On Monday, the Nobel committee awarded the famous prize to Dr. Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who, along with Willy Rozenbaum and Jean-Claude Chermann, discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

In 1983, the group of scientists, led by Montagnier, found the retroviral cause of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) through a lymph node biopsy, naming the causative virus LAV, lymphadenopathy-associated virus.

One year after that, United States biomedical researcher Robert Gallo and his team confirmed the virus’ discovery, renaming it T-lymphotropic virus type III (HTLV-III). Consequently, a dispute that spread over a period of four years arose, each team claiming they were the first to isolate the AIDS-causing virus.

In 1987, Montagnier and Gallo agreed to share credit for the finding, but not before the Prime Minister of France Jacques Chirac and then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan met in order to discuss the matter.

Nevertheless, it seems that this year’s Nobel Prize awards have unearthed the hatchet, since Robert Gallo was not honoured for his work alongside Luc Montagnier. The two men expressed their disappointment at the fact that the committee did not give credit to the former as well for having discovered the HIV.

In 1986 though, Gallo and Montagnier shared a Lasker Award, which honoured their efforts in finding the virus (the credit for this going to the French scientist) and in discovering that it caused AIDS ( the U.S. biomedical researcher being praised for the breakthrough).

Luc Montagnier, 76, is the co-founder of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention and also the co-director of the Program for International Viral Collaboration. Throughout his career, he has been honoured with over 20 prestigious awards such as the Gairdner Award (in 1987), the King Faisal International Prize, also known as the Arabian Nobel Prize (in 1993), and the above-mentioned Lasker Award (in 1986).

Robert Gallo, 71, is the director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, which he also co-founded back in 1996 along with Robert R. Redfield and William A. Blattner. Three years ago, the researcher co-founded Profectus BioSciences Incorporated, a company that comercializes technologies aimed at reducing mortality in diseases caused by viruses such as the HIV.

The controversy that featured the two scientists reached a peak on December 5, 1983, when the Pasteur Institute, for which Montagnier worked, asked for a patent on a screening blood test to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Moreover, another climax was hit two years later, when the aforementioned Institute sued the United Stated government.

In 1993, a group commissioned by the United States Office of Research Integrity at the National Institutes of Health examined archival samples at both the Pasteur Institute and the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute, reporting afterwards that the virus the group led by Luc Montagnier had found was identical to the one discovered by Gallo’s team.

Presently, the latter researcher is acknowledged for having found that HIV causes AIDS, while the French scientist is honoured for discovering the virus.