The Shocking Medicine Nobel (Newsweek)

[Guest guest]

The Shocking Medicine Nobel by Sharon Begley

It's rare for the announcement of a Nobel prize in science to make

researchers utter a collective " holy **** " (insert favorite expletive

here), but the mandarins of Stockholm have managed to do it this

morning. They awarded half the prize in medicine/physiology to German

biologist Harald zur Hausen of the University of Düsseldorf for his

discovery of human papilloma viruses, which cause cervical cancer. No

controversy there: the work " went against current dogma, " the Nobel

committee says in its statement, and led to " an understanding of

mechanisms of HPV-induced carcinogenesis and the development of

prophylactic vaccines " such as Gardasil.

But the other half of the prize went to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and

Luc Montagnier for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency

virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS. Without equivocation, the Nobel

committee credits the two with the 1983 discovery of HIV in

lymphocytes from patients in the early stages of what would soon be

recognized as AIDS, and in blood from patients with late stage

disease. The discovery, of course, led to the AIDS test and to tests

to screen blood for HIV, limiting the spread of the pandemic. " The

unprecedented development of several classes of new antiviral drugs is

also a result of knowledge of the details of the viral replication

cycle, " the Nobel citation adds.

The shock is not who is included but who is left out: Gallo.

In the United States, at least, Gallo (then at NIH, now at the

University of land) was and is widely credited with co-discovering

HIV. Uncounted web sites, books and articles assert that Gallo " is

considered the co-discoverer, along with Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur

Institute, of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), " as a PBS site

puts it. " Gallo established that the virus causes acquired

immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), something which Montagnier had not

been able to do, and he developed the blood test for HIV, which

remains a central tool in efforts to control the disease. "

The Nobel committee disagrees, and it is not the only one. Gallo was

accused of scientific misconduct in his early work on isolating and

identifying the AIDS virus. The allegations, chronicled at length by

Crewdson in The Chicago Tribune and in his 2002 book " Science

Fictions, " , centered on charges that, as Crewdson wrote in 1995, " the

AIDS virus Gallo called HTLV-3B and claimed as his own discovery was

virtually identical, at the genetic level, to the AIDS virus the

French called LAV. As recounted by [a congressional report], the

original focus of the Gallo case was what Gallo's laboratory did, and

did not do, with a sample of LAV lent to him by Pasteur, and Gallo's

assertions to the media, in published articles and under oath about

what happened to that sample. When Gallo announced in April 1984 that

he had discovered the virus that causes AIDS, he said his discovery

differed from the French virus and implied that the French LAV might

not be the cause of AIDS. Eventually it became clear that the two

viruses were more alike than any other known pair of AIDS viruses, and

Gallo suggested the French had contaminated their cultures with his

virus. When such a " reverse contamination " proved to be physically

impossible, Gallo proposed that the French patient in whom LAV had

been discovered had been infected by the American patient, never

identified, from whom Gallo's HTLV-3B had come. Gallo dismissed

suggestions that LAV might have contaminated his own virus cultures as

`the height of outrage,' declaring that it had been `physically

impossible' for his assistants to grow the LAV sample. These claims,

the [congressional] report says, `were not true.' "

The allegations that Gallo committed scientific misconduct were

overturned on appeal. The fight for credit grew so bitter that, in

1987, Presidents Reagan of the U.S. and Jacques Chirac of

France had to step in, signing an agreement that split royalties from

the AIDS blood test between the two countries. And that's where the

dispute has stood—until the Nobel committee weighed in with a verdict

that arguably carries more weight among scientists than any other:

Montagnier's lab, and only Montagnier's lab, discovered HIV.

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