Oct 6, 2008
Nobel Prize for Medicine 2008
This year the Nobel committee has awarded the Prize for Physiology or Medicine to Harald zur Hausen for his discovery of human papilloma viruses (HPV) causing cervical cancer and to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The announcement was made via the Nobel organisation’s Twitter page and on their site.
zur Hausen (born 1936) works at the German Cancer Research Centre Heidelberg. Barré-Sinoussi (born 1947) is at the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Unit, Virology Department, Institut Pasteur Paris, France and Montagnier (born 1932) is at the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention also in Paris. The full press release for the announcement of the Medicine Prize is here. Where’s Robert Gallo in all this one wonders?
You can get up to the minute alerts on the chemistry, physics, and other Nobels announced later this week via the Nobel site and their new alerting systems with SMS, RSS, Twitter and more (thanks to new publicity guy and friend of Sciencebase Simon Frantz and his colleagues).
You can find the iGoogle gadget for the Prizes here. There’s a news widget here and the Nobel RSS is here.
Physics is announced October 7 (dark energy/dark matter perhaps?), Chemistry (another aspect of biology, no doubt) October 8, Literature on Thursday, we give Peace a chance on Friday, finally the Economics Prize on Monday 13th (hopefully it won’t go to a merchant banker, given the state of the global economy at the moment). You can get a list of past winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine here and the Nobel announcement here.
The Nobel committee could have so easily avoided the problem and added Gallo to the list, simply by leaving HPV to another year…
If memory serves us all right, then peace was brokered by the 2 heads of state Ronald Reagen and Jacques Chirac then in perhaps 1987-88 that the credit to French and American team was equal in this revolutionising discovery.
the important points that I m aware of is Nobel Prize can be not shared beyond 3 scientists and the group with more citation takes it all. In fact one needs to be cited at least 10.000 times !!
In all recent years its the French group that has been cited most of the time in scientific world.
Its sad that Prof Robert Gallo does not find a mention of his name even duringthe ceremony as someone who contributed to the outstanding discovery at similar point of time.
Neverthless, the remarkable disocvery that did a revolution to the mankind has been finally recognised so well.
In fact, I very personally believe that there are two major discoveries of the last century : INTERNET and HIV.Glad both have had proper recognitions now.
Presumably, they’ve held off recognising these till there was some kind of solution on the horizon – vaccines – or maybe not…
Congratulations to the German and French virologists for being rewarded with the prestigious Nobel prize for their discoveries. But WHY it is so late to recognize their credits by the Nobel Committee ?
The Nobel prize for the discovery of a virus (HIV) that doesn’t do anything? A virus that especially does not cause AIDS! The ignorant must be livid!!!