Posted Monday, October 06, 2008 9:28 AM
The Shocking Medicine Nobel
Sharon Begley

It’s rare for the announcement of a Nobel prize in science to make
researchers utter a collective “holy ****” (insert favorite expletive
here), but the mandarins of Stockholm have managed to do it this
morning. They awarded half the prize in medicine/physiology to German
biologist Harald zur Hausen of the University of Düsseldorf for his
discovery of human papilloma viruses, which cause cervical cancer. No
controversy there: the work “went against current dogma,” the Nobel
committee says in its statement, and led to “an understanding of
mechanisms of HPV-induced carcinogenesis and the development of
prophylactic vaccines” such as Gardasil.

But the other half of the prize went to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and
Luc Montagnier for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency
virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS. Without equivocation, the Nobel
committee credits the two with the 1983 discovery of HIV in
lymphocytes from patients in the early stages of what would soon be
recognized as AIDS, and in blood from patients with late stage
disease. The discovery, of course, led to the AIDS test and to tests
to screen blood for HIV, limiting the spread of the pandemic. “The
unprecedented development of several classes of new antiviral drugs is
also a result of knowledge of the details of the viral replication
cycle,” the Nobel citation adds.

The shock is not who is included but who is left out: Robert Gallo.

In the United States, at least, Gallo (then at NIH, now at the
University of Maryland) was and is widely credited with co-discovering
HIV. Uncounted web sites, books and articles assert that Gallo “is
considered the co-discoverer, along with Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur
Institute, of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV),” as a PBS site
puts it. “Gallo established that the virus causes acquired
immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), something which Montagnier had not
been able to do, and he developed the blood test for HIV, which
remains a central tool in efforts to control the disease.”

The Nobel committee disagrees, and it is not the only one. Gallo was
accused of scientific misconduct in his early work on isolating and
identifying the AIDS virus. The allegations, chronicled at length by
John Crewdson in The Chicago Tribune and in his 2002 book “Science
Fictions,”, centered on charges that, as Crewdson wrote in 1995, “the
AIDS virus Gallo called HTLV-3B and claimed as his own discovery was
virtually identical, at the genetic level, to the AIDS virus the
French called LAV. As recounted by [a congressional report], the
original focus of the Gallo case was what Gallo’s laboratory did, and
did not do, with a sample of LAV lent to him by Pasteur, and Gallo’s
assertions to the media, in published articles and under oath about
what happened to that sample. When Gallo announced in April 1984 that
he had discovered the virus that causes AIDS, he said his discovery
differed from the French virus and implied that the French LAV might
not be the cause of AIDS. Eventually it became clear that the two
viruses were more alike than any other known pair of AIDS viruses, and
Gallo suggested the French had contaminated their cultures with his
virus. When such a "reverse contamination" proved to be physically
impossible, Gallo proposed that the French patient in whom LAV had
been discovered had been infected by the American patient, never
identified, from whom Gallo's HTLV-3B had come. Gallo dismissed
suggestions that LAV might have contaminated his own virus cultures as
‘the height of outrage,’ declaring that it had been ‘physically
impossible’ for his assistants to grow the LAV sample. These claims,
the [congressional] report says, ‘were not true.’”

The allegations that Gallo committed scientific misconduct were
overturned on appeal. The fight for credit grew so bitter that, in
1987, Presidents Ronald Reagan of the U.S. and Jacques Chirac of
France had to step in, signing an agreement that split royalties from
the AIDS blood test between the two countries. And that’s where the
dispute has stood—until the Nobel committee weighed in with a verdict
that arguably carries more weight among scientists than any other:
Montagnier’s lab, and only Montagnier’s lab, discovered HIV.

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Official Nobel announcement:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2008/press.html

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Posted By: bob8901 (October 6, 2008 at 11:33 AM)
The Nobel committee surely held long deliberations and discussions
about this. I think they came to the correct conclusion. Gallo, while
somewhat helpful to the process, did not take the crucial steps
towards the discovery. Instead, after the French announced their
discovery he descended into political grand standing and theater,
using his official position at the NIH and the help of the Reagan
administration. The reason why many Americans think of Gallo as the
"discoverer" of the HIV is the press conference that Gallo held with
Reagan political appointees, taking credit for the "discovery". There
is no doubt that scientific misconduct by Gallo was white washed and
fuzzified through political support.