The Nation - News from July 9, 1986

A federal court dismissed a suit filed by the Pasteur Institute of Paris against the U.S. government contending that scientists in Paris were the first to discover the AIDS virus. A spokesman for the Health and Human Services Department said that the U.S. Court of Claims in New York rejected the suit, filed against the department, Dr. Robert Gallo, head of the tumor cell biology laboratory at the National Cancer Institute, and others. The stated purpose of the suit was to settle the issue of who discovered the virus first. Gallo’s team had published its report in May, 1984. Pasteur scientists claimed to have been first with their report in 1983.