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.
