried the Tat protein and observed the rate of cell proliferation in cells infected by HIV 1 and the control, a culture of healthy human endothelial cells. Wong Staal used a type of cellular analysis known as radioimmunoprecipitation in order to detect the presence of KS lesions in cells with varying amounts of the Tat protein. The results of these tests showed that the amount of Tat protein within a cell infected by HIV 1 is directly correlated to the amount of KS lesions a patient may have. These findings were essential in developing new treatments for HIV/AIDS patients who suffer from these dangerous lesions.

In 1994, Wong Staal was named as chairman of UCSD's newly created Center for AIDS Research. In that same year, Wong Staal was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the U. S. National Academies, and to Taiwan's Academia Sinica. In 2002, Wong Staal retired from UCSD and accepted the title of professor emerita. She then joined Immusol, a biopharmaceutical company that she co founded with her second husband, Jeffrey McKelvy, while she was at UCSD, as chief scientific officer. Recognizing the need for improved drugs for hepatitis C (HCV), she transitioned Immusol to an HCV therapeutics focus and renamed it Pharmaceuticals. That same year, Discover named Wong Staal one of the fifty "most extraordinary women scientists". In 2007, The Daily Telegraph heralded Wong Staal as #32 of the "Top 100 Living Geniuses". For her contributions to science, the Institute for Scientific Information named Wong Staal "the top woman scientist of the 1980s". In 2019, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Scientist magazine named her one of the "ten superstars of science" in 1990. This was due to her being part of the team that discovered HIV and her effort of successfully cloning the HIV virus which led to its genetic mapping and the ability to screen blood for HIV.

In 1971, while doing her PhD at the UCLA, she married a fellow student, oncologist Stephen P. Staal. The couple had two daughters (Stephanie and Vega Staal), before divorcing around 1990. Wong Staal later re married to neurologist Jeffrey McKelvy, with whom she founded Immusol. She had four grandchildren. Wong Staal died on July 8, 2020, at the age of 73, at Jacobs Medical Center in La Jolla, due to complications caused by pneumonia.