Wong-Staal was born Yee Ching Wong in mainland China in 1947. Her father was a businessman and her mother a homemaker. In 1952 the family fled the Communist mainland and settled in the British colony of Hong Kong, where Yee Ching was enrolled in a Catholic school and her name was changed. The nuns thought that she should have an English name, and her father, who spoke no English, picked Flossie from a newspaper account of Typhoon Flossie, which had hit Hong Kong the week before. "I used to be embarrassed by [it]. Now I'm trying to change the image of the name," Wong-Staal told Discover magazine.

Wong-Staal was an excellent student and did especially well in science and math. About her early years, she told Asian American Biography, "I did not really have a role model in my family when I was growing up. All the women in the family were full-time housewives. Most of the men were in business, and rarely pursued higher (post-college) education." Her family was very supportive of her, however, and "surprisingly, my being female was not an issue with them."

As she excelled in school, Wong-Staal was encouraged to study science further. At first, she was not that interested in it, but the deeper she got into the field, the more fascinating it became to her. After graduating from an all-girls high school in Hong Kong in 1965, Wong-Staal immigrated to the United States to study at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where she chose to focus on molecular biology. She earned her bachelor's degree and then went on to graduate work as a research assistant in bacteriology. She attended the University of California at San Diego for postgraduate work in the same field. It was during this period that she married, adding Staal to her name. (She has since divorced.) In the early 1970s, having completed her schooling, Wong-Staal took a position with the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, where she worked in the field of retroviruses with the prominent researcher Robert Gallo, credited as the co-discoverer of HIV.

Searching for a cause for the newly discovered AIDS epidemic, Gallo, Wong-Staal, and other NCI colleagues identified HIV in 1983, simultaneously with a French researcher. In 1985, Wong-Stall was responsible for the first cloning of HIV. Her efforts also led to the first genetic mapping of the virus, allowing eventual development of tests that screen patients and donated blood for HIV.

In 1990, the Institute for Scientific Information declared Wong-Staal as the top woman scientist of the previous decade. That same year, Wong-Staal returned to the University of California at San Diego to continue her AIDS research. Four years later, the university created a new Center for AIDS Research; Wong-Staal became its chairman. There, she works to find both vaccines against HIV and a cure for AIDS, using the new technology of gene therapy.

LINKS:

1. Wikipedia
2. Immusol
3. Florida State University Research Foundation