Word: pasteur
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more unseemly rivalries to sully the scientific community in decades. Squaring off across the Atlantic, amid charges, countercharges and growing anger, are researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. At issue: who was first to isolate the virus that causes AIDS and first to develop a blood-screening test to detect AIDS infection. At stake: national pride, possibly a Nobel Prize and perhaps millions of dollars in patent royalties on the blood test...
Last year, after months of feuding, the Pasteur team, headed by Dr. Luc Montagnier, filed two legal actions in the U.S. The first challenged a patent on the blood test awarded to Dr. Robert Gallo and his colleagues. The second charged Gallo with breach of contract for allegedly using for commercial purposes samples of virus sent to him by the French. Gallo had agreed to use the samples for research purposes only...
...indeed had a rival claim to the blood-test patent and were entitled to a formal hearing. Moreover, the Patent Office recognized the French as the "senior party," since their patent application was filed seven months earlier than the NIH application. Now, says Charles Lipsey, a patent attorney for Pasteur, "the burden of proving that they invented the test first is going to rest on Dr. Gallo...
...Montagnier team of greediness. "I don't get any money," he emphasized, pointing out that royalties on the test go to its manufacturers and the U.S. Treasury, not his personal bank account. "The fight is theirs--to get the money," he charged. "My name is used in vain." But Pasteur scientists would not reap personal profits either. The proceeds, explains Spokeswoman Caroline Chaine, would go to the institute, which "lives on the funds and the patents of its research." Says she: "We want our work to be recognized...
Money aside, no one doubts that Gallo is as eager as the French to get the glory for one of the more important discoveries in late-20th century medicine. "It's what we call the race for the Nobel Prize," says one cynical scientist. In their second action, the Pasteur researchers are attempting to prove that they were the first to identify the AIDS virus. They hope to show either that the Americans derived their virus from French samples--essentially appropriating the virus as their own--or that the American discovery depended on key information provided by the Pasteur samples...