Announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for HIV discovery

On 6 October 2008, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced that Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier would share half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus." (The other half of the prize that year went to Harald zur Hausen for his discovery of human papillomaviruses causing cervical cancer.)

This announcement represented the highest form of international recognition for the work Barré-Sinoussi had conducted a quarter-century earlier, in early 1983, when she detected the first evidence of the retrovirus later named HIV. The Nobel committee's decision affirmed the Institut Pasteur team's priority in the discovery, following years of scientific and legal disputes with American researcher Robert Gallo's laboratory over credit for identifying the virus.

Barré-Sinoussi became only the eighth woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at that point in the prize's history, underscoring both the rarity of such recognition for women in science and the exceptional significance of her contribution. The award drew global attention to the ongoing AIDS pandemic and to the scientists whose fundamental research had enabled diagnostic testing, blood-supply screening, and eventually life-saving antiretroviral therapies that transformed HIV/AIDS from a near-certain death sentence into a manageable chronic illness for millions worldwide.