Dr. Benjamin Young knows what it’s like to confront a pandemic early in one’s medical career but in his case, we’re talking about AIDS, not COVID-19. Trained as an enzymologist, Young was studying drug resistance in cancer cells, but he quickly pivoted to become an HIV specialist when AIDS surfaced in the U.S. “You would have to have a heart made of a lump of coal not to understand the human spectrum and burden of what it meant to live and die of AIDS,” says Young, who is now the Head of Global Medical Directors for ViiV Healthcare, a pharmaceutical company focused on advancements in research and development of new medicines for people living with HIV. After decades of work in science, medicine, policy development and human rights, Young sees all of these fields as being very closely connected. “The distance between discovery in the basic science lab, what happens in the clinic, what happens in therapeutics, what happens at the governmental level and what happens in a social, racial, or judicial justice environment is very short.” Join Young and host Jannah Amiel to learn about the current state of the global AIDS fight, and lessons from the long HIV journey that can apply to today’s struggle with COVID and pandemic battles yet to come.

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