Today marks the 10th installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org titled, Heroes of Progress. This bi-weekly column provides a short introduction to heroes who have made an extraordinary contribution to the wellbeing of humanity. You can find the 9th part of this series here.

Our 10th Heroes of Progress are Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, two French scientists who discovered that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The pair’s discovery has led to the development of medical treatments that slow the progression of HIV and decrease the risk of the virus’ transmission.

Luc Antoine Montagnier was born August 18, 1932, in Chabris, a small commune in Centre-Val de Loire, France. After witnessing his grandfather suffer and eventually die from cancer in his teenage years, Montagnier decided to become a medical researcher and focus on studying cancer. In high school, Montagnier was a bright student, and his passion for science led him to set up a small chemistry laboratory in the cellar of his parents’ house. Looking back on his homemade lab, Montagnier noted, “there, I enthusiastically produced hydrogen gas, sweet-smelling aldehydes and nitro compounds.”

After finishing his preparatory education, Montagnier began studying at the University of Poitiers. Initially, Montagnier wanted to focus on human biology, but as there was no such specialty at Poitiers, Montagnier compromised by enrolling in a science degree. To gain experience in medical research, he spent his mornings working at a local hospital.

In 1953, Montagnier graduated from Poitiers, and soon began studying medicine at the University of Paris. After graduating with a degree in medicine in 1960, Montagnier devoted the early part of his career to studying cancer. He spent the next twelve years working at various medical research institutes in Paris, London, and Glasgow.

In 1972, Montagnier began working at the Pasteur Institute – a Parisian research center focused on studying biology, diseases, and vaccines. Upon arrival, Montagnier set up the institute’s Department of Virology – a research unit dedicated to detecting viruses involved in human cancers. During his time at the Pasteur Institute, Montagnier and his colleague, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, would make their ground-breaking discovery about HIV.

Barre-Sinoussi was born July 30, 1947, in Paris, France. Barre-Sinoussi showed an interest in science from an early age and decided to continue her passion for knowledge at the University of Paris. Like Montagnier, Barre-Sinoussi initially wanted to study medicine. However, as she came from a humble background, she decided to be pragmatic and study natural science. Natural science was a shorter course than a medical degree, which saved her family money in tuition and boarding fees.

After studying at the University of Paris for a couple of years, Barre-Sinoussi began working part-time at the Pasteur Institute. She soon began working full-time at the institute and would only attend the university to take her exams. Barre-Sinoussi received her Ph.D. in 1975. After a brief internship in the United States, she began working with Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute, researching a group of viruses known as retroviruses.

During the 1980’s AIDS epidemic, scientists were perplexed as to what was causing the outbreak of the disease. In 1982, Willy Rozenbaum, a clinician at Bichat-Claude Bernard Hospital in Paris, asked Montagnier for assistance in establishing the cause of this mysterious new disease. Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi began working immediately, and within a year, the pair made the ground-breaking discovery that human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) caused AIDS. Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi published their findings in an article in Science on May 20, 1983.

The pair’s discovery led to many medical breakthroughs that have helped fight against AIDS, including numerous HIV testing and diagnosis technologies and lifesaving antiretroviral therapies.

In 1985, Montagnier became a professor in the Department of AIDS at the Pasteur Institute. In 1993, he established the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Preventions. Since then, Montagnier has worked at various universities, including at Queens College in New York, and more recently, at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

In 1988, Barre-Sinoussi took charge of her own laboratory at the Pasteur Institute and began intensive research trying to create an HIV vaccine. Since 2006, Barre-Sinoussi has worked as the president and then co-chair of the International AIDS Society. Although a vaccine hasn’t yet been discovered, her team continues to research different mechanisms to protect people against HIV infections.

In 2008, Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in discovering HIV as the cause of AIDS. They shared the prize with Harald zur Hausen, who found that human papilloma viruses can cause cervical cancer.

Montagnier has received dozens of awards, including the Lasker Award, Commandeur de l’Order National du Mérite (a French order of merit), and numerous professional honours from countries worldwide. In 2000, he was portrayed on a stamp issued by Bhutan. Similarly, Barre-Sinoussi has received many awards and honorary doctorates, including the Prize of the French Academy of Sciences and the Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur – France’s highest order of merit.

As HumanProgress.org has previously noted, thanks to the discovery of HIV, and the creation of different treatments, humanity is now winning the war on AIDS. Since the peak of the HIV pandemic in the mid-2000s, when some 1.9 million people died of AIDS each year, less than one million people died from the disease in 2017. New infections have also fallen. In the mid-1990s, there were 3.4 million new HIV infections each year, but in 2017, there were only 1.8 million new HIV infections. That’s a decline of 47 percent.

Without Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier’s contributions, humanity’s crusade against AIDS would not be as advanced or successful as it is today, and millions more people would be dying from the virus each year. It is for this reason that Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier are our 10th Heroes of Progress.

Today marks the 33rd installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org titled Heroes of Progress. This bi-weekly column provides a short introduction to heroes who have made an extraordinary contribution to the well-being of humanity. You can find the 32nd part of this series here.

This week our heroes are George Hitchings and Gertrude Elion, two American scientists who pioneered the development of rational drug design. For most of history, the traditional method of drug discovery relied on a trial-and-error approach to determine the effectiveness of different treatments. Contrary to perceived wisdom, Hitchings and Elion’s new method of rational drug design focused on studying the differences between human cells and disease-causing pathogenic cells. From these findings, the method develops specifically-designed drugs to only target harmful pathogens.

Hitchings and Elion’s rational drug design technique has changed the way many new drugs are created, and their method has led to the creation of drugs to fight leukemia, malaria, gout, organ transplant rejection, and rheumatoid arthritis, just to name a few.

George Hitchings was born on April 18, 1905 in Hoquiam, Washington. When Hitchings was just 12 years old, his father died from a prolonged illness and Hitchings later noted that the impact of his father’s death made him want to pursue a career in medicine.

Hitchings graduated from Franklin High School in Seattle in 1923. That same year, he enrolled at the University of Washington to study chemistry. After graduating cum laude in 1927, Hitchings stayed at the University of Washington and obtained his master’s degree in 1928. Hitchings then moved to Harvard University as a teaching fellow and received his PhD in biochemistry in 1933.

Over the next decade Hitchings held several temporary appointments at different institutions. As he later admitted, his career “really began in 1942,” when he joined Wellcome Research Laboratories (now part of GlaxoSmithKline) as Head of the Biochemistry Department. Two years later, Hitchings wanted to hire a research assistant and that is where Gertrude Elion enters our story.

Gertrude Elion was born on January 23, 1918, in New York City. Elion was a bright student, who graduated from high school at just 15 years old. She later enrolled at Hunter College on a full academic scholarship. When Elion was 15 years old, her grandfather died of cancer. Similarly to Hitchings, the death of a loved one led to Elion’s lifelong commitment to a career in medicine.

After graduating from Hunter College with a degree in chemistry in 1937, Elion ran into what she described as a “brick wall.” The Great Depression made jobs very difficult to come by and women looking for jobs in science faced still greater obstacles. Elion later reflected that in the 1930s, few employers took her seriously. After attending job interviews for roles that she was qualified for, interviewers would often say she would be “a distraction” in a lab full of men.

After being rejected by numerous employers and graduate programs, she accepted an unpaid position as a laboratory assistant to a chemist. In 1939, Elion enrolled in a master’s program studying chemistry at New York University. Elion worked as a high school teacher throughout her master’s studies and obtained her M.Sc. in 1941.

In the early 1940s, with many men in the military, new doors opened for women in the sciences. After working as an analytical chemist for a food company, Elion became bored with her work. After a six-month stint in a lab run by Johnson and Johnson, she was hired by Hitchings as his research assistant in 1944.

Hitchings had thought that there must be a more rational approach to drug discovery than the existing trial-and-error method. The pair developed a method of drug design that focused on determining the differences in biochemistry and metabolism between human cells and the disease-causing pathogens. The pair could then design specific chemicals that could kill or inhibit the reproduction of harmful pathogens, without having to harm any healthy human cells.

Using their rational drug design method, Hitchings and Elion successfully developed drugs that are used to treat a variety of different conditions, including leukemia, gout, malaria, meningitis and viral herpes– just to name a few. Researchers around the world quickly copied Elion and Hitchings’s approach to drug design. Within a few years, scientists using the rational drug design method had created medicines to fight the viruses that cause cold sores, chickenpox and shingles. Eventually, they developed azidothymidine (AZT)– the first treatment available for HIV/AIDS.

Elion later wrote, “when we began to see the results of our efforts in the form of new drugs which filled real medical needs and benefited patients in very visible ways, our feeling of reward was immeasurable.”

Later in her career, Elion taught at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1967, when Hitchings became vice president in charge of research at Burroughs-Wellcome, Elion succeeded Hitchings in his old job.

In 1976, Hitchings became Scientist Emeritus at Burroughs-Wellcome. He also served as an Adjunct Professor at Duke University between 1970 and 1985. Elion officially retired in 1983, but like Hitchings, she remained working in the laboratory on a part-time basis as Scientist Emeritus.

Throughout their lives, Hitchings and Elion received dozens of awards and honors. Most notably, they received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988– an award which they shared with Sir James Black, a Scottish pharmacologist. In 1974, Hitchings became a member of the medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.

In 1991, Elion received the National Medal of Science from President George H. W. Bush. That same year, she became the first woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her important work developing a drug called 6-mercaptopurine, which offered new hope in the fight against leukemia. Like Hitchings, Elion also became a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1995. While Elion never received a formal PhD, she was awarded an honorary PhD from Polytechnic University of New York in 1989 and an honorary S.D. degree from Harvard University in 1998.

Hitchings died at the age of 92 in 1998. Elion passed away the following year, aged 81.

The work of Elion and Hitchings fundamentally transformed the conventional trial-and-error method of drug discovery. Their rational drug design method has been used to create dozens of different treatments for an array of life-threatening illnesses. Rational drug design has already saved or prolonged untold millions of lives– a number that will only increase as more drug treatments are developed. For that reason, George Hitchings and Gertrude Elion are our 33rd Heroes of Progress.

Sub-Saharan Africa consists of 46 countries and covers an area of 9.4 million square miles. One out of seven people on earth live in Africa and the continent’s share of the world’s population is bound to increase, because Africa’s fertility rate remains higher than elsewhere. If current trends continue, there will be more people in Nigeria than in the United States by 2050. What happens in Africa, therefore, is important not only to the people who live on the continent, but also to the rest of us.

Africa may be the world’s poorest continent, but it is no longer a “hopeless continent,” as The Economist magazine described it back in 2000. Since the start of the new millennium, Africa’s average per capita income adjusted for inflation and purchasing power parity rose by more than 50 percent and Africa’s growth rate has averaged almost 5 percent per year.

Increasing wealth has led to improvements in key indicators of human wellbeing. In 1999, 58 percent of Africans lived on less than $1.90 per person per day. By 2011, 44 percent of Africans lived on that income – all while the African population rose from 650 million to 1 billion. If the current trends continue, Africa’s absolute poverty rate will fall to 24 percent by 2030.

Life expectancy rose from 54 years in 2000 to 62 years in 2015. Infant mortality declined from 80 deaths per 1,000 live births to 49 deaths over the same time period. When it comes to HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, occurrence, detection, treatment and survival rates have all improved. Food supply exceeds 2,500 calories per person per day (U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends consumption of 2,000 calories) and famines have disappeared outside of warzones. Primary, secondary and tertiary school enrollments have never been higher.

Some of Africa’s growth was driven by high commodity prices, but much of it, a McKinsey study found in 2010, was driven by economic reforms. To appreciate the latter, it is important to recall that for much of their post-colonial history, African governments have imposed central control over their economies. Inflationary monetary policies, price, wage and exchange rate controls, marketing boards that kept the prices of agricultural products artificially low and impoverished African farmers, and state-owned enterprises and monopolies were commonplace.

That began to change after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Socialism lost much of its appeal and the Soviet Union, which bankrolled and protected many African dictatorships, fell apart. Between 1990 and 2013, economic freedom as measured by the Fraser Institute in Canada rose from 4.75 out of 10 to 6.23. Freedom to trade rose even more, from 4.03 to 6.39. Most impressively, Africa has made much progress in terms of monetary policy, or access to sound money, which rose from a low of 4.9 in 1995 to a remarkable 7.27 in 2013.

Africa has made similar strides in terms of microeconomic policy. As the World Bank’s Doing Business report indicates, Africa’s regulatory environment has much improved. Starting a business, for example, has become easier, with Africa’s score rising from 45 out of 100 in 2004 to 72 in 2015. Dealing with construction permits, resolution of insolvencies, enforcement of contracts, access to electricity, the ease of payment of taxes, registering of property and getting of credit, have all much improved.

Unfortunately, there has been no substantial improvement in the quality of Africa’s institutions. According to the Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2016 report, there were only 6 free countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Benin, Botswana, Ghana, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa. While many countries have adopted more “democratic” constitutions that include term limits, and other legislative and institutional checks on the executive branch of government, African rulers have found a way around those provisions in order to maintain power and abuse it.

According to the World Bank, corruption continues to thrive among government officials and, importantly, among members of the judiciary. As a consequence, rule of law indicators for African countries have remained, by and large, unchanged. Yet without efficient and impartial courts, Africa’s economic potential will always remain unfulfilled.

That said, as experience in other regions shows, institutional development tends to lag behind economic reforms. In the medium to long run, growth of the African middle class might yet result in a political awakening and greater assertiveness of the African populace, and eventual democratization of the continent.

The new millennium has been good to Africa, but the continent is still far from being prosperous, let alone democratic. In order for Africa’s economy to go on expanding, Africans will need to continue with their reforms – never forgetting that the world economy keeps on changing and global competition keeps on increasing. That is Africa’s challenge as well as its opportunity.

This piece was first published on CapX.