Ari Daniel

That is correct.

Right here, Nate.

Inside a lab at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg, South Africa.

It's arrayed with, if you can picture it, half a dozen large green and white freezers.

This is Penny Moore.

She's a virologist at the University of Wittwatersrand.

So Penny cracks open the lid of Bashful...

and pulls out a tower of frosty tubes.

These, Nate, are all the samples that have been donated to Penny and her team over and over again for two decades by the same group of 117 South African women.

That's right.

These samples have helped Penny and her team piece together a detailed portrait of the virus over the years, how it infects, how it hides, and how much it changes across different parts of the world, and even within a single individual.

This research has also helped fight other diseases, including COVID-19, RSV, and cancer.

And yet, despite all that, Nate, Penny actually spent much of last year worrying that it might all amount to nothing.

Why?

Well, because just when she and her colleagues were on the brink of an innovative HIV vaccine trial across Africa, the bottom dropped out.

Linda Gale Becker directs the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation in South Africa.

That's a vivid description.

But the team, they steeled their resolve.

They knew the science was sound and the need was urgent.

They insisted on finding a way forward.