By Stephanie Desmon AND KELLY BREWINGTON and Kelly Brewington , stephanie.desmon@baltsun.com and kelly.brewington@baltsun.com|October 07, 2008
Twenty-five years after the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS, two French researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday for their role in that scientific breakthrough.
Perhaps more notable than who won the award is who did not: Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the University of Maryland virologist who has long been credited as a co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus and whose early work led to a blood test for HIV that is believed to have saved millions of lives.
Though many in the field said they thought that a long-simmering debate over Gallo's exact role in the initial discovery had been settled and that Gallo and the French team should share credit, the Nobel committee apparently felt differently. Some scientists said yesterday that Gallo deserved to at least split medicine's highest honor.
FOR THE RECORD
Because of an editing error, an article in yesterday's editions incorrectly said that Dr. Robert C. Gallo's Institute of Human Virology is part of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. It is part of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
The Baltimore Sun regrets the error.
"The people who won the prize are very deserving," said Dr. John E. Niederhuber, director of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, where Gallo did his AIDS research. "But it seems strange to have left Bob out."
The award was shared this year among three scientists, with half of the award going to a German virologist, Harald zur Hausen, who discovered that the human papilloma virus causes cervical cancer, and half to the two French AIDS pioneers.
"We gave the prize for the discovery of the virus. The two to whom we gave the prize, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, discovered the virus," Hans Joernvall of the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, which awards the prize, told Agence France-Presse.
Acknowledging that Gallo had "done a lot of other work" in the field, Joernvall noted that he and the two French scientists now "agree that the discovery was made in Paris."
But Montagnier, who has been a colleague and rival of Gallo's for decades, said the American researcher should have been recognized.
"It is certain that he deserved this as much as us two," Montagnier told the Associated Press in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he is attending an international AIDS conference.
Gallo, who runs the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute in Baltimore, told an AP reporter who woke him at home early yesterday that he was "disappointed." He later left for South Africa and could not be reached for further comment, but he released a statement congratulating the French scientists.
