Pioneering South African AIDS researcher Joseph Sonnabend dies at 88 (Photo Credit: Simon Watney, Kent, UK via Facebook) LONDON, UK – Pioneering AIDS researcher and clinician Joseph Sonnabend, 88, died January 24, 2021 at London’s famed Wellington Hospital after suffering a heart attack on January 3, 2021. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to a physician mother and university professor father, Joseph Adolph Sonnabend grew up in Bulawayo, in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He trained in infectious diseases at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. In the 1960s, Sonnabend worked in London under Alick Isaacs, the co-discoverer of interferon, at the National Institute of Medical Research. In the early 1970s, he moved to New York City to continue interferon research as associate professor at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Sonnabend later served as Director of Continuing Medical Education at the Bureau of VD Control at the New York City Department of Health, where he advocated for a focus on gay men’s health, particularly programs to reduce sexually-transmitted infections.