Newsweek's Sharon Begley sums up what she calls the "shocking" decision to exclude Robert Gallo from the prize for discovering the AIDS virus.

It’s rare for the announcement of a Nobel prize in science to make researchers utter a collective “holy ****” (insert favorite expletive here), but the mandarins of Stockholm have managed to do it this morning...

The other half of the prize went to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS. Without equivocation, the Nobel committee credits the two with the 1983 discovery of HIV in lymphocytes from patients in the early stages of what would soon be recognized as AIDS, and in blood from patients with late stage disease. The discovery, of course, led to the AIDS test and to tests to screen blood for HIV, limiting the spread of the pandemic. “The unprecedented development of several classes of new antiviral drugs is also a result of knowledge of the details of the viral replication cycle,” the Nobel citation adds.

The shock is not who is included but who is left out: Robert Gallo.

In the United States, at least, Gallo (then at NIH, now at the University of Maryland) was and is widely credited with co-discovering HIV. Uncounted web sites, books and articles assert that Gallo “is considered the co-discoverer, along with Luc Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute, of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV),” as a PBS site puts it. “Gallo established that the virus causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), something which Montagnier had not been able to do, and he developed the blood test for HIV, which remains a central tool in efforts to control the disease.”...

The fight for credit grew so bitter that, in 1987, Presidents Ronald Reagan of the U.S. and Jacques Chirac of France had to step in, signing an agreement that split royalties from the AIDS blood test between the two countries. And that’s where the dispute has stood—until the Nobel committee weighed in with a verdict that arguably carries more weight among scientists than any other: Montagnier’s lab, and only Montagnier’s lab, discovered HIV.