Gallo just got bitch slapped

Big news - The 2008 Nobel Prize for medicine has been awarded to Luc Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi for their discovery of HIV (or as they called it back then, LAV). The committee didn't even mention Robert Gallo during the citation.

For those of you interested in some of the history of the discovery of HIV, here is a nice little account of the race to find the virus that caused AIDS, and the controversy that ensued; here is another. The fracas soured diplomatic relations between the US and France for a while. (Well, not that the two countries have been the best of buddies ever, but still...)

Two things:
1. I'm glad that the scientific community went this way; despite all the hype, the French group *did* isolate and characterize the virus first.
2. Gallo was a dick about it. If you came in second dude, no amount of shouting will make you first.