A Prize Tarnished

Abraham Verghese 10.06.08, 4:17 PM ET The discussion around the water cooler this morning is less about who got the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine than it is about who did not get it. In selecting Luc Montagnier and his associate, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, to share half the prize, the wise men and women of the Nobel committee clearly had a message to deliver. It was not so much a celebration of the accomplishments of the two French scientists at the Pasteur Institute as a slap in the face for Robert Gallo, the director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The committee effectively dismissed his role in the saga of scientific discovery around AIDS. When Gallo announced in 1984 that he had discovered the virus now called HIV, it quickly emerged that the virus he possessed... [read full story]