...I know I'm responding to a 6 year old post, as well as comments on said post, but for sake of posterity, I'm going to argue that the reason people weren't made aware of Dr. Flossie Wong-Staal's work with HIV is not because she was a woman and a person of color, but because of the massive erasures of public discussion around HIV and AIDS due to homophobia, racism, and ableism fueling the culture of silence and shame around that pandemic overall.
On top of most laypeople not paying attention to big names in things like virology and epidemiology to begin with, let alone the ways in which they are recognized, acknowledged, and awarded by their peers.
If you can't name Dr. Wong-Staal, it is because you did not look. Likewise, if you can't name five scientists who were instrumental in the decades of development of MRNA vaccine technology, PrEP antiretrovirals, and Covid-19 research and treatments, it is because you have not looked.
Maybe for other medical disease and treatment breakthroughs, you didn't have to look-- you might know the names Pasteur, Salk, even Dr. Charles R. Drew. You might know the name Fauci. But that is because these were figures whose prominent medical impacts were, sometimes posthumously, considered "universal" in a way the general public did not care to treat HIV and AIDS.
There is absolutely a gender and racial bias in which scientists get credit for their accomplishments and get their time in the sun, especially while alive. But saying, "The conspiracy around me not knowing about this HIV research is that the discoveries were made by an Asian woman," when the very obvious answer is staring you in the face, that HIV/AIDS was deemed beneath mainstream notice except as a whispered-about boogeyman, "gay cancer," something that "only fags and Haitians get," or a vicious punchline and narrative consequence for stories about chasers, men "on the DL," and IV drug users-- all that does, at best, is reveal your ignorance, and at worst, shows you to perpetuate the bigotries associated with those real world narratives in service of a persecution complex that erases those pandemic victims all over again to serve somebody else's identity politics and optics.
Unless you can crack a medical history book in person right now, name some of those names, or tell me what recent medical research you're currently, actively tracking, you will always be in that state of ignorance, and proudly declaring that information you have free access to (Wikipedia is free! the library is free!) but never bothered to look at in the first place is being deliberately "hidden" from you is the height of willful ignorance, childishness, and an ugly sense of entitlement to being spoonfed data that was never important enough to you to look for in the first place.
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