Colleagues said Gallo was besieged with e-mails and phone calls from scientists around the world, many complaining that an injustice had been done.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, said the Nobel Prize tends to be given to those who first identify a new discovery.
"I don't think it's a critique of Gallo. It's a statement about the very first observation that is made. This is how they decide," he said. "They generally make their decisions based on what they judge to be the first seminal observation as opposed to what came from that discovery. That's their judgment.
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.
"It does not detract from the contributions that Dr. Gallo has made."
The Nobel Prize might not put to rest what at times has been a bitter scientific feud spanning two continents. And Gallo, while seen yesterday in some circles as a victim, has often been a less than sympathetic character, seen as abrasive and self-promoting.
In the early 1980s, Gallo, whose research at NCI had focused on cancer-causing retroviruses, and Montagnier, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, were each working on isolating the AIDS virus. In 1983, Montagnier identified a virus he called LAV but was unable to prove it caused AIDS. Gallo, nearly a year later, published a paper on his virus, called HTLV-3, establishing that it caused AIDS. Gallo is credited with being the first to grow the virus in a lab, which paved the way for HIV testing and the screening of donated blood.
But a controversy erupted soon after Gallo's publication. There were allegations that Gallo's virus was actually Montagnier's and that he had improperly used it without credit to the Frenchman for first isolating the virus.
The dispute triggered investigations by the National Institutes of Health and by Congress. There was a lawsuit. It was finally settled in 1987 by a highly unusual agreement between the United States and France, with a joint announcement by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac.
"I was on the original committee that examined the evidence against Gallo," said Edmund Tramont, who now directs the NIAID's division of AIDS. "We examined all the data and came to the unequivocal conclusion that he did all the work on his own. And that what he discovered and what he wrote, that HIV is a retrovirus that infects T-cells, that it was the cause of AIDS was unequivocal.
