Three European scientists share the first of this year’s Nobel awards - the medicine prize - for discovering viruses responsible for two serious human diseases.

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier of France discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes Aids, while Harald zur Hausen of Germany went against current thinking to postulate correctly that human papilloma virus (HPV) causes cervical cancer, the second most common cancer in women.