HIV scientist Kundai Chinyenze: ‘I looked at Mum’s hospital bed and swore: I’m going to become a doctor’

She lost both her parents to Aids as a teenager in Zimbabwe. Nearly three decades later, the medical researcher leads a mission to find a vaccine

As a child, Kundai Chinyenze wanted to become a chemical engineer. Her mother, a nurse, said she should train as a doctor. Chinyenze disagreed, until one day, when she was 16, her mother was admitted to hospital in Harare, capital of Zimbabwe. When Chinyenze went to visit, she heard nurses whispering behind her: “That’s the daughter of the woman with Aids.”

It was the first time Chinyenze, now 44, knew her mother had been infected with HIV. “I was gutted,” she remembers. “All I knew was, ‘you get it, you’re dead.’ I didn’t understand much else beyond that.”

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