{"id":91,"date":"2008-10-08T06:38:41","date_gmt":"2008-10-08T11:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/pov\/hiv-id-observations\/?p=91"},"modified":"2008-10-08T06:38:41","modified_gmt":"2008-10-08T11:38:41","slug":"the-french-win-this-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/the-french-win-this-one\/2008\/10\/08\/","title":{"rendered":"The French Win This One"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/medicine\/laureates\/2008\/press.html\" target=\"_blank\">2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine<\/a> goes to <span class=\"h3teaser\">Fran\u00e7oise Barr\u00e9-Sinoussi<\/span> and <span class=\"h3teaser\">Luc Montagnier for discovery of HIV.\u00a0 They each get one-quarter of the prize money, with one-half going to <\/span><span class=\"h3teaser\">Harald zur Hausen for showing the relationship between human papillomavirus and cervical cancer.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>For the record, if you search the Nobel press release for the word &#8220;Gallo&#8221;, you won&#8217;t find it mentioned anywhere.<\/p>\n<p>Why is this notable?\u00a0 Seems like ancient history, but actually two groups in 1983 claimed they discovered the virus that causes AIDS, both finding a human retrovirus &#8212; the one we now know as HIV. The French group called it &#8220;lymphadenopathy-associated virus&#8221; or LAV, and the Americans (led by Robert Gallo) &#8220;human T-lymphotropic virus III&#8221; or HTLV-III. We now know it was the same virus &#8212; indeed, due to &#8220;lab contamination,&#8221; sometimes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v363\/n6428\/abs\/363466a0.html\"><em>literally<\/em><em> the same<\/em><\/a> &#8212; and that the French were first, but maybe (am being generous here) the Americans were a bit more practical (and certainly louder) about the implications of the discovery.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/content.nejm.org\/cgi\/content\/full\/349\/24\/2283\">An academic truce<\/a> of sorts ensued many years later &#8212; this was much less entertaining, but perhaps a good thing for international relations, at least until &#8220;Freedom Fries.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to Fran\u00e7oise Barr\u00e9-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for discovery of HIV.\u00a0 They each get one-quarter of the prize money, with one-half going to Harald zur Hausen for showing the relationship between human papillomavirus and cervical cancer. For the record, if you search the Nobel press release for the word [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[423,661,798],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hiv","category-infectious-diseases","tag-hiv","tag-nobel-prize","tag-research"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}