It’s rare for the announcement of a Nobel prize in science to make researchers utter a collective “holy ****” (insert favorite expletive here), but the mandarins of Stockholm have managed to do it this morning. They awarded half the prize in medicine/physiology to German biologist Harald zur Hausen of the University of Düsseldorf for his discovery of human papilloma viruses, which cause cervical cancer. No controversy there: the work “went against current dogma,” the Nobel committee says in its statement, and led to “an understanding of mechanisms of HPV-induced carcinogenesis and the development of prophylactic vaccines” such as Gardasil.

But the other half of the prize went to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS. Without equivocation, the Nobel committee credits the two with the 1983 discovery of HIV in lymphocytes from patients in the early stages of what would soon be recognized as AIDS, and in blood from patients with late stage disease. The discovery, of course, led to the AIDS test and to tests to screen blood for HIV, limiting the spread of the pandemic. “The unprecedented development of several classes of new antiviral drugs is also a result of knowledge of the details of the viral replication cycle,” the Nobel citation adds.

The shock is not who is included but who is left out: Robert Gallo.

In the United States, at least, Gallo (then at NIH, now at the University of Maryland) was and is widely credited with co-discovering HIV. Uncounted web sites, books and articles assert that Gallo “is considered the co-discoverer, along with Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute, of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV),” as a PBS site puts it. “Gallo established that the virus causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), something which Montagnier had not been able to do, and he developed the blood test for HIV, which remains a central tool in efforts to control the disease.”

The Nobel committee disagrees, and it is not the only one. Gallo was accused of scientific misconduct in his early work on isolating and identifying the AIDS virus. The allegations, chronicled at length by John Crewdson in The Chicago Tribune and in his 2002 book “Science Fictions,”, centered on charges that, as Crewdson wrote in 1995, “the AIDS virus Gallo called HTLV-3B and claimed as his own discovery was virtually identical, at the genetic level, to the AIDS virus the French called LAV. As recounted by [a congressional report], the original focus of the Gallo case was what Gallo’s laboratory did, and did not do, with a sample of LAV lent to him by Pasteur, and Gallo’s assertions to the media, in published articles and under oath about what happened to that sample. When Gallo announced in April 1984 that he had discovered the virus that causes AIDS, he said his discovery differed from the French virus and implied that the French LAV might not be the cause of AIDS. Eventually it became clear that the two viruses were more alike than any other known pair of AIDS viruses, and Gallo suggested the French had contaminated their cultures with his virus. When such a "reverse contamination" proved to be physically impossible, Gallo proposed that the French patient in whom LAV had been discovered had been infected by the American patient, never identified, from whom Gallo's HTLV-3B had come. Gallo dismissed suggestions that LAV might have contaminated his own virus cultures as ‘the height of outrage,’ declaring that it had been ‘physically impossible’ for his assistants to grow the LAV sample. These claims, the [congressional] report says, ‘were not true.’”