French Scientists Renew HIV Discovery Claim : Research: They say the virus was in a specimen sent to an American virologist and they want credit. Scientific prestige and, perhaps, a Nobel Prize are at stake.

In the latest chapter in the dispute over who discovered the virus that causes AIDS, French researchers say they now have evidence to bolster their claim that the AIDS virus isolated by virologist Robert Gallo in 1983 was in a specimen they sent to him and that they deserve credit for its isolation.

In February, Gallo published a report that seemed to show that his virus was significantly different from a French version he acknowledges receiving. After that, many researchers thought the case was closed.

But the new French claims, included in a manuscript submitted to Science magazine and made available by the journal on Monday, seem likely to place Gallo on the defensive once again.

Gallo, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, has denied any wrongdoing.

Identification of the virus allowed Gallo to develop the blood test for the human immunodeficiency virus that is now widely used for testing for exposure to AIDS.

Gallo and the French agreed in 1987 to share credit for the discovery and to split the royalties from the test. The question of who discovered it first is irrelevant to ongoing research on how the virus works and on ways to treat individuals infected by it.

But the controversy has continued to simmer because of the researchers’ quest for scientific prestige and the Nobel Prize that many believe will be conferred on HIV’s discoverer.

Allegations that Gallo obtained his virus from a specimen sent by French virologist Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris rather than from the American patients he was studying have also cast a shadow on his scientific reputation. The National Institutes of Health is conducting an investigation to establish the source of the virus Gallo used in his experiments, and to address allegations of other improprieties by researchers in his lab.

Gallo received virus specimens from Montagnier in 1983 when the two laboratories were collaborating in the search for the then-unrecognized virus.

Several years later, Montagnier and Gallo published articles in scientific journals outlining the genetic blueprints of their viruses. The blueprints had strong similarities, which raised questions within the scientific community about whether Gallo’s sequence was based on his own viral samples or Montagnier’s.

In February, Gallo reported that he had gone back to samples of the French material stored in his freezer and showed by genetic analysis that they were different from both the strain that he had identified and that first reported by Montagnier.

But the French researchers claimed Monday that Gallo did not analyze all the samples sent to him. When they went back to their own freezers, they found two of the samples to be “genetically indistinguishable” from the virus identified by Gallo and used in developing the antibody test.

Montagnier and his colleagues said that this new strain, which they call Lai after the code name of the patient from whom it was isolated, was a very fast-growing virus that apparently contaminated some of the samples sent to Gallo. Why the virus isolated by Gallo is identical to the Lai virus “remains to be explained,” they said.

Possible explanations include deliberate theft by Gallo’s lab or inadvertent contamination of his specimens.

“Nobody here did anything wrong on purpose,” Gallo said Monday. “That’s one thing I’m confident of.”

Although Gallo indicated that he would return to his freezer and investigate the rest of the French specimens, he also appeared to be trying to ease the controversy.

“The history of the discovery is not the simple report of one virus,” he said. “It was not all done in my lab and it was not all done at the Pasteur.”