Red Gold . Innovators & Pioneers . Robert Gallo

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Allegations Overshadow Scientific Accomplishments

Almost a year before Gallo announced his findings, Montagnier at the Pasteur Institute had identified a virus he called LAV, though he was not able to prove that it caused AIDS. The two laboratories were cooperating with each other in the race to find the cause of AIDS and several samples of this virus had been sent to Gallo at the National Cancer Institute. The controversy which would embroil the American scientist's career for almost the next decade began when the United States government denied the French scientists a patent for the AIDS test and awarded one to his team instead. The Pasteur Institute believed their contribution was not recognized in this decision, and they challenged it in court. Gallo did not deny that they had preceded him in isolating the virus, but he argued that it was proof of the causal relationship and the development of the blood test which were most important, and he maintained that these advances had been accomplished using a virus which had been independently isolated in his laboratory.

This first stage of the controversy ended in a legal settlement that was highly unusual for the scientific community: Gallo and Montagnier agreed out of court to share equal credit for their discovery. This settlement followed a review of records from Gallo's laboratory and rested on the assumption that the virus Gallo had discovered was different from the one Montagnier had sent him. An international committee renamed the virus HIV, and in what Specter calls "the first such negotiated history of a scientific enterprise ever published," the American and French groups published an agreement about their contributions in NATURE in 1987. In 1988, Gallo and Montagnier jointly related the story of the discoveries in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN.

Questions about the isolation of the AIDS virus were revived in 1989 by a long article in the CHICAGO TRIBUNE. The journalist, a Pulitzer Prize winner named John Crewdson, had spent three years investigating Gallo's laboratory, making over one hundred requests under the Freedom of Information Act. He directly questioned Gallo's integrity and implied he had stolen Montagnier's virus. The controversy intensified when it was established that the LAV virus which the French had isolated and the HTLV-3 virus were virtually identical. The genetic sequencing in the two were in fact so close that some believed they actually came from the same AIDS patient, and Gallo was accused of simply renaming the virus Montagnier had sent him. Gallo's claim to have independently isolated the virus was further damaged when it was discovered that in the 1984 SCIENCE article announcing his discovery of HTLV-3 he had accidently published a photograph of Montagnier's virus.

Finding of Scientic Misconduct Reversed on Appeal

In 1990, pressure from a congressional committee forced the NIH to undertake an investigation. In THE WASHINGTON POST, Malcolm Gladwell observed of this inquiry: "No other investigation has taken so long, dealt with a scientific discovery of such importance or directly implicated so distinguished a researcher." The NIH investigation found Popovic guilty of scientific misconduct but Gallo guilty only of misjudgment. A committee of scientists which oversaw the investigation was strongly critical of these conclusions, and the group expressed concern that Popovic had been assigned more than a fair share of the blame. In June 1992, the NIH investigation was superseded by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) at the Department of Health and Human Services, and in December of that year ORI found both Gallo and Popovic guilty of scientific misconduct . Based largely on a single sentence in the 1984 SCIENCE article that described the isolation of the virus, the ORI report found Gallo guilty of misconduct for "falsely reporting that LAV had not been transmitted to a permanently growing cell line." This decision renewed the legal threat from the Pasteur Institute, whose lawyers moved to claim all the back royalties from the AIDS blood test, which then amounted to approximately $20 million.

Gallo strongly objected to the findings of the ORI, pointing to the fact that the finding of misconduct turned on a single sentence in a single paper. Other scientists objected to the panel's priorities, believing that the charge of misconduct concerned a misrepresentation of a relatively minor issue which did not negate the scientific validity of Gallo's conclusions. Lawyers representing both Gallo and Popovic brought their cases before an appeals board at the Department of Health and Human Services. Popovic's case was heard first, and in December 1993 the board announced that he had been cleared of all charges. As quoted in TIME, the panel declared: "One might anticipate ... after all the sound and fury, there would be at least a residue of palpable wrongdoing. This is not the case." The ORI immediately withdrew all charges against Gallo for lack of proof.

According to TIME, in December 1993 Gallo considered himself "completely vindicated" of all the allegations that had been made against him. He has established that before 1984 his laboratory had succeeded in isolating other strains of the virus which were not similar to LAV. Many scientists now believe that the problem was simply one of contamination, a mistake which may have been a consequence of the intense pressure for results in many laboratories during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. It has been hypothesized that the LAV sample from the Pasteur Institute contaminated the mixture of AIDS viruses which Popovic concocted to find one strain that would survive in culture; it is believed that this strain was strong enough to survive and be identified by Gallo and Popovic for a second time.

In 1990, when the controversy was still at its height, Gallo published a book about his career called VIRUS HUNTING, which seemed intended to refute the charges against him, particularly the TRIBUNE article by Crewdson. Gallo made many of the claims that were later supported by the appeals board, and in the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, Natalie Angier called him "a formidable gladiator who firmly believes in the importance of his scientific contributions." Angier wrote of the book: "His description of the key experiments in 1983 and 1984 that led to the final isolation of the AIDS virus are intelligent and persuasive, particularly to a reader who was heard the other side of the story. Although the reviews of VIRUS HUNTING were not entirely sympathetic, many felt the controversy was misplaced. A number of reviewers commented on how this controversy had virtually paralyzed one of the most important AIDS research laboratories in the world. In THE WASHINGTON POST, J. D. Robinson observed that "thousands of hours and untold psychic energy which could have been devoted to seeking a cure for AIDS have been spent responding to inquiries and accusations."

The many allegations and the long series of investigations have distracted many people from the accomplishments of a man whose name appears on hundreds of scientific papers and who has won most major awards in biomedical research except the Nobel Prize. Gallo has actually received the coveted Albert Lasker Award twice, once in 1982 for his work on the viral origins of cancer, and again in 1986 for his research on AIDS. He has also been awarded the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor in 1983, the Lucy Wortham Prize from the Society for Surgical Oncology in 1984, the Armand Hammer Cancer Research Award in 1985, and the Gairdner Foundation International Award for Biomedical Research in 1987. He has received eleven honorary degrees.

Works

VIRUS HUNTING: AIDS, CANCER AND THE HUMAN RETROVIRUS, HarperCollins, 1991.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, "The First Human Retrovirus," December, 1986, pp. 88-99.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, "The AIDS Virus," January, 1987, pp. 46-57.
NATURE, "The Chronology of AIDS Research," April, 1987, pp. 435-436.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, "AIDS in 1988," October, 1988, pp. 40-49.
DISCOVER, "My Life Stalking AIDS," October, 1989, pp. 31-34.