Word: pasteur
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Over the next century, scientists such as Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and Paul Ehrlich developed more vaccines to diseases such as diphtheria, in the process saving countless millions of lives...
...AIDS pendulum took another big swing last week, thanks to a claim by biologist Ara Hovanessian of France's Pasteur Institute that his research team had made a major advance in understanding how the AIDS virus infects a healthy cell. The news created an instant stir, since the prestigious Paris-based institute is where HIV was first identified. Even before Hovanessian had a chance to present his findings to a Pasteur-sponsored conference and before other scientists were able to evaluate the research, the press got wind of the story and ran with it. Countless TV and newspaper accounts, including...
...finally cornered. "Why is the press so excited about this?" he demanded. "I'm flabbergasted. I thought it was an interesting presentation, but I can't say more than that." Gallo's lack of enthusiasm was + hardly surprising: he's still smarting from a losing battle with another Pasteur researcher, Luc Montagnier. For six years, both scientists claimed to have been the first to identify the AIDS virus, until Gallo finally admitted in 1991 that the virus he "discovered" had been previously isolated by Montagnier...
...were Americans, however. "I don't see the beginning of a proof," fumed Jacques Liebowitch of the Raymond Poincare Hospital near Paris. "The press has already whipped this up into a major breakthrough, and now we find that there is nothing to it." Even Hovanessian's own colleagues at Pasteur seemed somewhat reserved. "It's a very interesting paper," said Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who helped Montagnier isolate the AIDS virus. "The danger is that whenever there is something interesting in this field, it gets blown out of proportion. There are other experiments to do, and I'm sure Hovanessian already...
Hovanessian and his team have submitted their research to the journal Science, where experts will review it before publication. Pasteur's head of vaccine research, Marc Girard, nicely described the promising but precarious place in which his colleague's research stands: "If these results are reproduced in the next weeks or months by one or two other labs in the U.S. and elsewhere, then it's fantastic, because that would mean Hovanessian has really discovered something new. But we have to get to that stage before we can get excited...