Credit for the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS was a thorny issue in the 1980s.
The Institut Pasteur in France isolated a retrovirus that they shared with American researchers, who then claimed they had developed a test for the AIDS virus. The French protested, saying it was their research that made the test possible.
Eventually the presidents of both countries — Ronald Reagan and Jacques Chirac — reached a compromise, agreeing that both countries would share credit, and share royalties from patents.
Lost in that exchange was the fact that the male director of the Institut Pasteur, Luc Montagnier, had less responsibility for the discovery than his employee, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who did the legwork. The Nobel Prize committee resolved the issue in 2008 when they awarded their half of the prize in Physiology or Medicine to Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier for discovering that HIV causes AIDS. (The other half of the 2008 prize went to Germany’s Harald zur Hausen, who was honored for finding viruses that cause cervical cancer.)
Barré-Sinoussi, now 68, became an advocate for collaborative research in African and Asian countries, recognizing its terrible destruction in those areas. She also openly criticized Pope Benedict XVI over his statements that condoms are ineffective in the AIDS crisis.
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