Ari Daniel

After returning to Johannesburg, she says the official stop work orders arrived from Washington just weeks before the trial was to begin.

Everything came to a sudden halt.

All the money was gone.

And remember Linda Gale Becker from the top of the episode?

That's the one.

She says when the funding collapsed, she cycled through the stages of grief.

But soon, this team of researchers decided that they needed to find a different way forward.

A period of frantic grant writing began, and finally they got funding from the South African Medical Research Council and the Gates Foundation.

No, they couldn't raise that much, but they did get about $2.2 million.

Of course.

The new grant was focused inside South Africa only.

And that meant that they had to sacrifice studying how the vaccine might work against different versions of the virus within different African populations.

Here's Penny Moore again.

Despite having to reduce the scope of the grant, though, Penny told me that HIV vaccine research is farther along than it's ever been.

You know it.

It contains all those samples that those 117 women have donated over the years.

including why the virus is so skilled at evading our body's defenses.

But remarkably, in the blood of a few of these women, something pretty special surfaced after they became infected with HIV.

Penny tells me in her office it's something called a broadly neutralizing antibody.

Does it wear a cape?