Nobel Prize-Medicine

This year it has been awarded to three scientists for their work on viruses-HIV and papilloma virus.

For a long time the discovery of HIV virus was point of dispute. Robert Gallo, who discovered HTLV, and Luc Montagnier who identified in AIDS patient. Luc Montagnier has won the Nobel Prize. Robert Gallo is nowhere mentioned.

This is however not the first time that this has happened. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello were awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of siRNA. The only problem is that it was discovered long time back in plants. But Fire and Mello were able to identify the mechanism, and revolutionized the entire field of genetics. For that they deserved the prize.

Or take the most famous example: Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize for solving the structure of DNA. The X-ray crystallography data, however, was produced by Rosalind Franklin. Of course she had died by the time the Nobel Prize was awarded but in their book "The Double Helix" she is lampooned by Watson, which is kind of unacceptable. The major problem was that Rosalind Franklin was unable to solve the structure. Watson and Crick were able to and that is the end of the story. In fact, at that point in time Linus Pauling was also involved in the race to solve the structure. He proposed a triple helix. Had he read Erwin Chargoff's paper, he would have realized that a triple helix was not possible.

I usually tell this to the first year students emphasizing how important it is to analyze the data.

Coming back to Nobel Prize- I think somewhere out there the HIV virus must be chuckling to itself quietly. All efforts to control it has failed for the simple reason it always has a trick up its sleeve. It is a tough virus to work with and these scientists deserve their prize. I only feel sorry for Robert Gallo because I think, honestly, he has contributed a lot to the field of retroviruses.