I’m sure this won’t be much of a popular topic, not at this point in time during the election cycle and the current economic crisis that have been dominating the news and our attention. But it is an event that is worthy of mentioning. The Nobel Prize for medicine has be awarded to three Europeans.
Germany’s Harald zur Hausen and French researchers Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discovering the AIDS virus and the role of viruses in cervical cancer.
Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier were cited for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV; zur Hausen was cited for finding human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer, the second most common cancer among women.
The German scientist received half of the 10 million kronor (US$1.4 million) prize, while the two French researchers shared the other half.
In its citation, the Nobel Assembly said Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier’s discovery was one prerequisite for the current understanding of the biology of AIDS and its antiretroviral treatment. The pair’s work in the early 1980s made it possible to clone the HIV-1 genome.
Congrats go out to these dedicated scientists.
