How did you become an Aids researcher? I was infected by the virus in September 1983 and became extremely sick for one week. In 1984 I joined a study at UCLA – the University of California Los Angeles – where I lived in LA California. This was a branch of the MACS Study, the largest study in the world on how HIV is transmitted from one person to another and how it progresses in the body and brain. The MACS study started with 5,500 people and is still going 28 years later. They still take my blood and give me a number of tests every time I go back to Los Angeles, even though I now live in Johannesburg, South Africa.           In 1985 scientists finally developed a test for HIV and because I was in this study I was among the first few thousand people in the world tested for this infection. When the MACS study nurse informed me I was HIV positive and told me I had been positive since I joined the study in April of 1984she added, “You know, t...