Tribune's Crewdson, Fang, Hedges, Madhani Laid Off

The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded last month to Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute in Paris for discovering the HIV virus in 1983 — but not to the American scientist Robert Gallo.

This result might be interpreted as the ultimate vindication of reporter John Crewdson, who in 1988, in a 50,000-word story in the Chicago Tribune, argued that Gallo — credited back then with codiscovering the virus — had merely rediscovered Montagnier’s virus, which had been sent to Gallo as a professional courtesy.