One of the tackiest sagas in the history of medicine unfolded in the decade after HIV was discovered in 1983.
On the face of it, celebrations were in order because it had taken scientists just two years to discover what was causing AIDS after the first cases emerged in 1981.
Instead, the world's public were treated to an interminable squabble between two teams – one in France and one in the US – over who actually discovered the virus, whose test for the virus was patented first, and whether one team had "appropriated" viral samples from the other.
Now, the whole saga has been raked up again because the leaders of one team, but not the other, have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
One team, at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, was led by Robert Gallo. The other, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, was led by Luc Montagnier.
On Monday, Montagnier and his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, shared half the prize. The other half of the prize went to Harald zur Hausen of the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg for a completely unrelated achievement – the discovery that human papilloma viruses (HPV) cause cervical cancer.
So one has to ask: why did the Nobel committee decide against including Gallo?
More ...
