“Had this happened 20 years ago I would have been devastated. But I guess I have matured. It does not seem that important any longer and the Swedes have in fact made their decision. What can I do about it? I have to respect it”, Gallo says.

He is happy for the massive support from friends and colleagues; he has received more than 300 letters plus e-mails and phone calls. One of the first to call him in Bethesda outside Washington D.C. just a short while after the announcement, to say he was sorry, was Luc Montagnier.

“Many people are very upset, not least in leading research communities here in the US and among my collaborators at the institute in Baltimore”, says Gallo. “And I know that actions are being planned in support of me. But I am trying to calm people’s feelings.”

Robert Gallo, and many others who have followed aids research closely, do not understand “how he Swedes were reasoning”, why he was left out.

“Of course this opens old wounds and one can easily become paranoic”, he admits.

A three year long conflict between Montagnier’s and Gallo’s institutes ended in 1987 in a compromise; both men were recognised as “co-discoverers of the aids virus”. That was then the accepted version until the Nobel Prize selectors rewrote history twenty years later.

For six gruesome years after the conflict ended Gallo had to fight rumors that he had cheated and “stolen” the french virus.

Robert Gallo now worries that many will take the Nobel Prize debacle as a proof that he did “steal” the virus after all.

“It is deeply unfair”, he says to Svenska Dagbladet. “We had 48 virus of our own. The fact that we chose the french virus, which was among all the other viruses to continue research on, was a coincidence and nothing we were conscious of.”

The Nobel committee, as a matter of principle, never discusses or comments criticism of its selections.