Beatrice Hahn

Beatrice H. Hahn (born February 13, 1955) is an American virologist and biomedical researcher best known for work which established that HIV, the virus causing AIDS, began as a virus passed from apes to humans.

She is a professor of Medicine and Microbiology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Beatrice Hahn was born in Munich, Germany on February 13, 1955.

As a child, she was interested in medicine by her father's work as a primary care physician.

He was one of the first doctors in Bavaria to use an X-ray machine, and allowed Beatrice to use some of his medical equipment as she grew up.

Hahn was fascinated by studying urine slides under the microscope, and taking blood samples.

Her ambition to enter medicine dates from this period.

Hahn left home to attend medical school at Technical University Munich, where she earned her M.D. degree in 1981.

She worked as an intern at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1981 to 1982.

She attained her Doctorate in Medicine from Technical University Munich in 1982.

Her doctoral thesis was again influenced by her upbringing and early childhood.

It was at this period that she began to specialise in zoonoses or infections which can be transmitted between species, and their implications for public health.

Hahn had herded and milked cows as a child in her native Bavaria, where cattle were important to the rural economy.

She wondered if human populations might be affected by exposure to bovine viruses.

Her thesis specifically focused on the bovine leukemia virus, a very serious disease in cattle, and its close relationship with the human tumor virus HTLV-1.

After graduating, Hahn began her career with a fellowship from the German Science Foundation in Robert Gallo's National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

She decided to leave Germany because she believed she would have better opportunities for research and for funding in the United States.

Hahn left her home in Germany and started research at the National Cancer Institute on May 1, 1982.

There, she began her research into the origins of HIV/AIDS.

AIDS had just become prevalent in the United States a year before she arrived.

In 1985, she joined the faculty of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and established her own laboratory.

In November 2002, Discover magazine listed Hahn as one of the 50 most important women scientists.

Hahn discovered that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) originated in other primates and spilled over to humans.

Hahn and her research group established that wild-living chimpanzees in southern Cameroon were a natural reservoir of the closely related simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs).

The team developed non-invasive techniques for gathering genetic data.

By making comparisons between the genes of HIV-1 and SIVs, they found that SIVs had originated in apes, and had passed to humans through multiple connections.

The simian versions of the virus (known as SIVcpz in chimpanzees, and SIVgor in gorillas) became the infection named HIV in humans.

Hahn later determined that the malaria parasite also traversed from other primates to humans, in a single event.

She was a co-director of the Center for AIDS Research at UAB from 2003 to 2011.

In 2011, Hahn joined the faculty of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania along with her husband and research partner George Shaw.

Hahn and Shaw also work with CHAVI, a multi-institutional consortium.

Hahn is the lead researcher of CHAVI's Viral Biology Team.

In addition to her work in universities and as a researcher, Hahn is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences.

She is also a member of the advisory board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's HIV/AIDS Program and has served on numerous NIH Counsel groups.

Hahn met Robert Gallo when she was a student at the Technical University of Munich.

He was a virologist and a researcher at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

Most of his research was focused on leukemia, the disease that had taken his sister's life at an early age.

One of the main areas of interest for Gallo was tumor-causing retroviruses.

This sparked the interest of Hahn because Bovine leukemia virus is an example of such a retrovirus.

Hahn's wish to work in Gallo's lab was made possible when she received a fellowship from the German Science Foundation.