Nobel Week: It's Europe vs. the USA Already

Okay, I'm starting to sound like a WWF announcer (are you ready ruuuuuuumble?) but it is funny that the same Nobel season in which the Swedish chair of the literature prize committee asserted that Americans were not up to European standards saw the first award of the week, for Medicine, go to the French researchers whose claim to discovering the AIDS virus was embroiled in dispute with an American researcher, Robert Gallo, who was not included in today's award. I make no claims to being able to adjudicate the science of the controversy (despite growing up in a National Institutes of Health family, where my dad and Gallo both worked), but it does seem that despite Gallo's "disappointment" at not joining his French colleagues, the controversy (which required at one point an agreement between President Reagan and Prime Minister Chirac) has cooled and the scientific consensus has settled that Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier do have the legitimate claim to first scientific dibs here. Even Anthony Fauci, a high-profile administrator at NIH, "agreed there's no doubt the French scientists first identified the virus. He said they, and zur Hausen [who shared the award for his work on cervical cancer], deserved the Nobel. Fauci said that if additional researchers could have been included, Gallo 'would have been an obvious choice to be added to that list.'"

If you want to return to the bitter days of this '80s scientific controversy (carried on amid the general panic, anger, and shame surrounding the AIDS crisis), NBC's Robert Bazell has a short summary, and you can also visit our contentious customer review section for John Crewdson's Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (whose take on Gallo is obvious from its subtitle). Gallo and Montagnier also wrote their own versions of the discovery and dispute: Gallo in Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery and Montagnier in Virus: The Co-Discoverer of HIV Tracks Its Rampage and Charts the Future. --Tom