Leading AIDS Researcher, ‘Always Traveling,’ Is Killed on His Way to a Conference

Leading AIDS Researcher, ‘Always Traveling,’ Is Killed on His Way to a Conference

AMSTERDAM — As the airport lounge filled with passengers waiting to board Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a renowned professor rushed to the gate while texting a colleague, saying that he was “superbusy.”

Veering into the business-class line, Joep Lange, an AIDS researcher, passed a former election observer who had just returned from Ukraine. They were among 298 passengers and crew aboard the flight, which was shot down over Ukraine on Thursday.

The disaster claimed the lives of a number of people headed to theInternational AIDS Conference, scheduled to begin on Sunday in Melbourne, Australia, the International AIDS Society said on Friday. Dr. Lange, 59, was accompanied by his partner, Jacqueline van Tongeren, 64. He was the executive scientific director of theAmsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development, and she worked as a communications director there.

The World Health Organization confirmed on Friday that Glenn Thomas, 49, a communications officer, had also been aboard the plane. So had Pim de Kuijer, 32, a Dutch AIDS activist and former European Commission diplomat.

“We are bracing ourselves to hear of the deaths of others who worked in the AIDS response,” Michel Sidibé, executive director of Unaids, the United Nations agency fighting the disease, said in a statement. “The deaths of so many committed people working against H.I.V. will be a great loss.”

At a White House news conference on Friday, President Obama said, “These were men and women who had dedicated their own lives to saving the lives of others, and they were taken from us in a senseless act of violence.”

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Obama Memorializes AIDS Researchers

Obama Memorializes AIDS Researchers

The president honored the AIDS researchers and workers heading to an international conference aboard the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

News of the crash greeted other AIDS researchers as they made connections in Sydney and elsewhere. The apprehension and grief were “enormous and pervasive,” Dr. Mike McCune, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an email.

After checking into his hotel in Melbourne, Dr. McCune went for a run and returned to find scientists from all over the world milling about the lobby, many in tears.

Dr. Lange, a former president of the AIDS society, began researching the epidemic in 1983 and had worked at the World Health Organization, heading clinical research and drug development in the mid-1990s. Even before the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria or the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief were created, Dr. Lange was a major advocate of affordable drugs for AIDS patients in poor countries.