Science News / Nobel Prize In Medicine Given For HIV, HPV Discoveries

Nobel Prize in medicine given for HIV, HPV discoveries

By Nathan Seppa

Web edition : Monday, October 6th, 2008

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Three Europeans recognized for linking viruses to AIDS, cervical cancer

The 2008 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine will be shared among three European researchers for their pivotal work in identifying the viruses that cause cervical cancer and AIDS.

Half the prize goes to Harald zur Hausen, now at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, for his discovery that the human papillomavirus, or HPV, causes cervical cancer. His work in the 1970s and 1980s laid the foundation for a full onslaught against HPV. In recent years, scientists have developed and made available for commercial use a vaccine against HPV, marketed as Gardasil by Merck. It is the first vaccine against a cancer, preventing key strains of HPV infection that cause most cervical cancers. HPV has since been linked to other cancers as well.

The other half of the 2008 medical Nobel Prize will be split by Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and Luc Montagnier, now at the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention in Paris, for work that culminated in the early 1980s discovery that a strange retrovirus, later called the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, was the cause of AIDS. Their work, done at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, was confirmed in the United States a year later by Robert Gallo. The HIV discovery cleared the way for the development of drugs to combat the disease.

Is this relevant to my next post? Whose NATIONAL investments led to this success? The answer is easy .. the USA. In a global economy nations need to manage their wrker's resources ofr the national benefit. Else, the product of those workers and the capital will be lost to other nations. This is not in anyway to diminsh my pride in this triumph of science, buut to urge the government ot understand that inverstments in science will be productive if we also invest in our own society's ability to take advanatge of science.