--- description: Glenda Gray is on the TIME 100 2017 list. Siobhan O'Connor wrote about the scientist. title: Glenda Gray by Siobhan O'Connor: TIME 100 image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte741596e7df6c945/6988c3437cdbacfe7fd57f1d/time-100-2017-glenda-gray-2.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Apr 19, 2017 # Glenda Gray by Siobhan O'Connor  Glenda Gray, president of the country's Medical Research Council, speaks to the press on on November 30, 2016 in Shoshaguve, near Pretoria, as South Africa launched a major clinical trial of an experimental vaccine against the AIDS virus, which scientists hope could be the "final nail in the coffin" for the disease. More than 30 years of efforts to develop an effective vaccine for HIV have not borne fruit, but for the first time since the virus was identified in 1983, scientists think they have found a promising candidate. The new study, known as HVTN 702, will involve more than 5,400 sexually active men and women aged 18-35 in 15 areas around South Africa over four years. / AFP / MUJAHID SAFODIEN (Photo credit should read MUJAHID SAFODIEN/AFP/Getty Images) Glenda Gray, president of the country's Medical Research Council, speaks to the press on on November 30, 2016 in Shoshaguve, near Pretoria, as South Africa launched a major clinical trial of an experimental vaccine against the AIDS virus, which scientists hope could be the "final nail in the coffin" for the disease. More than 30 years of efforts to develop an effective vaccine for HIV have not borne fruit, but for the first time since the virus was identified in 1983, scientists think they have found a promising candidate. The new study, known as HVTN 702, will involve more than 5,400 sexually active men and women aged 18-35 in 15 areas around South Africa over four years. / AFP / MUJAHID SAFODIEN (Photo credit should read MUJAHID SAFODIEN/AFP/Getty Images)Photograph by Mujahid Safodien—AFP/Getty Images It can be easy to forget that until recently, HIV was a disease you didn’t talk about. Ironically, that’s what inspired Dr. Glenda Gray to study the virus in the first place. As a young medical student who fought to desegregate hospitals in apartheid-era South Africa, she was alarmed when she started seeing babies dying of a virus that her own government claimed wasn’t causing AIDS. That’s when the pediatrician in training learned firsthand that with HIV, you’re fighting a battle on two fronts: you’re up against a vicious virus—and the stigma that allowed it to proliferate, unchecked, for so long. Gray decided to fight the virus and the silence around it through research. Thanks in part to her work on mother-to-child transmission, the number of babies born with HIV has dropped from 600,000 a year to 150,000\. Now, she’s set her sights on a way to inoculate infants before they’re ever put at risk. Her ongoing HIV-vaccine study is the largest of its kind ever conducted in South Africa, and with it, Gray is once again doing her part to make sure that the science of HIV—and the conversation around it—never stops evolving. _O’Connor is an executive editor at TIME_ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/2017-time-100/4742691/glenda-gray/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/2017-time-100/4742691/glenda-gray/"},"headline":"Glenda Gray","datePublished":"2017-04-19T18:27:26.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-02T23:20:57.901Z","description":"Glenda Gray is on the TIME 100 2017 list. 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