Our gratitude to French pioneers that ID'ed AIDS virus, recipients of Nobel Prize in Medicine

[IndianaGreen]

This is the story, dramatized in the film "And the Band Played On," in which an ambitious American scientist, Robert Gallo, falsefied his research and took credit for work done at the Pasteur Institute. The Nobel Committee properly snubbed Gallo and bestowed its 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine on Dr. Francoise Barre, the first person to isolate the AIDS virus, and Luc Montagnier, the Head of the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

AIDS pioneers and cancer scientist win Nobel prize
By Niklas Pollard Mon Oct 6, 1:53 PM ET

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Two French scientists who discovered the AIDS virus and a German who bucked conventional wisdom to find a virus that causes cervical cancer were awarded the 2008 Nobel prize for medicine on Monday.

Luc Montagnier, director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of the Institut Pasteur won half the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) for discovering the virus that has killed 25 million people since it was identified in the 1980s.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081006/hl_nm/us_nobel_medicine

In regards to the plagiarizer Robert Gallo and his bogus AIDS research, he clearly took credit for research done by the Pasteur Institute. Gallo's dishonest role was portrayed by Alan Alda in the film "And the Band Played On," about the onset of the AIDS crisis.

Archive report: Science subverted in AIDS dispute
In Gallo case, truth termed a casualty

By John Crewdson | Tribune reporter

This story was first published in the Tribune on Jan. 1, 1995.

In March 1987, President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac appeared in the East Room of the White House to announce that their governments had settled the question of whether scientists at the Pasteur Institute of Paris or the National Institutes of Health had invented the blood test for the virus known as HIV.

The answer, it appeared, was both. The names of the Pasteur scientists were added to the American patent on the AIDS test, and the formal agreement that formed the core of the settlement declared that both countries' scientists had independently "succeeded in isolating a human retrovirus which proved to be the causative agent of AIDS." Just eight days later, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, a scientist specializing in the genetic analysis of viruses sent senior officials at the National Institutes of Health a confidential memo warning that "a double fraud" had been perpetrated on the scientific community.

The Los Alamos scientist, Gerald Myers, had compared the genetic codes of the French and American AIDS viruses and determined they were not independent discoveries but had undoubtedly come from the same patient.

Moreover, Myers said, the American virus and its progeny could not have been isolated from a pool of blood samples from several AIDS patients, as the NIH publicly had maintained.

"I suggest that we have paid for this deception in more than the usual ways," Myers wrote. "Scientific fraudulence always costs humanity . . . but here we have been additionally misdirected with regard to the extent of variation of the virus, which we can ill afford ... "

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-100608-hiv-discovery-nobel-prizeoct07,0,7068937.story