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Nature Medicine 9, 158 (2003)
doi:10.1038/nm0203-158

Peter Piot

Karen Birmingham1

  1. London


By the time this issue of Nature Medicine reaches you, a new director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO) will have been appointed. That person may be Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and a man respected throughout the global HIV community for making progress towards combating the AIDS epidemic. Piot talked to Nature Medicine during the run-up to the election.


Like Peter Piot, all of the contenders for the job of director general of WHO have a medical degree. But none of the other candidates is a scientist—unlike Piot, who has excellent research credentials and is, in fact, credited with co-discovering the Ebola virus.