STOCKHOLM: Two French scientists who discovered the AIDS virus and a German who found the virus that causes cervical cancer were awarded the 2008 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology yesterday.
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 deadly virus that has killed millions of people since it was identified in the 1980s.
Harald zur Hausen of the University of Duesseldorf and a former director of the German Cancer Research Center shared the other half of the prize for work that went against the current dogma as to the cause of cervical cancer.
“The three laureates have discovered two new viruses of great importance and the result of that has led to an improved global health,” said Jan Andersson, a member of the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.
“We have reached two of the laureates, the two men, and they were both very, very happy. As far as I know Francoise has not yet been reached,” said.
The award marks a vote for Montagnier in a long-running dispute over who discovered and identified the virus, Montagnier or Dr. Robert Gallo, then of the US National Cancer Institute. The institute said the French researchers isolated and cultured cells from patients with swollen lymph nodes characteristic of the early stage of acquired immune deficiency.
By 1984, they had obtained samples of the retrovirus from a variety of people. These included people who had been infected from sexual contact, haemophiliacs, patients who had received blood transfusions and infants who had contracted the disease from their mothers.
Zur Hausen was recognized for research based on his idea that oncogenic human papilloma virus, or HPV, caused cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women. Zur Hausen, who began his research in the 1970s, assumed that if HPV was causing the cancer it should be possible to detect it by searching tumor cells for a specific viral DNA.
