France and Germany share Nobel honours for medicine and physiology
Harald zur Hausen ,Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier shared the Nobel prize for the year 2008 in Medicine and Physiology for thier classical work in identifying the roles of viruses in sexually transmitted diseases. Harald Zur Hausen ( Born 1936 ) from Germany has been rewarded for his discovery of human papilloma viruses (HPV) causing cervical cancer” and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (Born 1947)/ Luc Montagnier (Born 1832) “for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus”.
Half of the $1.4 million prize goes to Harald zur Hausen of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg and reamining half goes to the French scientists from Paris. Its the work of Hausen in early 70’s showed the HPV causes cervical cancer . In early 70’s it was thought that Herpes virus is the one which causes cervical cancer but it was Huasen who showed that it was not Herpes which causes the disease using the latest techonoly of that time ,the recombinat DNA technology.Later due to some great work being done in this area resulted in two vaccines against cervical cancer and happen to be first to protect against a cancer.
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier efforts of discovering HIV virus,which causes AIDS takes the other half of prize.Infact this happens to the first time Nobel is being given specifically for HIV research.
In the early 1980s, Group headed by Montagnier and Francoise tested lymph nodes in people with the new disease and found that a virus, later named HIV, not only replicated out of control in these patients but also damaged their immunity by killing T cells, the workhorses of the immune system.
Robert gallo might be bit unfortunate to miss out as the shared Nobel is limited to three scientists.But he also contibuted immensely for understanding of HIV.As mentioned by Anthony Fauci, a physician-researcher and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md.
“The Nobel Prize historically goes to the person or group that makes the first seminal discovery or observation, and the 1983 paper by Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi — in which they identified the virus ultimately called HIV — came first,”
so it seems a fair judgement in favour of French scientists.
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