This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Harald zur Hausen of Germany for establishing that human papilloma viruses (HPV) cause cervical cancer. He gets half of the prize, and the other half is shared by two French scientists, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

The announcement that this year's prize goes to three scientists, who discovered two viruses causing severe human diseases, was made to the press earlier today by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

Harald zur Hausen

Harald zur Hausen was born in 1936 in Germany, and attained his MD at the University of Düsseldorf. He is Professor emeritus and former Chairman and Scientific Director of the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg.

Zur Hausen's discovery has led to the understanding of the natural history of HPV infection and how the virus leads to cancer, thus opening the door to developing vaccines that stop the virus taking hold.

Zur Hausen persisted against the majority view in the 1970s when he suggested HPV (human papilloma virus) caused cervical cancer, the most common cancer among women. He had a hunch that inside cervical cancer tumours were cancer cells whose DNA had been invaded by DNA from HPV and this could be found by looking for it in the cancer cell genome. While this sounds straightforward, it took ten years and was complicated by the fact that only parts of the viral DNA were fused in the host genome.

After painstaking work analysing biopsy after biopsy of cervical cancers, zur Hausen eventually found DNA from HPV type 16 inside tumour cells in 1983…