Missing from the picture: Some say Gallo is Credit: UPI Photo/ David Silpa

The Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institutet raised eyebrows last month when it announced the winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Although the accomplishments of this year's recipients are widely recognized, critics say that one important name is missing from the mix.

The award, worth 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.3 million), will be split among three virus researchers: Harald zur Hausen of Germany, who is credited with discovering that human papillomavirus can cause cervical cancer, and Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of France for discovering HIV. But many researchers, particularly those in the US, are dismayed that HIV researcher Robert Gallo did not make the cut.

“Everybody I've talked to around the water cooler has the sense that he [Gallo] has been shafted,” says Abraham Verghese, professor of medicine at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Gallo's work on retroviruses and human immune cells set the stage for the discovery of HIV, Verghese adds. Although the French team was the first to isolate the virus, Gallo and his colleagues in the US established its link to AIDS (Science 220, 868–871; 1983; Science 224, 500–503; 1984). “Gallo showed the disease correlated with the virus,” says virologist Michael Emerman of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Montagnier's lab between 1986 and 1989. “Gallo showed it before they did. His contribution is certainly worthy of a Nobel Prize,” Emerman adds, noting that the winners are also deserving.

In the 1980s, when researchers identified AIDS and its viral cause, a heated controversy erupted over who deserved credit for discovering HIV. The US and French governments stepped in, declaring Montagnier and Gallo as 'co-discoverers' of the virus that causes AIDS. And, in an effort to calm the storm, the two scientists even published a joint paper (Nature 326, 435–436; 1987) outlining how their discoveries unfolded. Since then, the controversy has periodically flared up. And the news of the Nobel Prize has far from put the issue to rest. “I was very saddened to learn that Dr. Gallo was not included,” says Victor Garcia-Martinez, an infectious disease researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “He is a towering figure in the field.”