On Friday it was discovered that Dr. Joep Lange, former President of the International AIDS Society from 2002 to 2004, was aboard the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and is presumed to be dead along with 100 other AIDS researchers. They were on their way to the International AIDS Conference in Australia.
According to emails exchanged with delegates in Sydney, Australia, it is believed around 100 AIDS researchers and scientists were aboard the flight that was shot down by a surface-to-air missile on Thursday. Joep Lange, a Dutch clinical researcher and leading AIDS expert, was the director of the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development. A World Health Organization communications officer, Glenn Thomas, is also presumed dead.
The International AIDS Conference is set to take place between July 20-25 in Melbourne, Australia, where Lange and the other researchers were going to take a connecting airline after Flight 17 landed in Kuala Lumpur. The Australian newspaper reported that up to 108 delegates to the conference are believed to be dead. These people were considered the "brightest and best minds" in HIV/AIDS research, especially Lange, who spent over 30 years researching and fighting the virus.
According to Lange's biography on the Amsterdam Institute's for Global Health and Development website, he is known as "the architect and principal investigator of several pivotal trials on antiretroviral therapy and on the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V. in both the developed and developing world." Lange also worked for the World Health Organization in the mid-1990s.
Trevor Stratton is a Canadian HIV researcher who is attending the AIDS conference in Melbourne and he spoke with reporters about Lange and the researchers who were lost in the plane crash.
"What if the cure for AIDS was on that plane? Really? We don't know," he said in this Independent article. "There were some really prominent researchers that have been doing this for a very long time and we're getting close to vaccines and people are talking about cures and the end of AIDS. And you can't help but wonder what kind of expertise was on that plane."
You can read more about the death of Joep Lange and the other AIDS researchers in this New York Times article.
