NEW YORK TIMES REVIEWS OF 'SCIENCE FICTIONS' - The story of Robert Gallo

‘ The tale of Dr. Robert Gallo’s role in the discovery of the virus that
causes AIDS (so he claimed) is one of those stories that wouldn’t be
believable as fiction...Science Fictions is bursting with allegations
leveled at Dr. Gallo, his associates, rivals and enemies, that include
deception, misconduct, incompetence, fraud, sabotage, back-stabbing,
double-dealing, overstatements, half-truths, outright lies, a clandestine
affair with a co-worker, a bribery attempt, denials, evasions, coverups
and serial rewritings of history.

— New York Times

On Wed, 11 May 2005 21:00:34 -0400, "PaulKing"
<aimulti@aimultimedia.com> wrote:

Frankly, who cares?

LAV, as HIV-1 was originally known, was discovered in France by
Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and in the US, by Jay Levy.

HIV exists. A good start Mark!

George M. Carter

In article <f4b88ee0c6ff35afc58c7e1508eab6b9@localhost.talkab outhealthnetwork.com>,
PaulKing <aimulti@aimultimedia.com> wrote:
The reviewer's opinion of the book is missing from the text above.
He also said this:

"Something important is missing from the book, namely a documentation
of its claims, or even so much as a bibliography."

You probably quoted from some source that left this information out,
and you never even thought to check the review itself to see if your
source was representing it accurately. It seems the review is not
so favourable.

You have several options:
* Quietly ignore this.
* Question the character and/or motives of the NYT's reviewer.
* Flood the newsgroup to distract attention away from this.
* Concede that your quote from the NYT's review is misleading.
* Or do the rational thing. I won't tell you what that is, because
I want to see if you have the brains to figure it out yourself.

--
David Canzi

‘ Scrupulously researched and sweeping... Science Fictions documents enough
treachery, negligence and megalomania to make even the most trusting of
readers skeptical of the scientific establishment.’
— Washington Post


‘ A gripping work with important implications...With incredible tenacity,
Crewdson reveals a biological research scandal that was significant,
frightening and, most of all, a testament to one reporter’s quest to
separate science fact from fiction.’
— Chicago Tribune


‘ Crewdson’s work is the most powerful and revealing since James Watson’s
The Double Helix...This is an awesomely documented prosecutorial brief
that concedes no credit to its target and yields him no doubts. If the
Gallo camp has a rebuttal, let’s hear it.’
— New Scientist


‘ No one knows whether someone in Gallo’s lab stole the French virus or if
it contaminated their samples through sloppy practice, and it really
doesn’t matter… And as Crewdson shows, the biggest discoveries in Gallo’s
career — his claim to have identified the virus that causes AIDS and the
patent on the AIDS blood test — both belong to someone else.’
— Baltimore Sun


‘ Robert Gallo’s hour was not the brightest for American science. In fact,
it may be one of the darkest. The two-decade-long sequence of events
described in John Crewdson’s new book resembles more the actions of a
megalomaniac intent more on self-promotion and profit than on a way to
stop the AIDS epidemic.’
— San Diego Union-Tribune


‘ I could hardly put the book down out of a mounting realization that this
was more than a story about human vanity and political corruption. Science
Fictions is ultimately a scientific detective story, with dramatic plot
twists, inspired sleuthing, and unlikely heroes. It’s a crime with many
victims, and one that is well worth the effort to understand.’
— Washington Monthly


‘ John Crewdson, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, has written a
detailed history of the events that led scientists to the cause of AIDS -
and it makes unpleasant reading for anyone who thought science was simply
about the pursuit of truth. Instead, a picture emerges of deliberate
falsehoods, exaggerated claims and denigrating criticism.’
— The Independent (London)


‘ 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.’
— Los Angeles Times


‘ Science Fictions is about scientists behaving very, very badly.
Crewdson’s research is thorough, his writing brisk.’
— Edmonton Journal


‘ A compelling case that Gallo claimed and obtained recognition for
research that had, in fact, been accomplished by the French...this book is
a successful indictment of Gallo, whom history will probably judge to have
been guilty of excessive zeal in the pursuit of scientific glory.’
— Montreal Gazette


‘ Was Gallo’s behavior so extreme as to be anomalous, or was it to some
extent encouraged by what Crewdson calls a “hypercompetitive” scientific
culture? If Science Fictions forces scientists to address these difficult
questions — and it should — it will have served its purpose.’
— New York Times Book Review


‘ Science Fictions is a profoundly disturbing account, demonstrating that
even brilliant minds may trade truth for fame or fortune...John Crewdson
has written a masterpiece.’
— Providence Journal-Bulletin


‘ Comprehensive and compelling...The level of drama here is
unprecedented…Crewdson is able to weave a story that is impossible to put
down.’
— Publishers Weekly


‘ A meticulous account of slippery science that develops slowly into a
panoramic view of the biomedical world.’
— Kirkus Reviews

Publisher’s Weekly

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Crewdson (The Tarnished Door) provides a
comprehensive and compelling examination of the controversy surrounding
the discovery of the AIDS virus. Although the basic facts of the story
have been documented before, largely via Crewdson’s reporting in the
Chicago Tribune, the level of detail and drama here is unprecedented. By
quoting extensively from interviews with many of the principals, from the
public record and from documents obtained via the federal Freedom of
Information Act, Crewdson is able to weave a story that is impossible to
put down. Robert Gallo, the National Cancer Institute researcher
originally credited with virtually every important AIDS-related discovery,
is portrayed as a self-serving scientist willing to manipulate both the
data and everyone he encounters in his quest for fame. Described as a
“thug” by Harold Varmus, head of the National Institues of Health, Gallo
has won every major award short of the Nobel Prize. Yet, by this account,
Gallo’s actions have slowed the progress of AIDS research and to have kept
the world’s blood supply at risk for far longer tha necessary. Crewdson
also details the alleged complicity of the federal government, which
defended Gallo’s behavior and methods for years. The only flaw with
Crewdson’s meticulous reporting is his lack of direct contact with Gallo
himself, and so the complexity of the man is not fully realized.
Nonetheless, Crewdson’s effort deserves high praise and a wide readership.

Scandalous behavior in the assault on AIDS

04/14/2002

BY JEANNE NICHOLSON
Special to The Journal


SCIENCE FICTIONS: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Coverup, and the Dark
Legacy of Robert Gallo, by John Crewdson. Little, Brown. 672 pages.
$27.95.

Fasten your seat belts. John Crewdson is at the wheel of a fast-paced
nonfiction thriller about a scientific scandal of major proportions, with
superstar scientist Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute at
center stage.

"This is not a book about AIDS," advises Crewdson, a brilliant,
determined, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with a talent for relentless
research. "Nor is it really about science. It is a book about how
scientists behave when the stakes are high, and the stakes were never
higher than in the search for the cause of AIDS."

Drawing upon thousands of pages of correspondence, memoranda, laboratory
notes, transcripts and other documents compiled over 10 years of intense
investigations, Crewdson meticulously traces how the AIDS virus and its
blood test were actually discovered, and by whom; how the French AIDS
virus ended up in Gallo's test tubes; and how the National Institutes of
Health and other agencies of the Reagan administration struggled to cover
up the truth.

He opens his tightly edited saga with President Richard Nixon's
declaration of a War on Cancer in 1971, funded with a $1.6-billion
appropriation for cancer research -- a huge sum in those days. The war
would be waged by the National Cancer Institute, a virtually independent
agency, Crewdson points out, headed by a presidential appointee and
governed by a NCA Advisory Board "to cheer the virus hunters on."

James Watson, now running a lab at Harvard, worried that "the Gold Rush
mentality was likely to 'scare off the sensible [scientists] and leave the
field to a combination of charlatans and fools.' "

And so, the stage was set. Enter Robert Gallo, then 27 and a newly
appointed lab chief at NIH, later to be described as an "arrogant
megalomaniac," by fellow scientists.

For nearly a year, Gallo insisted that the wrong virus, one discovered
previously in his own laboratory, was the most likely cause of AIDS, while
he publicly denigrated the critical research of the Pasteur scientists in
France and also systematically impeding the scientific community here and
abroad.

When it became evident that the French had beaten Gallo in the race to
find the cause of AIDS, Gallo then chose to engage in an unethical
campaign to scramble and rewrite scientific history by writing articles
claiming discoveries he had not made with data he did not have.

Crewdson reveals that Gallo wrote papers as a "political exercise, a
pollution of the scientific literature, intended to help lay the
groundwork for a defense against the French." The scientific press never
challenged these articles and leading journalists got nowhere when
pressing Gallo for the truth.

Unfortunately, his brilliant tactical strategies were never matched by
scientific accomplishments. When French investigators finally challenged
U.S. patents, U.S. attorneys simply echoed Gallo's many falsehoods about
the primacy of his research, assuring the Patent Office and the federal
courts that the AIDS virus and the HIV blood test had been discovered here
first.

"What set Robert Gallo apart," Crewdson concludes, "was his profound
disinclination to acknowledge his mistakes, preferring instead to ignore
them, insist they hadn't occurred, blame someone else, or propagate
outlandish explanations and outright fictions that only confused science
further and slowed its forward march."

Science Fictions is a profoundly disturbing account, demonstrating that
even brilliant minds may trade the truth for fame or fortune. As with the
current Enron scandal, there are victims. In this case, add to the list
not only the taxpayers footing the bills but also the 18 million people
worldwide who had perished from AIDS by the turn of the century.

Crewdson has written a masterpiece on what seems to be a never-ending
epidemic of non-accountability in this country.

Jeanne Nicholson is a syndicated columnist and freelance reviewer in
Newport.

Blood and Thunder From AIDS Labs


By ED REGIS


he tale of Dr. Robert Gallo's role in the discovery of the virus that
causes AIDS is one of those stories that wouldn't be believable as
fiction. The narrative of John Crewdson's new book, "Science Fictions," is
bursting with allegations leveled at Dr. Gallo, his associates, rivals and
enemies, that include deception, misconduct, incompetence, fraud,
sabotage, back-stabbing, double-dealing, overstatements, half-truths,
outright lies, a clandestine affair with a co-worker, a bribery attempt,
denials, evasions, coverups and serial rewritings of history. All of this
would be plausible in politics, but none of it is the normal stuff of
science.

Dr. Gallo, indeed, has steadfastly maintained his innocence of all
charges. As chief of the National Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Tumor
Cell Biology in Bethesda, Md., Dr. Gallo strode onto the world stage in
1983 and set into motion an amazing sequence of events. He had identified
a new virus from the blood of four AIDS patients, named it HTLV (for human
T-cell leukemia virus) and suggested that it was the most likely cause of
AIDS. But as later developments proved, it wasn't.

Meanwhile, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Luc Montagnier, the chief of
viral oncology, had isolated a genetically distinct virus from a different
batch of AIDS patients. Dr. Montagnier called the virus LAV
(lymphadenopathy-associated virus), and said that it was the cause of
AIDS. Later events proved he was right. (The virus was eventually renamed
H.I.V.)

SCIENCE FICTIONS
A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Coverup, and the Dark Legacy of Robert
Gallo.
By John Crewdson.
Illustrated. 670 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. $27.95.
Issue in Depth: AIDS at 20
Federal Official Says He Believes Cause of AIDS Has Been Found (April 22,
1984)
New U.S. Report Names Virus That May Cause AIDS (April 24, 1984)
'Science Fictions': Autopsy of a Medical Breakthrough (March 3, 2002)

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Price: $19.95. Learn More.

In July 1983, before any of this was nailed down, Dr. Montagnier
personally delivered a sample of LAV to Dr. Gallo at his home in Bethesda.
Afterward, Dr. Gallo tossed off the incident as of virtually no
importance. "Was I so excited to get the thing?" he said. "No, I really
wasn't. I put it in my freezer and I went out and played volleyball."

During the subsequent months, however, Dr. Gallo proceeded to "discover" a
new virus, one that he named HTLV-3B, and that he said was the true cause
of AIDS. It was, but his HTLV-3B was in fact LAV, and although Dr. Gallo
was passing it off as his own product, the virus, according to Mr.
Crewdson, had come directly from the French researchers. "HTLV-3B and LAV
weren't just the same kind of virus," he writes. "They had come from the
same patient."

Based on his "discovery," Dr. Gallo proposed a blood test for AIDS. The
test kits designed in response to his proposal were quickly approved by
the Food and Drug Administration, patented and rushed into production by
Abbott Laboratories. In an early field trial, however, the tests attained
the notable distinction, Mr. Crewdson says, of "an astounding
false-positive rate of 99 in every 100," causing large amounts of good
blood to be discarded, and leading many people to falsely think they had
AIDS.

A smaller number of false negatives caused some people to acquire AIDS
from transfusions of blood that they thought was safe. The Pentagon needed
an AIDS test for the armed services. Still, despite the abject failure of
the initial Gallo-designed test, the Pentagon refused to consider the
earlier French blood test for AIDS, which worked correctly, on the ground
that to do so would be un-American. The French finally sued the United
States Department of Health and Human Services for violating a
noncommercialization agreement, and, almost 10 years later, won $6 million
in royalties.

In 1992 a review panel of the National Academy of Sciences accused Dr.
Gallo of "intellectual recklessness of a high degree." That same year, the
Office of Research Integrity of the National Institutes of Health found
him guilty of scientific misconduct. These accusations and findings were
later overturned on appeal.

Dr. Gallo, meanwhile, consistently denied wrongdoing. In response to a
Time magazine piece about the scientific-misconduct charges, he said: "My
colleagues and I isolated the AIDS virus in 1984. Actually, we made many
isolates (a total of 48) between 1983 and early 1984. This has been
acknowledged by everyone as has been the fact that it is my colleagues and
myself who showed that H.I.V. is the cause of AIDS and who also developed
the life-saving blood test which has protected our blood supply since
1984."

Dr. Gallo, long immune to embarrassment over the accusations, had acquired
journalistic "groupies" who regularly touted him as a medical
wonder-worker. He won awards right and left, went on millionaire-style
vacations paid for by foreign universities and was pampered like visiting
royalty. "They treated me like a maharajah," Dr. Gallo said, speaking of
members of the Indian Oncological Society, who had brought him to India.
"They put garlands of flowers around my neck and sprinkled me with oil.
What a place."

Later, Dr. Gallo left the National Cancer Institute and became director of
the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore,
where he remains today.

This summary, however, is only the bare outline of a story that includes a
vast array of characters, a bewildering variety of charges and
countercharges and an outsize share of plot convolutions. Mr. Crewdson,
the author of two previous books, is a reporter for The Chicago Tribune
and a winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1981, when he reported for The New
York Times. In this book he explains the science clearly and carefully.
Early on, the lay reader will be able to confront a sentence like "Popovic
acknowledged growing LAV in Ti7.4 and one other cell line, though without
mentioning HUT-78 by name," and understand it perfectly the first time
through.

But at more than 500 pages of dense text, most of them packed with equally
arcane scientific information, it is all too easy to lose the essential
plotline in a sea of detail. The text is supplemented by a 5-page
chronological summary of major events, a 13-page glossary of technical
terms and a 7-page list of dramatis personae, all of which function as a
life raft for the drowning reader.

Still, for all of its impressive depth, breadth and staggering length,
something important is missing from the book, namely a documentation of
its claims, or even so much as a bibliography. Instead, the reader is
glibly informed at the end: "The superscript numerals appearing in the
text indicate citational notes, which are available online at
www.sciencefictions.net." The story, in other words, is here, but the
evidence for it is elsewhere.

For a book that purports to be the canonical exposé of a shameful episode
in the history of science, this is a major lapse. It assumes, for one
thing, that anyone reading it, or at least anyone crazy enough to care
about proof, has convenient Internet access at every moment, whether on
vacation, or on a plane, a train or reading in bed. And it assumes that
the documentary Web site will exist indefinitely, or at least for the
lifetime of the book — all of which is highly dubious. Indeed, the Web
site could vanish tomorrow.

Let prospective purchasers be warned: if you buy a copy of "Science
Fictions," you will be paying the whole price, but you will not be getting
the whole book.

A publisher's dream method of cutting costs, perhaps: part book, part
e-book. One hopes it is not the start of a trend.

Ed Regis is the author of "The Biology of Doom: The History of America's
Secret Germ Warfare Project" and other books about science.

In article <431f4454239dfd1733179da8696a5879@localhost.talkab outhealthnetwork.com>,
PaulKing <aimulti@aimultimedia.com> wrote:
Well, you found the full text of the New York Times review. I didn't
think you would. You surprised me.

Now here's the rational thing you failed to do: Given two quotes
from the review, mine and Crewdson's, implying opposite things about
what the review says, and with the review right in front of you,
you didn't bother to check if one or the other quote was dishonest.
I know you didn't, because my quote was dishonest, and if you had
noticed that you would certainly have pointed it out.

You don't investigate the veracity of your sources, and as we have
just seen, you don't even investigate the veracity of your opponents.
You don't investigate, period. You appear not to care whether the
ideas you espouse here are true or false, but you have been trying
hard, for at least 4 years on the internet, to get a lot of people
to believe them.

--
David Canzi

In article <0021b84ada493c3c3601c307e0c07caf@localhost.talkab outhealthnetwork.com>,
"PaulKing" (really Mark Hanau) <aimulti@aimultimedia.com> wrote:
Perhaps the reason you hate Gallo is that he's so much like you
and you resent the competition. Speaking of a disinclination to
acknowledge mistakes:

You still have a picture of Joseph Sonnabend (live ex-dissident)
labelled with the name of Casper Schmidt (dead dissident) here:
http://groups.msn.com/DissidentScientists

The same picture may be found, correctly labelled, here:
http://www.fumento.com/pozaids.html

This was pointed out to you first on Jan 5, and has been pointed
out multiple times since, and yet remains stubbornly uncorrected.
You don't seem to care whether anything you say is true or false.

What are we to think of a man who shows no evidence of caring
whether what he is saying is true or false, but has spent 4 years
on the internet trying hard to get other people to believe it?
Especially when the results, for those other people, of believing
false information about AIDS can be lethal?

What possible motivation could be driving such a man?

--
David Canzi

On Sun, 15 May 2005 19:42:55 +0000 (UTC),
dmcanzi@remulak.ads.uwaterloo.ca (David Canzi -- non-mailable) wrote:

snip...

What's despicable as you note parenthetically is that Joe is not nor
has he been a "dissident" for close to 20 years.

So the bullshit here is DEEP.

George M. Carter

I don't expect people to fake articles simply to win a debate.

You admit you are dishonest.

On that we agree.

In article <c0a1f2ba7d21d85681520f86fa1b98ec@localhost.talkab outhealthnetwork.com>,
PaulKing <aimulti@aimultimedia.com> wrote:
You're trying to save face. I quoted dishonestly to see if you would
notice, and you didn't. Your failure to notice is remarkable.

In political or politicized arguments, people typically check for
dishonesty in what their opponents say, but not what their allies say.
Though I am your opponent, you didn't check what I said.

You have called me a liar many times. And yet, in spite of the clear
usefulness of catching a lying opponent in the act, you didn't try
to see if I was lying.

After over a year of arguing with me here -- over a year of observing
me -- you simply took it for granted that I was honest.

I'm flattered.

--
David Canzi