"He had in his lab previous work that was necessary to isolate the virus and others followed in his footsteps and duplicated what he had done."
Gallo and Montagnier have published joint papers sharing credit for discovering HIV. And as far back as 1986, they also shared the prestigious Lasker Award. The citation given then outlined why they were honored: Montagnier was praised for his role in detecting the virus later identified as causing AIDS and Gallo for determining HIV was the cause of AIDS.
Dr. Bernard Poiesz, who worked in Gallo's lab from 1978 through 1981, said yesterday that because the first discovery was the Frenchman's, the Nobel should be too.
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.
"This is all built upon many, many people's work over the years," Poiesz said. "But if you restrict it to the word discovery, then that award goes to the French."
Dr. Samuel Broder, the NCI's director from 1989 to 1995, worked closely with Gallo. Yesterday, he called him "a brilliant revolutionary investigator" whose work with HIV led to the discovery of lifesaving drugs that significantly shrunk the AIDS death rate, which rose sharply through the early 1990s until new drug therapies came on the market in the middle part of the decade.
"What you have to ask yourself is what would have happened if Gallo were not around - those curves would have shot right up," said Broder, who is now the chief medical officer for Celera Genomics in Rockville. "Symbolically, Gallo is in the room whenever any AIDS patient is getting retrovirus therapy. Those facts speak for themselves."
But Broder stopped short of saying whether he thought Gallo deserved the ultimate prize for his work.
"In terms of how you assign accolades and who gets to become a Nobel laureate, that's not for me to say," he said. "The larger issue is, Bob Gallo and his group transformed medicine in the totality of their work in human retrovirus. Their discoveries are responsible in a dramatic shift in the death rate in this country on HIV; without them, it would not have happened."
Many in the field of AIDS research said it was about time that the discoverers of the AIDS virus were recognized with a Nobel Prize. Some said they suspect it took all these years because of the debate among the players in what one called "the major new discovery of our lifetime."
"There had to be something holding it up," said Dr. John Bartlett, a professor of infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "I always assumed it was the controversy that made the Nobel Prize group uncomfortable in coming down one way."
