 Meet Dr. Frank Plummer, renowned HIV researcher and the former head of the National Microbiology Lab of Canada. We asked him about his start as a researcher, how he became an expert on AIDS, and when he took over the lab. This goes way back to 1984, basically, when I went to Kenya as a university medical faculty member to kind of build our research project there. We were interested in sexually transmitted diseases, and my contribution was to try to study immunity to diseases like gonorrhea. And I thought the best way to do that was to study people who were frequently exposed to gonorrhea and got it frequently. And that was female sex workers. When we got around to testing these women for HIV, we found that two thirds of them were more infected with the virus. Which was a complete shock. We had no knowledge that there was any AIDS in Kenya at all. And that really reoriented what we were doing. So the project rapidly evolved into an HIV research project rather than a research project on gonorrhea, although we continued to do that work. And that's kind of how I got into HIV. Our project happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I often sort of say that AIDS kind of fell on me. So when I took over the National Microbiology Lab, my goal was to help further the vision that the people that built it had of being the best in the world, and attracting the best in the world. So I think the expectations are always set very high. It's not only me that set them, but the people that built the lab that set them high. And there's an environment, I think partly that I helped create, but partly because the lab was the best in the world, that people came there with the idea that they're working the best facility in the world. And morale is extremely high because of that, because of the environment. We have received a lot of support from the government of Canada through the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and other organizations. And we were fortunate enough to get to one of the Gates Grand Challenge projects a number of years ago, which allowed us to do a lot of work. And I'd like to tell a story about the building of the bioinformatics capacity. I didn't really even know what bioinformatics was. I'm still not much about it, but I knew that there was a need for bioinformatics expertise at the lab. So I hired a young bioinformatician from the University of Alberta, and I was happy with him coming on board and, you know, tried to support him. And kind of saw him in the hallways every once in a while and said, hi, Gary, how's it going? That kind of thing. But it didn't really follow his work that closely. And then a couple of years later, he was giving a presentation at the annual Public Health Agency of Canada Science Meeting. And he put up these slides of this supercomputer that he built in the basement, essentially. And he was at a point where the US CDC was sending him genomic information to analyze because they didn't have the capability of analyzing it. So I guess what I tried to do as a director of the lab is basically set people free to do their jobs. And I tried to run interference for them and get them the money that they needed to do their jobs well. And it worked.