Mathilde Krim, a scientist turned AIDS activist, dies at 91
She helped strip AIDS of stigma
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Harrison Smith.
Mathilde Krim — a geneticist, virologist and AIDS activist — died Jan. 15 at her home in Kings Point, N.Y., at 91. She left behind a legacy of stripping AIDS of its stigma and turning its treatment into a national cause.
Early life
- Dr. Krim was born in Como, Italy, on July 9, 1926, and raised in Geneva.
- She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in genetics from the University of Geneva in 1948 and received a doctorate from the school in 1953.
- The scientist helped develop a method for determining an infant’s sex before birth.
- Her first marriage ended in divorce. Dr. Krim’s second marriage — to politically connected movie mogul Arthur Krim — happened in 1958. He died in 1994.
- Dr. Krim joined what is now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as a research scientist in 1962 and remained there for more than two decades, leaving in the mid-1980s to focus on her nonprofit organizations.
AIDS activism
Dr. Krim was researching the possible treatment of leukemia with interferon, a protein and antiviral agent, when in 1980 a physician friend told her he was seeing a set of unusual symptoms affecting gay men in New York. Their lymph nodes were enlarged, as were their spleens, but the men appeared to be free of disease.
As Dr. Krim and the physician, Joseph Sonnabend, began testing blood samples, their patients started to die — marking some of the first reported deaths of an American epidemic and what has since become a global health crisis.
“I was struck by the totally misguided stigma — obviously due to age-old prejudice and to ignorance of biological facts — that was being attached to the disease,” Dr. Krim later said, recalling AIDS’s early designation as “gay cancer” or “the gay plague.”
Dr. Krim had been known as the “Interferon Queen” for her single-minded research into the protein’s medical potential, but quickly pivoted to research of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The disease was found to be spread by a virus, HIV, and while early patients were often gay or drug addicts, Dr. Krim worked to dispel a broad misconception that it was confined to patients of a certain sexual orientation or social status.
With a $100,000 donation from her husband, she co-founded the AIDS Medical Foundation in New York in 1983. The organization merged with a similar California-based group two years later to form Amfar, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and adopted its current name in 2005 in a nod to its increasingly global scope. She was chairman of the organization’s board until 2004.
“Mathilde did carry AIDS into the social mainstream,” wrote the late Allan Rosenfield, a women’s health advocate and dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “She saw that AIDS would demand the intellectual resources of the fields of medicine, basic science and public health, and she set out to bring them to Amfar to guide its research grantmaking, overturning many stereotypical notions of gay men in the process.”
Other achievements
- She spearheaded legislation that increased federal funding for research into the disease.
- She called for expanded access to experimental drugs and promoted the use of condoms and needle exchanges in an effort to limit the disease’s spread.
- She also enlisted a group of celebrities who helped make AIDS a popular cause across the country. Working with actors such as Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Woody Allen and Joan Rivers, she organized gala events and fundraisers that raised millions of dollars.
President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2000.
She is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Daphna Krim of Bethesda, Md.; a sister; and two grandchildren.
