THE NOBEL Prize for Science has been shared this year between two French researchers and a German for their work in identifying the viruses that cause Aids and cervical cancer.
Harald zur Hausen of the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg was recognised for his work in the 1970s and 1980s into human papillomarivirus or HPV. It laid the foundation stone for new treatments against the disease now on the market, the first cancer vaccines in the world.
Sharing the €1 million prize are two French scientists based in Paris, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute and Luc Montagnier, professor emeritus at the World Foundation for Aids Research and Prevention.
Their work culminated in the discovery in the early 1980s that the cause of Aids was a previously unknown retrovirus, later dubbed human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.
Absent from the award announcement yesterday was US researcher Robert Gallo who took credit for identifying the virus in the journal Science in 1984, beginning years of acrimonious dispute with Montagnier.
An investigation later suggested that, despite the highly variable nature of the virus, the two teams’ work was based on an identical strain. The French team accused the Gallo team of using the Pasteur sample without permission. Gallo countered that he was the one who made the connection between what was later termed HIV and Aids.
The row escalated into an international incident between France and the US in 1987 and only after the intervention of the then presidents of France and the US, Francois Mitterand and Ronald Reagan, did both sides agree to share credit.
A 1992 ruling by US National Academy of Sciences overturned on appeal, found that the Gallo sample was contaminated with Pasteur material and accused him of “intellectual recklessness to a high degree”.
In the years since, the scientific community appears to have decided that the Frenchman was the first to identify the virus in 1983, a year before Prof Gallo.
Prof Gallo, who runs the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland, has always maintained his innocence. He said yesterday it was “a disappointment” not to be honoured.
The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which selects the Nobel Prize for medicine, didn’t mention Prof Gallo in its statement praising the French researchers.
The prize can be awarded to a maximum of three people.
At the same time as the French team identified HIV, Prof zur Hausen and his team in Heidelberg successfully isolated the first variant of the virus that causes cervical cancer. A year later he cloned two other types, found in 70 per cent of cervical cancer cases.
“It certainly is a while back,” said Prof zur Hausen yesterday, “but we have had a tremendous amount of work as a result.”
Today a simple smear test can detect HPV while two effective vaccines against it are on the market. Papilloma viruses account for more than 5 per cent of all cancers worldwide.
