Sean Rameswaram

speaker

7,113 appearances 119 recordings 4 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 9 Sep

Sean Rameswaram’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 46 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 11.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Today, Explained · The culture wars turn deadly · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

Well, scientifically, we're in a more exciting time than ever when it comes to developing an effective HIV vaccine.

There are challenges, both in terms of the actual research and obviously the kind of funding environment around it.

But in terms of the scientific roadmap towards getting a truly effective vaccine, researchers have never been more excited than they are today.

Science journalist Ailey Dolgan wrote about it for Vox.

I mean, basically since the day that we discovered the virus over 40 years ago, people have thought, well, it's an infectious agent.

We should try to develop a vaccine.

And pretty quickly, people narrowed in on the obvious target, which is a protein called envelope.

It's the protein on the outside that the virus uses to

kind of latch on to our cells and infect our cells.

And so it seemed like, okay, well, we found the virus.

We found this great target on its surface.

You know, we should be able to get a vaccine.

But here we are 40 plus years later, and it didn't work out that way.

Right.

I mean, as a general consumer of the news, I don't feel like I'm often reading about an HIV vaccine.

What have been the greatest barriers to its success?

I think what scientists realized in recent years is that they kind of needed to go back to the drawing board.

There were several high profile attempts in years past, it's been a while, where they thought, okay, we've got a prototype vaccine, let's put it into large

efficacy trials in Africa or in India and put tons of money and effort and resources into it only for the vaccine to come up empty and fail in those trials.

And so the scientists thought, okay, whatever we're doing isn't working.

Showing 61–80 of 7,113 · page 4 of 356