Joseph Sonnabend
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Joseph A. Sonnabend MRCP |
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|---|---|
| Born |
6 January 1933 Union of South Africa |
| Alma mater | University of the Witwatersrand (MBBCh) |
| Occupation | Physician and clinical researcher |
| Known for |
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| Website | aidsperspective |
Joseph Adolph Sonnabend (born 6 January 1933) is an Afrikaans physician, scientist and HIV/AIDS researcher, notable for pioneering community-based research, the propagation of safe sex to prevent infection, and an early multifactorial model of AIDS.
As one of the first physicians to notice among his gay male patients the immune deficiency that would later be named AIDS, during the 1980s and 1990s he treated many hundreds of HIV-positive people. During the height of the AIDS crisis, Sonnabend helped create several AIDS organisations, including the AIDS Medical Foundation (now amfAR), the nonprofit Community Research Initiative (now ACRIA), which pioneered community-based research, and the PWA Health Group, the first and largest formally recognised buyers' club.
Sonnabend became controversial for maintaining his view that HIV was not the sole cause of AIDS over a decade after the virus's discovery but he is widely respected as a pioneering and compassionate clinician and researcher.
Joseph Sonnabend was born in 1933 to a physician mother and a university professor father in South Africa. He trained in infectious diseases at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. During the 1960s he conducted research at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, where he worked under Alick Isaacs, a pioneer of interferon research. He is known to have fathered two sons in the 1960s. His sister was Yolanda Sonnabend, the world-renowned theatre designer and artist.
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