Mathilde Krim (née Galland) was a geneticist, virologist, and philanthropist whose scientific career and moral urgency helped turn AIDS from a stigmatized mystery into a funded research priority. Born July 9, 1926, in Como, Italy, and dying January 15, 2018, in Kings Point, New York, she is best remembered as founding chairman of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR).
She was the eldest of four children of Eugene Galland, a Swiss Protestant agronomist of Italian ancestry, and Elizabeth Rosa Krause, an Austrian Catholic raised in Czechoslovakia. The family soon settled in Geneva. Her father worked as a municipal public-health official after leaving Fascist Italy. Childhood walks collecting mushrooms and animals with him helped spark her interest in biology. World War II brought shortages even in neutral Switzerland; the family garden and livestock became essential. A 1945 newsreel of liberated Nazi camps shocked her. She later said the images taught her that racism could be murderous—a lesson that shaped every major decision that followed.
Against her father’s preference for secretarial training, she enrolled in biology at the University of Geneva. She earned a license (bachelor’s equivalent) in 1948 and, in 1953, became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in biology from the university. Her doctoral work used electron microscopy to study chromosomes. During these years she worked part-time for a Jewish lawyer handling refugee-visa cases and befriended Palestinian Jewish medical students. She converted to Judaism, married David Danon, a Bulgarian-born Irgun member studying medicine, in 1948, and helped arrange shipments of arms from former French Resistance sources to Zionist fighters. Their daughter Daphna was born in 1951. After her doctorate the family moved to Israel. The marriage ended in divorce a few years later.
From 1953 to 1959 Krim worked at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot under Leo Sachs. The laboratory produced foundational papers on using amniotic-fluid cells to determine fetal sex before birth—work that helped establish amniocentesis and prenatal genetics. She also studied cancer-causing viruses and became skilled at cell culture. In 1957 she met Arthur B. Krim, a New York entertainment lawyer, United Artists executive, later founder of Orion Pictures, Democratic fundraiser, and Weizmann trustee. They married in 1958. She and Daphna moved to Manhattan. Arthur Krim died in 1994.
In New York she resumed laboratory work first at Cornell University Medical School (1959–1962) and then at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. From 1981 to 1985 she directed its interferon laboratory. Interferons—proteins cells release to fight viruses—were then hoped to be a broad anticancer and antiviral therapy. She published extensively on their production, properties, and clinical potential and organized international workshops. The hoped-for panacea never materialized, but the work positioned her to notice a new disease.
When the first cases of what became known as AIDS appeared in 1981, Krim was among the earliest scientists outside government to grasp both the medical emergency and the social danger. Gay men and injection-drug users were dying of opportunistic infections and Kaposi’s sarcoma; official response was slow and often moralizing. Her laboratory began treating Kaposi’s sarcoma patients with interferon. Enraged by stigma and the lack of research funding, she co-founded the AIDS Medical Foundation in April 1983 with physician Joseph Sonnabend and a small group of associates, using $100,000 of her husband’s money. The foundation acted as a “scientific venture capitalist,” giving seed grants to ideas that federal agencies would not yet touch. In 1985 it merged with a California group associated with Elizabeth Taylor to form amfAR. Taylor became founding international chairwoman; Krim served as founding chairman and later board chair (1990–2004). She continued fundraising and advocacy until her death.
amfAR funded basic science, clinical trials, prevention research, and policy work. It supported studies of HIV transmission, community-based trials, and early international grants. Krim used her scientific credentials, social connections, and political access—Arthur Krim had advised Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter—to lobby Congress. She testified on Capitol Hill, allied with Senator Edward Kennedy, and pressed for expanded treatment access and research budgets. She championed needle-exchange programs, condom distribution, and anti-discrimination laws, and opposed mandatory testing that could be used to persecute patients. Celebrities including Elizabeth Taylor, Elton John, and others helped destigmatize the epidemic by making it visible in mainstream culture. Charles Kaiser later wrote that no heterosexual scientist in New York did more to sound the alarm.
Krim also served on presidential commissions on mental retardation and on ethical problems in medicine. She held an adjunct professorship in public health and management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She received 16 honorary doctorates, the 2003 Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged, and, in August 2000, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton for “extraordinary compassion and commitment.” amfAR later created the Mathilde Krim Fellowships in Biomedical Research to support early-career HIV scientists.
Her approach combined laboratory rigor with human-rights conviction formed by the Holocaust and by her own conversion and years in Israel. She hosted fundraisers in her home, kept the organization solvent in lean years, and insisted that science and dignity belonged together. Colleagues described her as generous, loyal, and politically naïve only in the sense that she refused to treat patients as politically inconvenient. Larry Kramer, often critical of institutions, still wrote of “overpowering awe and gratitude that such a person has lived among us.” Harry Belafonte called her one of the great human-rights leaders of the era.
Krim died at 91, survived by her daughter Daphna, two grandchildren, and a sister. By then amfAR had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in research that helped make HIV a manageable chronic condition for millions. The Mathilde Krim Fellowships continue to fund young investigators pursuing prevention, treatment, and cure. Her life traced a consistent line: from a young woman watching newsreels of the camps, to a scientist helping invent prenatal diagnosis, to a public figure who refused to let a new plague be ignored because its first victims were unpopular. That combination of technical skill and moral stubbornness remains her most durable contribution.
In the laboratory at Sloan-Kettering, Krim examined the biology of interferons before turning that same experimental eye on AIDS.
Later in life she remained the public face of amfAR, using celebrity platforms and scientific authority to keep research funded and stigma challenged.