Nobel awarded in AIDS, cancer work

Foundation backs French in dispute with American

Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier of France and German professor Harald zur Hausen were hailed for the discoveries of the viruses causing HIV and cervical cancer. (Getty Images)

Two French researchers who discovered the human AIDS virus and a German scientist who showed that human papilloma virus causes cervical cancer were awarded yesterday the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The decision effectively ends the long-running dispute between Frenchman Luc Montagnier and American Dr. Robert Gallo, concluding that Montagnier and his colleague Francoise Barre-Sinoussi were the rightful discoverers of the virus, which is now carried by more than 33 million people worldwide.

The other half of the $1.4 million prize was awarded to Dr. Harald zur Hausen of the University of Dusseldorf for discovery of the viruses that cause genital warts and are responsible for an estimated 500,000 cases of cervical cancer each year.

"I'm not prepared for this," Zur Hausen, 72, said. "We're drinking a little glass of bubbly right now."

Montagnier, 76, is director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention in Paris; Barre-Sinoussi, 61, is at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where the discovery was initially made.

Barre-Sinoussi received word of the prize in Cambodia, where she is doing research, while Montagnier was in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, delivering a lecture.

Their work was honored, the Nobel citation said, because never before have "science and medicine been so quick to discover, identify the origin, and provide treatment for a new disease entity."

Montagnier and Gallo conducted a bitter public dispute over discovery of HIV in the 1980s, with each claiming that the other had misused viral samples.

At stake was not only scientific primacy for the discovery of the virus but also millions of dollars in licensing fees from tests used to detect HIV infections in patients.

The dispute was so contentious that then-president Reagan and French prime minister Jacques Chirac eventually stepped in in 1987, negotiating an agreement that divided the royalties equally.

In 1991, however, further studies showed that the virus isolated by Gallo was identical to Montagnier's and different from the viruses carried by the patients Gallo said he isolated it from. Three years later, the US government conceded that the French researchers should receive the lion's share of royalties from the AIDS test, affirming Montagnier's role.

The Nobel citation did not mention Gallo's role, noting only that "after the discovery of the virus, several groups contributed to the definitive demonstration of HIV as the cause" of AIDS.

Gallo said yesterday that he was disappointed by the foundation's rejection of his role.

Montagnier said he wished Gallo had shared in the award. "It is certain that he deserved this as much as us two," he said.

Zur Hausen's work was far less controversial, although his proposal that human papilloma virus, or HPV, causes cervical cancer was initially disparaged by other researchers.

But he reasoned that if the virus played such a role, its genes would be incorporated into those of tumor cells, and he spent more than a decade looking for evidence of that incorporation. That search was complicated by the fact that only segments of the virus made it into the tumor DNA.

After a decade of searching, in 1984 he found that one strain, called HPV-16, was in some tumors. The following year, he showed that a second strain, HPV-18, was in others. He cloned the two viruses and made them available to other researchers.