Los Angeles Times - October 6, 2008
Thomas H. Maugh II, thomas.maugh@latimes.com

Two French researchers who discovered the human AIDS virus and a German scientist who showed that human papilloma virus causes cervical cancer were awarded on Monday the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The decision effectively ends the long-running dispute between France's Luc Montagnier and America's Dr. Robert Gallo, concluding that Montagnier and his colleague Francoise Barre-Sinoussi were the rightful discoverers of the virus, which is now carried by more than 33 million people worldwide.

The other half of the $1.4-million prize was awarded to Dr. Harold zur Hausen of the University of Dusseldorf for discovery of the viruses that cause genital warts and are responsible for an estimated 500,000 cases of cervical cancer each year.

"I'm not prepared for this," zur Hausen, 72, told the Associated Press. "We're drinking a little glass of bubbly right now."

Montagnier, 76, is now director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention in Paris; Barre-Sinoussi, 61, is still at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where the discovery was initially made. The award to them is the first Nobel received by a French scientist since 1980.

Barre-Sinoussi received word of the prize in Cambodia, where she is doing research, while Montagnier was in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, delivering a lecture.

Their work was honored, the Nobel citation said, because "never before has science and medicine been so quick to discover, identify the origin, and provide treatment for a new disease entity."

Montagnier and Gallo conducted a bitter public dispute over discovery of HIV in the 1980s, with each claiming that the other had misused viral samples.

At stake was not only scientific primacy for the discovery of the virus but millions of dollars in licensing fees from tests used to detect HIV infections in patients.

The dispute was so contentious that then- President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac eventually stepped in in 1987, negotiating an agreement that divided the royalties equally.

In the 1990s, however, the U.S. government conceded that France deserved the lion's share of the royalties, affirming Montagnier's role.

The Nobel citation did not mention Gallo's role, noting only that "after the discovery of the virus, several groups contributed to the definitive demonstration of HIV as the cause" of AIDS.

Gallo said Monday that he was "disappointed" by the foundation's rejection of his role.

Zur Hausen's work was far less controversial, although his proposal that human papilloma virus, commonly called HPV, causes cervical cancer was initially disparaged by other researchers.

But he reasoned that if the virus played such a role, its DNA would be incorporated into that of tumor cells, and he spent more than a decade looking for evidence of that incorporation. That search was complicated by the fact that only segments of the virus made it into the tumor DNA.

After a decade of searching, in 1984 he found that one strain, called HPV-16, was in some tumors. The following year, he showed that a second strain, HPV-18, was in others. He then cloned the two viruses and made them available to other researchers.

Those two strains are now known to cause an estimated 70% of all cases of cervical cancer and vaccines against them are now beginning to play a crucial role in preventing the disease.

A total of about 15 strains of the virus are now known to cause cervical cancer. The viruses have also been associated with penile, oral and other cancers as well.

The prizes will be presented in Stockholm on December 10.

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