今年的诺奖获奖名单陆续公布了,首先是医学奖,两位发现人类免疫缺陷病毒(HIV)爱滋病病毒的法国巴斯德研究所的科学家Françoise Barré-Sinoussi 和Luc Montagnier和发现人类乳突淋瘤病毒(HPV)导致子宫颈癌的德国癌症研究中心的科学家Harald zur Hausen获奖。这也是几年来的第一次,医学或生理奖与美国无缘,美国似乎华尔街沦陷,诺贝尔医学奖也没份儿了。诺贝尔奖也又一次与被中文媒体炒做成科学圣殿的哈佛大学擦肩而过!哈佛大学已经10来年与诺贝尔奖无缘了,虽然她依然在众多的大学排名中名列第一,还是全世界最富的大学,当然很多获奖者都是哈佛大学的毕业生。两位法国病毒学家的获奖更使全世界正直的科学家松了一口气!当年美国病毒学者中的大腕Robert Gallo博士不仅用法国人的照片发文章, 还用法国人的样品测序, 测出来说是自己的样品而发现了人类免疫缺陷病毒(HIV)爱滋病病毒品.----这些事其实学术界的人都清楚。我当年做研究生时就对这种Robert Gallo这种行为感到不解,上苍有眼,诺贝尔奖没有给予他。当然还是有很多人为他而鸣不平的...请看英文媒体的评论:
Twenty-five years after the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS, two French researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine yesterday for their role in that scientific breakthrough.
Perhaps more notable than who won the award is who did not: Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the University of Maryland virologist who has long been credited as a co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus and whose early work led to a blood test for HIV that is believed to have saved millions of lives.
Though many in the field said they thought that a long-simmering debate over Gallo's exact role in the initial discovery had been settled and that Gallo and the French team should share credit, the Nobel committee apparently felt differently. Some scientists said yesterday that Gallo deserved to at least split medicine's highest honor.
"The people who won the prize are very deserving," said Dr. John E. Niederhuber, director of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, where Gallo did his AIDS research. "But it seems strange to have left Bob out."
Acknowledging that Gallo had "done a lot of other work" in the field, Joernvall noted that he and the two French scientists now "agree that the discovery was made in Paris." But Montagnier, who has been a colleague and rival of Gallo's for decades, said the American researcher should have been recognized.
"It is certain that he deserved this as much as us two," Montagnier told the Associated Press in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he is attending an international AIDS conference.
Gallo, who runs the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine, told an AP reporter who woke him at home early yesterday that he was "disappointed." He later left for South Africa and could not be reached for further comment, but he released a statement congratulating the French scientists.
Colleagues said Gallo was besieged with e-mails and phone calls from scientists around the world, many complaining that an injustice had been done.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, said the Nobel Prize tends to be given to those who first identify a new discovery.
"I don't think it's a critique of Gallo. It's a statement about the very first observation that is made. This is how they decide," he said. "They generally make their decisions based on what they judge to be the first seminal observation as opposed to what came from that discovery. That's their judgment. "It does not detract from the contributions that Dr. Gallo has made."
The Nobel Prize might not put to rest what at times has been a bitter scientific feud spanning two continents. And Gallo, while seen yesterday in some circles as a victim, has often been a less than sympathetic character, seen as abrasive and self-promoting.
In the early 1980s, Gallo, whose research at NCI had focused on cancer-causing retroviruses, and Montagnier, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, were each working on isolating the AIDS virus. In 1983, Montagnier identified a virus he called LAV but was unable to prove it caused AIDS. Gallo, nearly a year later, published a paper on his virus, called HTLV-3, establishing that it caused AIDS. Gallo is credited with being the first to grow the virus in a lab, which paved the way for HIV testing and the screening of donated blood.
But a controversy erupted soon after Gallo's publication. There were allegations that Gallo's virus was actually Montagnier's and that he had improperly used it without credit to the Frenchman for first isolating the virus.
The dispute triggered investigations by the National Institutes of Health and by Congress. There was a lawsuit. It was finally settled in 1987 by a highly unusual agreement between the United States and France, with a joint announcement by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac.
"I was on the original committee that examined the evidence against Gallo," said Edmund Tramont, who now directs the NIAID's division of AIDS. "We examined all the data and came to the unequivocal conclusion that he did all the work on his own. And that what he discovered and what he wrote, that HIV is a retrovirus that infects T-cells, that it was the cause of AIDS was unequivocal.
"He had in his lab previous work that was necessary to isolate the virus and others followed in his footsteps and duplicated what he had done."
翻开钱永健教授在加州大学圣迭戈分校的网页,可以看到他的实验室是拥有20多人由科学家,博士后,博士生和技术人员组成的团队,依染活跃在科学的前沿,发表着Nature-Protocol,Nature-Method, PNAS等著名杂志的原创性文章和Science,Nature-Protocol和Methods in Enzymology 等杂志书籍上的综述性文章。钱永健教授的科研文章不下几百篇,他的科学工作真是不仅多产,更是开创性和革命性的工作。钱教授手下很多学生都成了名校的Faculty,像来自台湾的Alice Ting博士现在已是MIT化学系的副教授,Zhang Jin博士也是霍普金斯大学神经科学系的助教授。Robert E. Campbell博士是加拿大阿尔伯塔大学的助教授。钱教授最得意的学生恐怕是近年来被麻省理工学院评为顶尖青年科学家之一的王雷,这位来自北大的学子现在是Salk(索克研究所)的助教授,研究工作相当前沿。