Was Gallo robbed of the Nobel prize?

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Comment: Was Gallo robbed of the Nobel prize?

* Updated 17:55 07 October 2008

* NewScientist.com news service

* Andy Coghlan

One of the tackiest sagas in the history of medicine unfolded in the

decade after HIV was discovered in 1983.

On the face of it, celebrations were in order because it had taken

scientists just two years to discover what was causing AIDS after the

first cases emerged in 1981.

Instead, the world's public were treated to an interminable squabble

between two teams – one in France and one in the US – over who

actually discovered the virus, whose test for the virus was patented

first, and whether one team had " appropriated " viral samples from the

other.

Now, the whole saga has been raked up again because the leaders of one

team, but not the other, have been awarded the Nobel Prize for

Physiology or Medicine.

One team, at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, land, was

led by Gallo. The other, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, was

led by Luc Montagnier.

On Monday, Montagnier and his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi,

shared half the prize. The other half of the prize went to Harald zur

Hausen of the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg for a

completely unrelated achievement – the discovery that human papilloma

viruses (HPV) cause cervical cancer.

So one has to ask: why did the Nobel committee decide against

including Gallo?

Twin 'discoveries'

In the information sent to journalists, the Nobel Foundation says that

Montagnier's team isolated the virus we now call HIV-1 in 1983. They

found it in samples of white blood cells extracted from the lymph

nodes of Frederic Brugiere, a French fashion designer with AIDS, and

called it lymphadenopathy associated virus (LAV).

On 20 May 1983, Montagnier's team had its discovery published in

Science (vol 220, p 868).

Not until a year later, on 4 May 1984, did Gallo's team report that

they too, had discovered the virus that causes AIDS, again in Science

(vol 224, p 500) . His team called its virus HTLV-IIIB, standing for

human T-cell leukaemia/lymphoma virus type IIIB.

Many years, and many rumours later, in June 1991, Gallo finally

admitted that the AIDS virus he had " discovered " in 1984 really came

from the Pasteur Institute – in fact, from the lymph nodes of Frederic

Brugiere himself (see this wonderful account of the saga by our

medical reporter of the time, Phyllida Brown, which details the

National Institutes of Health investigation that cleared Gallo of

stealing the French strain.

'Contaminated' cultures

So HTLV-IIIB and LAV were one and the same, and both came from the

same sample. Between 1983 and 1984, the two teams did regularly swap

samples, but quite how the crucial sample ended with a " discovery " in

Gallo's lab has never been fully explained.

In a letter to the journal Nature in 1991 admitting that the crucial

sample had come from France, Gallo said that it appeared to have come

from contamination of his cultures by a French virus.

There were also issues of money coming from a test for HIV developed

and patented by Gallo's team on the back of the HTLV-IIIB discovery.

Although this was settled out of court in March 1987, the question

arises whether in the light of the viruses having originated from

France, the Pasteur deserved to have profited exclusively from the

test (not least since the French team had applied for a patent on the

test in the US four months before Gallo).

The out-of-court agreement, announced jointly by French prime minister

Jacques Chirac and US president Reagan, stipulated that each of

the two parties had equal rights to claim priority concerning

detection and isolation of the virus, and Gallo and Montagnier would

henceforth be recognised as the " co-discoverers " of HIV – a

stipulation also included in a Chronology of AIDS research co-authored

by the two in Nature on 2 April 1987.

So in the wake of the revelations that emerged in 1991 about the

" contamination " of the Gallo sample, does Gallo's title of

" co-discoverer " still stand up?

Shift in attitude

An analysis of scientific citations of the two landmark papers throws

some interesting light on this. It shows that at first, hardly anyone

cited Montagnier's 1983 paper, while Gallo's attracted massive

interest from other scientists in the six months after publication.

But the situation was reversed following the peak of the dispute in

1985, with Montagnier's paper gradually climbing the citation charts

until it overtook Gallo's. By 1990, scientists had moved to citing

Montagnier's paper only, as reported in New Scientist.

Other scientists have weighed into the debate too. Stanley Prusiner of

the University of California at San Francisco, and himself a Nobel

prize winner for the discovery of prion diseases, wrote in Science

that " in retrospect, there is no doubt that Montagnier and his

colleagues were the first to report the discovery of the virus that we

now call human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV " .

Likewise, the two parties tried to bring the matter to a close with a

joint announcement in 1994.

But the key question remains. Did Gallo do enough to have deserved a

share of the Nobel glory? Or was it right that the final credit went

to Montagnier? Some researchers we spoke to certainly thought that

including Gallo would have brought the whole dispute to rest once and

for all. I tried to get in touch with the man himself, but so far I've

had no response.

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