Reviewed by Stephen Mihm
Sunday, April 14, 2002; Page BW04

SCIENCE FICTIONS
A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-Up and the Dark Legacy Of Robert
Gallo
By John Crewdson
Little, Brown. 627 pp. $27.95

Looking for a heartwarming story of heroic scientific inquiry? Best steer
clear of John Crewdson's exposé of the career of AIDS researcher Robert
Gallo. Crewdson, a reporter whose earlier books tackled subjects as
different as immigration and child abuse, devotes his investigative
talents to dismembering Gallo and his putative accomplishments in this
scrupulously researched and sweeping narrative. A sobering read, Science
Fictions documents enough treachery, negligence and megalomania to make
even the most trusting of readers skeptical of the scientific
establishment.

Crewdson's story begins before the age of AIDS, with the creation of the
National Cancer Institute in the early 1970s. Many of the scientists at
the NCI -- Robert Gallo included -- sought to establish that cancer had a
viral origin. Gallo quickly attracted notoriety for his studies of a
retrovirus he christened Human T-Cell Leukemia Virus, or HTLV. Then, when
gay men began showing up at hospitals in 1981 with symptoms of what later
became known as AIDS, Gallo joined the search for the cause of the new
disease. He soon came to believe that HTLV was the cause of AIDS.

On Sun, 09 May 2004 17:03:59 -0400, "PaulKing"
<aimulti@aimultimedia.com> wrote:

Possibly a good book! I don't know. The funny thing is that Gallo did
not discover HIV. The Institut Pasteur did. It's really another red
herring that bears no relevance on the argument as to whether HIV
exists or causes AIDS.

One could go on about the right-wing, crypto-fascist relations of
Peter Duesberg. But that would not be relevant to the fact that his
theory about "drugs causing AIDS" is demonstrably false as well as
just pretty idiotic. Or discussing the bona fides of the "Perth Group"
to underscore their inability to identify a virus everyone else in the
world in the business has no trouble finding.

George M. Carter

another perspective:
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/conte...24/7349/1341/a

Reviews
Book

Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up, and the
Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo
John Crewdson

Little, Brown and Company, $27.95/£19.67, pp 670
ISBN 0 316 13476 7

It's fairly clear that Robert Gallo is not a very likeable man. In the
race to identify the cause of AIDS, he threatened his rivals, bullied
his collaborators, and lied to editors of journals. Although never
proved, it seems more than possible that HTLV-III, the retrovirus that
he claimed to have discovered, had been deliberately misappropriated
from cell lines sent to him from the Pasteur Institute in Paris and
given a new name.

Crewdson, an investigative journalist on the Chicago Tribune, is
apparently appalled that a scientist could behave in this way. In
1989, he wrote a long article for his newspaper about the
Gallo-Montagnier controversy in which he accused Gallo of malpractice.
Here, after exhaustive scrutiny of correspondence, memoranda,
laboratory notebooks, and the transcripts of the official
investigations, he takes nearly 700 pages to tell an updated version
of the same story.

Crewdson believes that Gallo abandoned all moral and scientific
principles in the singleminded pursuit of a Nobel prize. To persuade
us that this judgment is correct, he overwhelms us with evidence,
often quoting verbatim from the protagonists' own accounts. This makes
the book tough going because it is hard not to lose the scientific
plot in the minutiae of who said what to whom. And despite the weight
of information Crewdson amasses, it's ultimately unconvincing. One has
no way of knowing whether it has been presented in a fair minded way.
There's a strong sense of only hearing the case for the prosecution.
Don't read the book hoping for a history of AIDS research, an account
of the biology of retroviruses, or a psychological profile of the main
characters. You'll be disappointed.

The author's shock at discovering that scientists are not always
honourable in their dealings must surely be simulated. It's a
commonplace observation that important discoveries are made by
unpleasant people. (Forgive me if I don't give medical examples here.)
And the phrase in the subtitle, the dark legacy of Robert Gallo, which
implies that lasting harm was done and which, I guess, Crewdson must
need to believe to justify writing the book, is never supported by
argument or facts. It's far from clear that progress in understanding
the causation of AIDS was slowed up by anything Gallo did. Indeed, the
reverse might well be true.



Christopher Martyn.

BMJ

[This review of Science Fictions was written by a biochemistry professor.
Following the article I've included a subsequent "rebuttal" to Epstein's
review, and Epstein's reply to the rebuttal.-rmjon23]

Los Angeles Times
February 17, 2002
COVER REVIEW
Blood, Sweat and Ego

Author: HELEN EPSTEIN
Features Desk
Edition: Home Edition
Section: Book Review
Page: R-6

SCIENCE FICTIONS: A Scientific Mystery, Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy
of Robert Gallo, by John Crewdson. Little, Brown: 672 pp., $27.95.

*

In the history of science, as in other fields, there have certainly been
scandals and controversial figures: researchers who planted archeological finds
made from clay, fudged their statistics or painted spots on lab animals to
prove something about genetics that wasn't true. But what if they falsify
research on diseases when lives are hanging in the balance?

That's an offense of another order, especially when it concerns a disease as
cruel as AIDS, according to John Crewdson's "Science Fictions." HIV, the virus
that causes AIDS, has spread worldwide to 50 million people and killed 20
million so far, most of them young adults and children. The scale of the global
AIDS epidemic was becoming clearly known in the 1980s and early 1990s when the
events in Crewdson's book were unfolding. The story of the U.S. National Cancer
Institute's Robert Gallo and his relentless insistence that he was the first to
discover HIV and the first to develop a blood test for it--in the face of
powerful evidence to the contrary--is gruesome, indeed harrowing, for
suggesting what happens when scientists succumb to ego and greed in the race
for discovery.

Few in the scientific community can forget Gallo's April 1984 announcement that
his lab had discovered that AIDS was caused by a retrovirus called HTLV-III.
The discovery led to the development of a blood test to protect the blood
supply and help doctors make diagnoses and begin work on vaccines. This was a
triumphant moment for American scientific research, by far the best-funded and
most active in the world.

But across the Atlantic, this book relates, all was not well. Months before
Gallo's announcement, a group of French scientists at the Pasteur Institute in
Paris had sent a sample of their own candidate AIDS virus, which they called
LAV, to Gallo's lab. Eventually the French began to suspect that Gallo's lab
workers had contaminated their cell cultures with LAV and had then rediscovered
it and claimed it as their own. Perhaps, at first, Gallo and his colleagues
deceived themselves into believing that they had discovered this virus
independently of the French. But AIDS viruses from different people are
different in subtle but detectable ways, and by 1991, it became clear that the
French were right: LAV and HTLV-III were the same virus and had come from the
same patient. The credit for the discovery should have gone to the French.

Crewdson describes how Gallo maintained that, though his technicians might have
used the French virus by mistake, his own lab was the first to grow the virus
in significant quantities and to develop a blood test that showed that this new
virus was the most likely cause of AIDS. The French might have isolated the
virus first, he suggested, but the Americans made it useful: It was an argument
akin to saying that the Germans had demonstrated that nuclear fission was
theoretically possible but that Americans made the first bombs and reactors, or
that English mathematician Alan Turing may have described the principle of a
computer but that a real operating system was developed by Americans.

That is how the credit for the AIDS blood test was apportioned in 1994, when
the head of the NIH announced that royalties for the test would be split 50-50
between the French and the Americans. But in "Science Fictions," we learn that,
for Crewdson, the matter didn't end there. He has spent the last eight years
sifting the evidence and has come up with some startling conclusions: Gallo
wasn't the first to grow the virus in significant quantities nor was he the
first to make a blood test that showed the virus was the most likely cause of
AIDS. In fact, Gallo's blood test, although based on the French virus, wasn't
nearly as good as another test developed by the French. Even though the French
had applied for a patent more than a year before Gallo did, Gallo's test was
patented first and was the first one on the U.S. market, where it was used to
screen the blood supply.

Though the American test could identify most infected batches of blood, it also
had a high false-positive rate that meant many safe batches of blood were
thrown away at great cost to the blood banks. When Abbott Laboratories, the
company that made the test, tried to improve it, the result was a test that
failed to detect all infected bags of blood, and some slipped through the
screening process with tragic results. Meanwhile, the U.S. government, which
held Gallo's patent, was raking in millions of dollars a year, and Gallo and
Mikulas Popovic, his postdoctoral assistant, were taking home handsome
royalties. The French sued, but U.S. government patent lawyers kept them tied
up in technicalities for years, costing both parties an enormous amount of
money.

Crewdson's squalid tale of grasping self-interest in the face of a devastating
epidemic is told through court documents, reports from internal NIH and
congressional investigative committees and interviews. The enormous amount of
evidence which the author has gathered in favor of the French seems convincing.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Crewdson reveals how Gallo was able to
suppress the results of others, including the French scientists, through his
influence over scientific journals and meetings. Then, the U.S. government
tried too hard to defend him and disparage the French.

By Crewdson's account, Gallo may well be a rascal, but still, 10 years seems a
long time to devote oneself to one wayward scientist. (Today, Gallo heads the
Institute of Human Virology in Maryland, an independent research facility that
receives money from public and private sources.) It is chilling to contemplate
that, according to the book, some people may have died because the more
accurate French test was kept off the market. The French test eventually
entered the market, and U.S. manufacturers managed to improve their own test,
and by now many lives have been saved by AIDS blood tests. The discovery of the
cause of AIDS will leave a mark on the world forever and matters far more than
the men and women who made it.

He doesn't say so, but investigating the unholy alliance between scientists,
government and industry in America was clearly part of Crewdson's motivation.
But not all scientists behave as Gallo does in Crewdson's account, and focusing
so much attention on this case risks overly demonizing the scientific
establishment in general, which some journalists see as a secretive coven of
amoral, even destructive geniuses.

However, "Science Fictions" dramatizes far more important issues in
contemporary science that others have recently been raising, but which Crewdson
himself does not explore. Despite the billions of dollars spent on medical
research every year in the United States, the returns have been relatively poor
lately, and "Science Fictions" does shed considerable light on the way science
works in America and the larger dilemma it may be facing.

Medical historian James Le Fanu has argued that the golden age of medical
research began in the 1930s with the discovery of antibiotics and ended roughly
in the 1970s with the invention of in-vitro fertilization. The intervening
years saw the development of treatments for mental illnesses and childhood
cancer, new surgical techniques and many other innovations. Since then, the
rate of innovation has slowed while government and industry science budgets
have soared. The number of new chemical entities filed by the U.S. patent
office is about half what it was 40 years ago, and many patents today are
merely for "copycat" versions of existing drugs. Le Fanu blames molecular
biology, which he sees as a technical distraction from the serious business of
studying disease.

But there are other possible explanations for the relatively slow pace of
medical innovation today. Like so many other things in this world, science has
become bureaucratized. The people closest to the work itself often aren't the
ones making the decisions. "Science Fictions" describes how Popovic originally
wanted to give the French credit for their findings and their help. But Gallo,
according to Crewdson, had problems with Popovic's scientific paper and took
out almost all the references to the French virus. Postdocs like Popovic do
most of the research in the world's labs, but they are in a very precarious
position.

According to science journalist Daniel Greenberg, in the early 1980s, leading
U.S. scientists warned the government that by 1990, there would be a shortage
of scientists in the country, and this could threaten America's position in the
world. They reminded U.S. politicians that the Soviets had a vigorous
scientific research program, devoted mainly to military applications. So the
U.S. government provided universities with money to expand their science
doctoral programs. In the end, established scientists got more cheap labor, but
the scientist shortage never materialized. Now, most new PhDs move on to
low-paying postdoctoral positions in other people's labs. If, after a few
years, they fail to make a major discovery (and many do fail), they move on to
other postdoc jobs. This may well have been running through Popovic's mind
when, according to "Science Fictions," his powerful boss urged him not to give
the French any credit. In the end, when the various government committees
investigated the AIDS virus incident, Popovic, not Gallo, took most of the
blame.

These days, the atmosphere in America's labs is increasingly tense and
competitive, sometimes in an unhealthy, unproductive way. The glut of
underemployed postdocs explains part of this phenomenon. So does the Bayh-Dole
Act of 1980, which allowed scientists at federally funded labs to profit,
personally, from patented discoveries. As predicted, this led to closer ties
between industry and academic research. But no one predicted that it would deal
such a blow to the spirit of cooperation among scientists.

*

From `Science Fictions'

Popovic flew to Utah on March 18, 1984, a Sunday. The following Friday, he got
a message to call Gallo at once. When Popovic found a phone, he learned that
Gallo had major problems with his manuscript, especially Popovic's description
of his experiments with LAV....

The manuscript Popovic saw when he walked into the lab on Monday afternoon bore
little resemblance to the one he had left behind. Entire sentences, even whole
paragraphs, had been excised, replaced with Gallo's scrawled additions. Crossed
out altogether was the paragraph in which Popovic acknowledged the Pasteur's
discovery of LAV and explained that the French virus was "described here" as
HTLV-3.

"I just don't believe it," Gallo had written in the margin. "You are absolutely
incredible." Also gone was Popovic's description of his use of LAV as a
"reference virus" in his search for a permissive T-cell line. Next to that
strikeout, Gallo had scribbled "Mika you are crazy."

*

Helen Epstein taught biochemistry at the medical school at Makerere University
in Uganda and has written about public health for the New York Review of Books,
the TLS and other publications.

Los Angeles Times


April 7, 2002
Correspondence
By Features Desk
Edition: Home Edition
Section: Book Review
Page: R-14

To the editor:

The review of "Science Fictions" (Book Review, Feb. 17) uncritically repeats
the book's accusations against the world-renowned virologist Robert Gallo.
These accusations initially appeared in newspaper articles written more than a
decade ago by the author of "Science Fictions" and led to an exhaustive review
by the National Institutes of Health. The NIH's 1993 report concluded that "

Epstein repeats two specific misrepresentations that are particularly worth
correcting. The first is that Gallo's group inappropriately claimed credit for
HIV discoveries involving the laboratory of Luc Montagnier in Paris. Science
magazine (Feb. 22, 2002) quotes Montagnier himself saying he does not believe
any such theft occurred. The second concerns the suggestion that Gallo retarded
development or implementation of an effective blood test for HIV. Quite the
contrary. The record is clear that Gallo's test was the first to be patented
and that it rapidly transformed the design of public health strategies to slow
HIV transmission. Without Gallo's test, the world's most dreadful epidemic
would have been far worse.

The L.A. Times' one-sided review of a deeply flawed book both impugns the
reputations of many distinguished scientists and distracts them from a highly
important unfinished agenda.

Dean T. Jamison

Professor and director

Program on Global Health, UCLA

*

Helen Epstein replies:

Indeed, the NIH wanted to put this matter to rest 10 years ago, and "Science
Fictions" describes in great detail how it did so. That the scientists involved
do not want to revive this fracas is unsurprising. However, as "Science
Fictions" also shows, the real history of the race to discover HIV is not so
simple and readers have a right to know about it.

As my review stated, Gallo's HIV test was indeed the first to be patented.
However, the patent for the more accurate French test was submitted several
months earlier. Gallo's application was expedited; the French one wasn't, and
the French test was kept out of the market for years.

"The funny thing is that Gallo did
not discover HIV. The Institut Pasteur did."

TRUE


"HIV did not, after all, kill T-cells"


In 1990 at the San Francisco AIDS conference, Montagnier announced that
HIV did not, after all, kill T-cells and could not be the
cause of AIDS. Within hours of making this announcement, he was attacked
by the very industry he'd helped to create. Montagnier's not a liar. He's
a so-so scientist who's in over his head.

Afterword:

In a 1997 interview, Luc Montagnier spoke about his isolation of HIV. He
said, "We did not purify [isolate] ... We saw some particles but
they did not have the morphology [shape] typical of retroviruses ... They
were very different ... What we did not have, as I have always recognized
it, is that it was truly the cause of AIDS."

John Crewdson’s reply to Science

Asking Martin Delaney to review Science Fictions,1 my history of the
discovery of HIV, is like asking Ariel Sharon to review Yasser Arafat’s
memoirs. Why bother?
I first became aware of Delaney a dozen years ago, when he
threatened2 to send the publisher of my newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, a
bill for the ‘direct and indirect’ costs incurred by the government
investigations of Dr. Robert Gallo's AIDS research that had been prompted
by my reporting in the Tribune.3
Judging from his letter, Delaney, a San Francisco AIDS activist and
Gallo’s most vociferous defender, was uncomfortable with Tribune’s
conclusion that Gallo had performed his celebrated experiments, including
the development of an HIV blood antibody test that has so far earned him
more than $1 million in personal patent royalties, with a virus isolated
at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
Delaney’s inflammatory missives to the Tribune continued for years,
and he hasn’t missed many chances to attack anyone else who questions
Gallo’s behavior. Now Science, which published many of the papers that
provided AIDS researchers with a false impression of Gallo’s work, chooses
the one person in America least likely to give my book an impartial
reading. And, rather than acknowledging his longstanding conflict of
interest, Delaney dons the guise of objective reviewer – and proceeds to
demonstrate convincingly that he has not read Science Fictions.
Delaney thinks my book contains no mention of Pasteur researcher
Luc Montagnier’s hypothesis that mycoplasma is an important co-factor in
AIDS? Check out page 366. Or that the book fails to note that Don Francis
‘spent 10 years on a quixotic search for value in an old gp120 vaccine?’
See page 529. Or that ‘the author fails to mention that he never
interviewed Gallo at all?’ Take a look at page 343, for an account of how
Gallo cancelled a long-sought interview at the last moment.
Despite Gallo’s refusal to speak further to me or to allow his
staff to do so,4 his side of the story is told, and told again, in
extensive first-hand quotes from his scientific talks, public appearances
and correspondence – not the ‘hearsay’ Delaney describes, but a
historically useful account of Gallo’s story in his own words.
The book spends ‘precious little time digesting the ultimate
conclusions’ of the DHHS Research Integrity Adjudications Panel’s finding
that Gallo’s chief virologist, Mikulas Popovic, had not committed
scientific misconduct? Chapters 24 and 25 devote exactly 10,602 words to
Popovic’s 1993 hearing before the panel and its report (a report which,
far from representing an ‘exoneration’ of Gallo, acknowledges that the
narrow case against Popovic was ‘largely vestigial’ to the larger issues
raised by Gallo’s claims of credit for discoveries made at the Pasteur and
the resulting patent dispute between the French and American
governments).
As for readers of Science Fictions having to take ‘the author’s
word for the accuracy of what he writes,’ Delaney seems to have missed the
78 pages of documented chapter notes that make up more 10 percent of the
book. He does acknowledge the book’s 1,749 citations and references –
though not the more than 300 public source documents, including the
79-page Research Integrity Adjudications Panel report, available for
downloading at www.sciencefictions.net.
Nor does Delaney’s reprimand for my ‘prosecutory tone’ and
‘adversarial perspective’ square with the observations of presumably
impartial reviewers that I did not put enough of my own perspective and
analysis into the book, choosing instead ‘to let the facts speak for
themselves.’5
In the end, Delaney finds it ‘difficult to understand the purpose
of this book. ’ He utterly fails to see that what matters most is how the
National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the
Department of Health and Human Services, and other entities of the Reagan
administration behaved after it became clear that – however it happened –
Gallo’s flagship AIDS virus had been isolated from a French patient in
Paris.
Except for the reporting that forms the basis for Science
Fictions, the day might never have come that then-NIH director Harold
Varmus stood in front of two hundred reporters and researchers to
acknowledge that HTLV-3B was, is, and always will be, LAVLAI.
Even so, it took seven years longer than it should have to rewrite
scientific history. That the record was ultimately corrected not through
the efforts of the scientists involved or their institutions, but because
of a Chicago newspaper reporter, perhaps is worth pondering. If science
doesn’t want any more Science Fictions, it knows how to make that happen.

1 M. Delaney, ‘Double Jeopardy for Gallo,’ Science 215:1615-6, 31 May
2002.
2 M. Delaney to J. Madigan, August 7, 1990.
3 J. Crewdson, ‘The Great AIDS Quest,’ Chicago Tribune, 19 November
1989.
4 R. Gallo to M. Schwartz, February 4, 1991
5 J. Horgan, ‘ “Science Fictions”: Autopsy of a Medical Breakthrough,’
New York Times, March 3, 2002.

On Mon, 10 May 2004 18:49:04 -0400, "PaulKing"
<aimulti@aimultimedia.com> wrote:

The quote above is mine.

The quote above is NOT mine. HIV DOES kill CD4+ T lymphocytes.
However, viral cytopathicity does not explain the loss of CD4+ cells
in the development of AIDS. A lot of dying T cells are not infected.
This is a key and important question that is being researched but the
mechanisms aren't fully articulated yet. Oxidative stress, increased
expression of inflammatory cytokines and aberrant signalling by
infected antigen-presenting cells like macrophages are perhaps the
most likely explanations.

The rest I'm snipping because it is completely unknown who is saying
what, when, the context--and given Paul's penchant for making things
up, cutting and pasting at random, etc., it's not reliable
information. Other information on Montagnier is provided below,
including the source of this quote: "In July, at the international
AIDS conference in South Africa, Montagnier was one of the most
prominent critics of president Thabo Mbeki and several dissident
scientists who claim that HIV is not the cause of AIDS."

To claim that Montagnier says HIV does not cause AIDS is a lie.

George M. Carter

**
http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffai...00/091200.html

For immediate release:
September 12, 2000
CONTACT:
Mary Ann Hill
(781) 283-2373



NOTED AIDS RESEARCHER
LUC MONTAGNIER TO SPEAK AT WELLESLEY ON SEPTEMBER 20


WELLESLEY, Mass. -- Dr. Luc Montagnier, one of the co-discoverers of
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, will give a public lecture at 8:00
p.m. Wednesday evening, September 20, in Alumnae Hall on the Wellesley
College campus. The title of Montagnier's talk is "AIDS and Beyond:
The Challenge of the Emerging Chronic Diseases." The event is free and
open to the public.

In 1983, Montagnier, a virologist, and his colleagues at the Pasteur
Institute in Paris discovered the human retrovirus now known as HIV-1.
He has continued to research HIV and AIDS, including efforts to find a
vaccine, and is now a professor at the City University of New York and
the director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Biology there.
In July, at the international AIDS conference in South Africa,
Montagnier was one of the most prominent critics of president Thabo
Mbeki and several dissident scientists who claim that HIV is not the
cause of AIDS.

In recent years, Montagnier has begun to focus on other emerging, and
re-emerging, chronic diseases, such as tuberculosis and cholera. He
has been pointing out how population growth, urban poverty, rapid
travel, globalization, viral adaptability, the overuse of antibiotics,
and various environmental factors influence the emergence of new
epidemics.

"Montagnier takes a very interdisciplinary approach to the study of
these devastating illnesses," noted Professor of French Barry Lydgate,
who is organizing Montagnier's visit to campus. "His ideas and remarks
will be of interest to anyone who seeks a greater understanding of the
environmental, scientific, and social factors in the emergence of new
diseases."



Editor's note: Please call the Wellesley College Office for Public
Information at 781-283-2373 if you would like more information or if
you plan to cover this event



###