- How a disgruntled scientist looking to prove his food wasn’t fresh discovered radioactive tracers and won a Nobel Prize 80 years ago The Conversation
- How a disgruntled scientist looking to prove his food wasn’t fresh discovered radioactive tracers and won a Nobel Prize Phys.org
- How a disgruntled scientist looking to prove his food wasn’t fresh discovered radioactive tracers and won a Nobel Prize 80 years ago Yahoo News
- How a disgruntled scientist looking to prove his food wasn’t fresh discovered radioactive tracers and won a Nobel Prize Samachar Central
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Nobel
Trio win Nobel physics prize for tiny light pulses that give snapshot of atoms – Reuters
- Trio win Nobel physics prize for tiny light pulses that give snapshot of atoms Reuters
- Nobel in medicine goes to 2 Penn scientists whose work enabled creation of mRNA vaccines 6abc Philadelphia
- Scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman win Nobel for mRNA vaccine: How their cutting edge technology helped us tame COVID-19 The Indian Express
- With Nobel Prize in medicine, a new laurel for ‘eds and meds’ in Philadelphia | Editorial The Philadelphia Inquirer
- Karikó and Weissman’s Nobel for mRNA Shows Power of Perseverance Bloomberg
Dozens of papers co-authored by Nobel laureate raise concerns
Several research articles co-authored by Nobel-prizewinning geneticist Gregg Semenza are being investigated by publishers after internet sleuths raised concerns about the integrity of images in the papers. Journals have already retracted, corrected or expressed concerns about 17 papers over the past decade, and others are investigating image- and data-integrity issues in further studies.
Semenza, who works at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine with two other scientists for discovering how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability in the body. He published his Nobel-prizewinning work in the 1990s; the latest concerns focus on related molecular-biology research published since.
Image integrity in scientific papers has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, as digital tools have made it easier for scientists to manipulate their results. There can be legitimate reasons to alter images — to make results clearer by raising contrast or colour balance, for example. Figures might also be mistakenly mislabelled or become distorted while the paper is being prepared. But image-editing tools can also be used to create fraudulent results.
Elisabeth Bik, a prominent image-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California, who is among those who have pointed out irregularities in work co-authored by Semenza, says that the number of corrections seems reasonable for a 20-year period in a successful lab and many of the concerns potentially fall into “sloppy science territory”. But “five retractions for papers with image manipulation is much more than one should expect”, she adds.
Semenza did not respond to requests for comment from Nature’s news team.
Image concerns
Commenters on the website PubPeer — where users scrutinize published research, often anonymously — have questioned images in 52 articles co-authored by Semenza that were published between 2000 and 2021. Since 2011, 17 of these papers have been retracted, corrected or had an expression of concern issued on them. The editorial notices cite the potential alteration, reuse or incorrect labelling of images showing experimental results. Another 15 of the papers are currently under investigation at their respective journals, Nature’s news team has learned.
Across the 32 papers that have so far drawn publisher scrutiny, all list Semenza as an author, but there are many combinations of different co-authors. Semenza is the corresponding or co-corresponding author on 14 of these papers, which cover research related to the molecular mechanisms of oxygen sensing in different types of cancer, and the function and dysfunction of blood vessels, among other topics. No wrongdoing has been proven, and with a lack of clarity about who contributed what to the papers, it is unclear who might have been responsible for any errors or problems with images. Corresponding authors do, however, carry responsibility for ensuring a paper’s overall integrity.
In Bik’s opinion, “the fact that there are multiple papers now retracted for manipulated images, and several others still under investigation suggests an intention to mislead”.
Retractions and corrections
The first post about Semenza’s work appeared on PubPeer in 2015, but most posts are from 2020 and 2021. Journals had issued one retraction in 2011 and corrections in 2013 to two papers Semenza co-authored, but the rest of the editorial notices have appeared in the past two years.
In 2021, five journals issued corrections on five papers because of errors including mislabelled data and the apparent re-use of images. In March, the journal Cancer Research corrected one paper and issued an expression of concern on another after an investigation found that the authors inadvertently presented the same data as results of different experiments, and reused data from an earlier publication.
And last month, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA retracted four cell biology papers co-authored by Semenza and corrected three others. The editorial notices describe concerns about figures including possible data duplication — where one set of results are used for more than one experiment — and ‘splicing’ of immunoblot images (when specific parts of an image are cut out and relocated). In three of the four retraction notices, the authors say that updated figures or confirmatory experiments are detailed in new articles uploaded to the bioRxiv preprint server. And in all of the retraction notices, the authors say they believe the overall conclusions of the work remain valid but they are retracting the work because of concerns over the figures.
A spokesperson for Johns Hopkins University says that the institution “maintains the highest standards for accuracy and integrity in research” and takes allegations of impropriety seriously. It adds that there are “strict protocols and processes in place to vet any such allegations and to determine an appropriate path forward, if necessary”. They declined to disclose details of these review processes, or to comment on whether there were any specific allegations against Semenza or his group.
Further investigations
The dozen papers currently under investigation include one paper in Nature Genetics and one paper in Oncogene, which are published by Springer Nature (Nature’s news team is independent of its publisher). Science Signalling, which is looking into two papers, has concluded an investigation into one and says that it will publish an erratum soon.
Another title, The Journal of Physiology, says that it is reconsidering its position on two papers that it had previously investigated in light of the recent retractions. A spokesperson for the journal says that it didn’t take action after the first investigation because the original data were unavailable and “the resolution of the figure in the published paper was too poor”.
Seven journals that published 20 of the papers co-authored by Semenza that have received comments on PubPeer told Nature that they were aware of the criticisms raised but declined to comment on them. Three other journals made no comment, two said they were not aware of the allegations and were not investigating the papers and one did not respond to requests for comment.
A researcher in the field, who wished to remain anonymous, says that they are awaiting the results of the investigations “with a mixture of concern and interest”. (Several other researchers in the field contacted by Nature’s news team declined to discuss the irregularities in papers co-authored by Semenza.)
The researcher says that Semenza’s most influential contribution to research on oxygen-sensing — the identification of a protein complex called HIF-1 — has stood the scientific test of being reproduced and built upon by others. “The work under discussion [on PubPeer] does not have the same broad significance, although its total extent is large.” It remains to be seen whether the problems with images affect the papers’ conclusions, the scientist says.
French writer Annie Ernaux awarded Nobel Prize in literature
STOCKHOLM (AP) — French author Annie Ernaux, who has fearlessly mined her own biography to explore life in France since the 1940s, won this year’s Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for work that illuminates murky corners of memory, family and society.
Ernaux ’s books probe deeply personal experiences and feelings – love, sex, abortion, shame – within a society split by gender and class divisions. The Swedish Academy said Ernaux, 82, was recognized for “the courage and clinical acuity” of books rooted in her background in a working-class family in the Normandy region of northwest France.
Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel literature committee, said Ernaux is “an extremely honest writer who is not afraid to confront the hard truths.”
“She writes about things that no one else writes about, for instance her abortion, her jealousy, her experiences as an abandoned lover and so forth. I mean, really hard experiences,” he told The Associated Press after the award announcement in Stockholm. “And she gives words for these experiences that are very simple and striking. They are short books, but they are really moving.”
One of France’s most-garlanded authors and a prominent feminist voice, Ernaux said she was happy to have won the prize, which carries a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) — but “not bowled over.”
“I am very happy, I am proud. Voila, that’s all,” Ernaux said in brief remarks to journalists outside her home in Cergy, a town west of Paris that she has written about.
French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “Annie Ernaux has been writing for 50 years the novel of the collective and intimate memory of our country. Her voice is that of women’s freedom, and the century’s forgotten ones.”
While Macron praised Ernaux for her Nobel, she has been unsparing with him. A supporter of left-wing causes for social justice, she has poured scorn on Macron’s background in banking and said his first term as president failed to advance the cause of French women.
Ernaux is the first female French Nobel literature winner and just the 17th woman among the 119 Nobel literature laureates. More than a dozen French writers have received the literature prize since Sully Prudhomme won the inaugural award in 1901. The most recent French winner before Ernaux was Patrick Modiano in 2014.
Her more than 20 books, most of them very short, chronicle events in her life and the lives of those around her. They present uncompromising portraits of sexual encounters, abortion, illness and the deaths of her parents.
Olsson said Ernaux’s work was often “written in plain language, scraped clean.” He said she had used the term “an ethnologist of herself” rather than a writer of fiction.
Ernaux worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book was “Cleaned Out” in 1974. Two more autobiographical novels followed – “What They Say Goes” and “The Frozen Woman” – before she moved to more overtly autobiographical books.
In the book that made her name, “A Man’s Place,” published in 1983 and about her relationship with her father, she writes: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral writing style comes to me naturally.”
“Shame,” published in 1997, explored a childhood trauma, while “Happening,” from 2000 depicts an illegal abortion.
Her most critically acclaimed book is “The Years,” published in 2008, which described herself and wider French society from the end of World War II to the 21st century. Unlike in previous books, in “The Years,” Ernaux wrote in the third person, calling her character “she” rather than “I.” The book received numerous awards and honors, and Olsson said it has been called “the first collective autobiography.”
“A Girl’s Story,” from 2016, follows a young woman’s coming of age in the 1950s.
The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers, as well as too male-dominated. Last year’s prize winner, Tanzanian-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa.
Olsson said the academy was working to diversify its range, drawing on experts in literature from different regions and languages.
“We try to broaden the concept of literature but it is the quality that counts, ultimately,” he said.
The prizes to Gurnah in 2021 and U.S. poet Louise Glück in 2020 helped the literature prize move on from years of controversy and scandal.
In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which names the Nobel literature committee, and sparked an exodus of members. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.
A week of Nobel Prize announcements kicked off Monday with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine for unlocking secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system.
Three scientists jointly won the prize in physics Tuesday. Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger had shown that tiny particles can retain a connection with each other even when separated, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, that can be used for specialized computing and to encrypt information.
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and K. Barry Sharpless, and Danish scientist Morten Meldal for developing a way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to explore cells, map DNA and design drugs that can target diseases such as cancer more precisely.
The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Monday.
The prizes will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
___
Macpherson reported from Clergy, France and Lawless from London. John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Naomi Koppel in London, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.
___
Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes
Annie Ernaux is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature
Ernaux’s work frequently deals with questions of personal history. Her memoir “The Happening” discusses an illegal abortion that she had in the 1960s. A 2018 translation of her memoir “The Years” was shortlisted for the Booker prize. A translation of Ernaux’s “Getting Lost,” a diary of her affair with a younger, married man, was published earlier this year.
Ernaux was born in 1940 in Normandy, the daughter of working class parents. She published her first book, “Cleaned Out,” a fictionalized account of her abortion, in 1974. She has two sons and lives in Cergy, in the Northwestern suburbs of Paris. She has previously won several French language literary prizes, including the Prix Renaudot.
In 1996, author Linda Barrett Osborne wrote, “Annie Ernaux’s work can evoke the same response that some modern art does in viewers: a tendency to think that, because it appears simple or direct in composition, it was simple to conceive, that anyone could create the same forms and impressions. Instead, at her best, Ernaux has the ability to refine ordinary experience, stripping it of irrelevancy and digression and reducing it to a kind of iconography of the late-20th-century soul.”
In “I Remain in Darkness,” Ernaux chronicled her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. Released in English in 2000, and translated by Tanya Leslie, the book “details brilliantly, with all the unconscious acuity of actual presence, the miseries and the interdependencies, the frustration and the tedium, the toxic mix of devotion and revulsion that characterize for so many of us the long process of losing an elderly parent,” according to a review in The Washington Post.
Yale University Press is scheduled to publish a translation of Ernaux’s “Look at the Lights, My Love” in Fall 2023. John Donatich, director of Yale University Press said in a statement, “As a great admirer of Annie Ernaux’s extraordinary work, it is a particular pleasure for me to see her receive this global recognition. Her visionary nonfiction is a profound achievement, and it richly deserves the wide readership this prize will attract. Those many new readers are about to make a wonderful discovery.”
Ernaux’s work has also been adapted to film. An adaptation of “The Happening,” directed by Audrey Diwan, received the 2021 Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, and 2020′s “Simple Passion” was a Cannes Film Festival selection. Ernaux is also a filmmaker. “The Super 8 Years” is a 60-minute film she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot composed of old home movies. She will be presenting the movie at the New York Film Festival next week.
The New Republic recently described Ernaux as “a perennial front-runner” for the Nobel Prize “who never quite crosses the line,” but suggested that in selecting her the Academy might “make a principled statement about reproductive rights,” especially given her work in “The Happening.” In response to an audience question on whether the choice was a political one, Ellen Mattson, a representative of the Academy said, “We concentrate on literature and literary quality,” before adding, “The message is that this is literature for everyone.”
The Nobel Prize for literature is awarded annually by the 18-member Swedish Academy. It typically recognizes an author’s full body of work, though the academy has singled out individual works by laureates on nine occasions. This year, the prize is worth roughly $913,000.
Nominations for the literature prize, which are kept secret for 50 years, can be submitted by members of the academy and its peer institutions, literature and linguistics professors, previous laureates, and the presidents of national literary societies. A smaller committee narrows that list down twice, ultimately furnishing the Academy with a list of five possible candidates each year. After reviewing and discussing the works of nominees on this list, the Academy selects a winner in October.
Last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian-born novelist who writes primarily in English, won the prize. It was granted “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
In response to an audience question at the 2022 announcement about the Nobel Prize’s general focus on European writers, Mattson said, “We have many different criteria, and you cannot satisfy all of them.” Stressing again that literary quality was most important to the committee, he went on, “One year, we gave the prize to a non-European writer, last year, Abdulrazak Gurnah. This year, we give the prize to a woman.” Ernaux is the 17th woman to win the prize.
The 2022 awards ceremony will take place on Dec. 10 in Stockholm.
A note to our readers
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program,
an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking
to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Nobel prize goes to pioneers of Lego-like “click chemistry”
STOCKHOLM, Oct 5 (Reuters) – Scientists Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for discovering reactions that let molecules snap together to create new compounds and that offer insight into cell biology.
The field of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry has been harnessed to improve the targeting of cancer pharmaceuticals now being tested in clinical trials, along with a host of health, agricultural and industrial applications.
“Combining simple chemical building blocks makes it possible to create an almost endless variety of molecules,” the award-giving body said in a statement, adding that “sometimes simple answers are the best”.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Danish winner Medal described click chemistry as a way to build complex structures and link them as if they were pieces of Lego, the plastic construction toy.
The technology is employed globally to learn more about cells and track biological processes. It also allows assembly in the lab of stable molecules without creating undesirable by-products that had hobbled older methods.
Sharpless joins an elite band of scientists who have won two Nobel prizes. The other individuals are John Bardeen who won the Physics prize twice, Marie Curie, who won Physics and Chemistry, Linus Pauling who won Chemistry and Peace and Frederick Sanger who won the Chemistry prize twice.
“I’m absolutely stunned, I’m sitting here and I can hardly breathe,” Bertozzi said from California after the academy reached her by telephone with the news she had won.
She added that as part of her work, she and her team managed to visualize and understand cell surface structures known as glycans, leading to a new idea in cancer immune therapy.
Jonas Aqvist, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Hans Ellegren, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Olof Ramstrom, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry announce winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry Caroline R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless, during a news conference at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, October 5, 2022. TT News Agency/Christine Olsson via REUTERS
The academy said the laureates’ discoveries had been used far beyond oncology, enabling products such as antimicrobials, herbicides, diagnostic tests, corrosion retardants and brightening agents.
Bertozzi works at Stanford University, Sharpless works at the Scripps Research institute, both in California, while Meldal is at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Meldal told Reuters his legs and body started shaking with excitement when the Nobel committee called.
“It is not every day to have a Dane get the Nobel Prize,” he said, adding he had been recording a teaching video when he received the news and that he was very proud on behalf of his colleagues and team.
The third of the prizes unveiled over six consecutive weekdays, the chemistry Nobel follows those for medicine and physics announced earlier this week.
The 2021 chemistry award was won by German Benjamin List and Scottish-born David MacMillan for their work in creating new tools to build molecules, aiding in the development of new drugs as well as in areas such as plastics.
The prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were established in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel, himself a chemist, and have been awarded since 1901. Economics was added later.
The prizes have been awarded every year with a few interruptions, primarily for the world wars, and made no break for the COVID-19 pandemic though much of the pageantry and events were put on hold or temporarily moved online.
($1 = 10.9281 Swedish crowns)
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Reporting by Niklas Pollard, Simon Johnson and Johan Ahlander in Stockholm, and Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt; additional reporting by Terje Solsvik in Oslo, Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm and Marie Mannes in Gdansk; editing by Frank Jack Daniel
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Russian journalist’s Nobel Peace Prize fetches record $103.5 million at auction to aid Ukraine children
June 21 (Reuters) – Dmitry Muratov, the co-winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize and the editor of one of Russia’s last major independent newspapers, auctioned off his Nobel medal for a record $103.5 million to aid children displaced by the war in Ukraine.
All proceeds from the auction, which coincided with the World Refugee Day on Monday, will benefit UNICEF’s humanitarian response for Ukraine’s displaced children, Heritage Auctions, which conducted the sale in New York, said in a statement.
Muratov’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper, fiercely critical of President Vladimir Putin and his government, suspended operations in Russia in March after warnings from the state over its coverage of the war in Ukraine. read more
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Pressure against liberal Russian media outlets has been continuous under Putin, Russia’s paramount leader since 1999, but it has mounted after Moscow sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24. Muratov was attacked with red paint in April. read more ]
Russia’s mainstream media and state-controlled organisations follow closely the language used by the Kremlin to describe the conflict with Ukraine, which Moscow calls a “special operation” to ensure Russian security and denazify its neighbour. Kyiv and its Western allies say it is an unprovoked war of aggression.
Dmitry Muratov speaks during the auction of his 2021 Nobel Peace Prize medal by Heritage Auctions in New York City, New York, U.S., June 20, 2022. REUTERS/David ‘Dee’ Delgado
According to U.S. media reports, the auction of Muratov’s prize shattered the record for any Nobel medal that has been auctioned off, with reports saying that the previous highest sale fetched just under $5 million.
“This award is unlike any other auction offering to present,” Heritage Auctions said in a statement before the sale.
“Mr. Muratov, with the full support of his staff at Novaya Gazeta, is allowing us to auction his medal not as a collectible but as an event that he hopes will positively impact the lives of millions of Ukrainian refugees.”
Muratov, who co-founded Novaya Gazeta in 1991, won the 2021 the Nobel Peace Prize with Maria Ressa of the Philippines for what the Nobel Prize committee said were “their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace”.
Muratov, who pledged to donate about $500,000 of that prize money to charities, dedicated his Nobel to the six Novaya Gazeta journalists who have been murdered since 2000.
That list included the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of Russia’s war in Chechnya, who was killed in 2006 in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Reporting in Melbourne by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Michael Perry
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Dmitry Muratov: Russian Nobel Peace Prize winner to auction medal for Ukrainian refugees
Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov was compelled to sell his medal by the sight of “wounded and sick children” requiring “urgent treatment” following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a statement published Tuesday on the newspaper’s website.
Muratov shared the 2021 Nobel with Filipino American journalist Maria Ressa for what judges described as their “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.”
Proceeds from the sale of the Nobel medal will go to The Foundation of Assistance to the Ukrainian Refugees, an NGO that provides support to refugees from Ukraine. In the statement, Muratov stressed the need for a ceasefire, exchange of prisoners and provision of humanitarian corridors.
Over 3.5 million refugees have fled Ukraine, according to the latest update from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Muratov helped found Novaya Gazeta in 1993 and has served as its top editor since 1995. The Nobel Committee said that the newspaper had been highly critical of the Russian government since its inception, including reporting on corruption and the activities of the country’s military.
Russian authorities have tightened their grip on the country’s independent media following the invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this month, lawmakers criminalized the spread of “fake” information that discredits the Russian armed forces or calls for sanctions against the country.
The crackdown has forced some outlets to shut up shop and their journalists to leave the country.
In early March, Novaya Gazeta said it had removed articles on the war in Ukraine from its website due to the government censorship.
-— Anna Cooban contributed reporting.
Luc Montagnier, French Nobel laureate who co-discovered HIV, dies at 89
Issued on:
French researcher Luc Montagnier, who has died at 89, shared the Nobel medicine prize for his vital early discoveries on AIDS, but was later dismissed by the scientific community for his increasingly outlandish theories, notably on Covid-19.
Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi shared the Nobel in 2008 for their work at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in isolating the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Their achievement sped the way to HIV tests and antiretroviral drugs that keep the deadly pathogen at bay.
Bitter rivalry
AIDS – acquired immune deficiency syndrome – first came to public notice in 1981, when US doctors noted an unusual cluster of deaths among young gay men in California and New York.
Montagnier had a bitter rivalry with US scientist Robert Gallo in his ground-breaking work in identifying HIV at the virology department he created in Paris in 1972.
Both are co-credited with discovering that HIV causes AIDS, and their rival claims led for several years to a legal and even diplomatic dispute between France and the United States.
Montagnier’s work started in January 1983, when tissue samples arrived at the Pasteur Institute from a patient with a disease that mysteriously wrecked the immune system.
He later recalled the “sense of isolation” as the team battled to make this vital connection.
“The results we had were very good but they were not accepted by the rest of the scientific community for at least another year, until Robert Gallo confirmed our results in the US,” he said.
The Nobel jury made no mention of Gallo in its citation.
In 1986 Montagnier shared the Lasker Award – the US equivalent of the Nobel – with Gallo and Myron Essex.
In 2011, to mark 30 years since the appearance of AIDS, Montagnier warned of the spiralling costs of treating the 33 million then stricken with HIV.
“Treatment cuts transmission, that’s clear, but it doesn’t eradicate it, and we can’t treat all the millions of people,” he told AFP.
Controversial ideas
Montagnier was born on August 8, 1932 at Chabris in the Indre region of central France.
After heading Pasteur’s AIDS department from 1991 to 1997, and then teaching at Queens College in New York, Montagnier gradually drifted to the scientific fringes, stirring controversy after controversy.
He repeatedly suggested that autism is caused by infection and set up much-criticised experiments to prove it, claiming antibiotics could cure the condition.
He stunned many of his peers when he talked of the purported ability of water to retain a memory of substances.
And he believed that anyone with a good immune system could fight off HIV with the right diet.
Montagnier supported theories that DNA left an electromagnetic trace in water that could be used to diagnose AIDS and Lyme’s Disease, and championed the therapeutic qualities of fermented papaya for Parkinson’s Disease.
‘Slow scientific shipwreck’
He repeatedly took up positions against vaccines, earning a stinging reprimand in 2017 from 106 members of the Academies of Sciences and Medicines.
The French daily Le Figaro described his journey from leading researcher to crank as a “slow scientific shipwreck”.
During the Covid pandemic he stood out again, stating that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was laboratory-made and that vaccines were responsible for the appearance of variants.
These theories, rejected by virologists and epidemiologists, made him even more into a pariah among his peers, but a hero to French anti-vaxxers.
(AFP)
Attenborough, WHO, Tsikhanouskaya among nominees for Nobel Peace Prize
OSLO, Feb 1 (Reuters) – British nature broadcaster David Attenborough, the World Health Organization and Belarusian dissident Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya are among the nominees for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize after being backed by Norwegian lawmakers who have a track record of picking the winner.
Also among the candidates for the accolade were Greta Thunberg, Pope Francis, the Myanmar National Unity Government formed by opponents of last year’s coup and Tuvalu’s foreign minister Simon Kofe, last-minute announcements showed.
Thousands of people, from members of parliaments worldwide to former winners, are eligible to propose candidates.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
Norwegian lawmakers have nominated an eventual Peace laureate every year since 2014 – with the exception of 2019 – including one of the two laureates last year, Maria Ressa.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which decides who wins the award, does not comment on nominations, keeping secret for 50 years the names of nominators and unsuccessful nominees.
However, some nominators like Norwegian lawmakers choose to reveal their picks.
NATURAL WORLD
Attenborough, 95, is best known for his landmark television series illustrating the natural world, including “Life on Earth” and “The Blue Planet”.
He was nominated jointly with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which assesses the state of biodiversity worldwide for policymakers.
They were put forward for “their efforts to inform about, and protect, Earth’s natural diversity, a prerequisite for sustainable and peaceful societies,” said nominator Une Bastholm, the leader of the Norwegian Green Party.
Another Green Party representative nominated Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, whose rise from teen activist to global climate leader has made her a frequent Nobel nominee in recent years, along with the Fridays For Future movement she started.
Pope Francis was nominated for his efforts to help solve the climate crisis as well as his work towards peace and reconciliation, by Dag Inge Ulstein, a former minister of international development.
Tuvalu’s foreign minister Simon Kofe was nominated by the leader of Norway’s Liberal Party, Guri Melby, for his work in highlighting climate change issues. Kofe filmed a speech to last year’s COP26 climate conference standing knee-deep in seawater.
Environmentalists have won the Nobel Peace Prize in the past, including Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore.
Still, “there is no scientific consensus on climate change as an important driver of violent combat”, said Henrik Urdal, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, cautioning against a “too simplistic connection between the two”.
PANDEMIC
The coronavirus pandemic has been front and centre of people’s concerns over the past two years and this year the international body tasked with fighting it, the WHO, has again been nominated.
“I think the WHO is likely to be discussed in the Committee for this year’s prize,” said Urdal.
The Myanmar National Unity Government, a shadow government formed last year by opponents of military rule after civilian leader and former peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was detained in a coup, was also named as a candidate. read more
Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was nominated for the second year running for her “brave, tireless and peaceful work” for democracy and freedom in her home country, said parliamentarian Haarek Elvenes.
Other nominees revealed by Norwegian lawmakers are jailed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, the International Criminal Court in the Hague, WikiLeaks and Chelsea Manning, NATO, aid organisation CARE, Iranian human rights activist Masih Alinejad, and the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum for cooperation for Arctic nations, according to a Reuters survey of Norwegian lawmakers.
Nominations, which closed on Monday, do not imply an endorsement from the Nobel committee.
The 2022 laureate will be announced in October.
For a graphic of Nobel laureates, click here: http://tmsnrt.rs/2y6ATVW
(This story corrects to read 2022 laureate instead of 2021 laureate in final sentence)
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Register
Editing by Gwladys Fouche, Toby Chopra and Alex Richardson
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.