BOOK REVIEW
Call Him Ishmael
Nathaniel Comfort
Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up, and
the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo. John Crewdson. xviii + 670
pp. Little, Brown, 2002. $27.95
I am expecting a telephone call from Bob Gallo any minute. Gallo,
now at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, was from 1972 to 1995
head of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology at the National Cancer
Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland. He is a member of the National
Academy of Sciences, recipient of the National Medal of Science,
winner of the coveted Lasker prize in medicine—by any measure
a distinguished and brilliant scientist. He is also a man of
seemingly boundless energy. During the 1980s and 1990s, he
supervised a huge research group—some 50 or more scientists
and technicians—engaged in one of the most competitive,
fast-paced areas of biomedicine. He jetted the globe attending
scientific meetings. He battled scientists from the Institut
Pasteur, in Paris, over priority in the discovery of the human
immunodeficiency virus, the pathogenic agent in AIDS. When the
dispute led to allegations of scientific misconduct, Gallo scrapped
with Congress, the Office of Scientific Integrity and a curse of
lawyers. His extensive writings include a history of the discovery
of HIV and a memoir. And somehow, amid all that, he manages to find
the time to browbeat anyone, from members of Congress to the
lowliest science writer, either in person or by telephone, who
criticizes him or his research. How does he do it?
Gallo is John Crewdson's great white whale. Crewdson, a reporter for
the Chicago Tribune, has conducted interviews, pored over
laboratory notes and correspondence, combed government documents,
read published accounts and pieced together a scathing portrait of
the Gallo affair, one of the most high-profile scandals in the
history of recent science. Although Science Fictions is
billed as a "scientific mystery," there's never a doubt
whodunit. Along the way, Crewdson accuses him of theft, fraud,
attempted blackmail, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony—nearly
everything but sloth. Such character assassination is great sport,
but it undermines the seriousness and rigor of Crewdson's investigation.
In 1989, Crewdson published a 16-page, 55,000-word article in the
Tribune that laid out the facts of the Gallo case up to
that point. The first AIDS patients began to appear in Los Angeles
hospitals in 1979. In early 1983, scientists in the laboratory of
Luc Montagnier, a minor figure at the once-glorious Institut
Pasteur, identified and isolated a human retrovirus from a French
AIDS patient. They named the virus lymphoid adenopathy virus (LAV).
Meanwhile, Gallo, in Bethesda, had his own candidate AIDS virus, a
human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV). He requested from Montagnier a
sample of LAV to study and compare with his HTLV. Weeks later, Gallo
announced that he had found the cause of AIDS: a new, third type of
leukemia virus, HTLV-3. Montagnier's group then wrote up their
results, claiming LAV as the, or a, cause of AIDS. Receiving a
preprint of the paper, Gallo realized that they had forgotten to
include an abstract, without which it could not be published. He
dashed one off as a courtesy and read it long-distance to
Montagnier, who approved it, even though it referred to the French
virus as an HTLV. The two papers appeared back-to-back in
Science. Because scientists often read only the abstracts
and figures of papers, the impression was of Gallo's generosity in
sharing the credit with the French lab. Gallo, who had a big
reputation, many connections and a knack for finding spotlights to
stand in, emerged as the discoverer of the AIDS virus.
Quickly, the French and the Americans each developed their own blood
test, of a type known as an ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent
assay). Before long, royalties for the Gallo test, licensed to
Abbott Laboratories, topped half a million dollars per year. By the
vagaries of international patent law, the French were squeezed out
of the American market, even though their patent was filed just
before the American one. The French, incensed, sued. They claimed
that they had discovered the virus and developed the first, best
test, and that they had been the first to patent that test. Further,
they argued that Gallo's HTLV-3 (actually, one isolate known as 3B)
was in fact LAV. They believed that, deliberately or not, the virus
they had sent to Bethesda had been introduced into Gallo's cultures.
The National Institutes of Health, Gallo's employer, stood by their man.
A settlement of sorts was reached in 1987, when Gallo and Montagnier
sat down in a hotel room and wrote out a joint history of the
discovery of the virus, which Gallo edited and which was published,
apparently without peer review, in Nature. The French,
having been given second billing, managed to become costars. Both
patents were revised to include both teams, and Gallo and Montagnier
officially became codiscoverers of HIV.
Science Fictions fills out the Tribune tale with
much more evidence and then brings the reader forward to a
conclusion, in 1995. This latter phase is a tortuous chronology of
further investigations and lawsuits. The federal Office of
Scientific Integrity and its successor, the Office of Research
Integrity, become involved, Gallo and others get on and off the hook
repeatedly, and the reader is treated to fresh examples of
whitewashing, backstabbing and realpolitik. Gallo, by the
way, is hardly the only unseemly character; most of the principals
bumble, fib or snipe their way through the labyrinthine narrative.
The book's subtitle promises, in addition to a scientific mystery, a
massive cover-up and a look at Gallo's "dark legacy." It's
not clear what this legacy is; we can hardly blame Gallo for every
subsequent incidence of scientific misconduct. What's left as a
legacy? The deceit, scare tactics and creepy badgering of his
critics that Crewdson details? I have firsthand experience of the
badgering: A decade ago, as a novice science writer, I reviewed
Virus Hunting, Gallo's memoir, for this magazine and
noted in passing the author's less-than-objective stance. When the
review appeared, my phone rang and I was subjected to 45 minutes of
Gallo's humor. Narcissistic behavior, to be sure. But megalomaniacs
are as common as rats in high-stakes biomedicine; even if Gallo were
guilty of all Crewdson's charges he would remain in distinguished
company. The surprise is to find a brilliant, eminent scientist who
wears his purple cloak lightly.
As to the cover-up, Crewdson's most damning conclusion—that
Gallo deliberately appropriated the Pasteur group's virus, peddled
it as his own and doctored lab notebooks to hide the fact—will
be persuasive to those who want to be persuaded. The evidence is
like a dessert mousse: rich, but light. Crewdson documents with
devastating thoroughness, however, the lesser charges: that
Montagnier, not Gallo, discovered HIV; that LAV got into Gallo's
cultures, and that Gallo's HTLV-3B was in fact LAV; and that Gallo
was, for years, less than candid about what he knew and when. This
is enough to make the Gallo affair a moral lesson to would-be
scientific stars. Science Fictions should be required
reading for postdocs and graduate students in biomedical research labs.
The discovery and isolation of HIV is one of the great success
stories of scientific medicine. A mere six years elapsed from the
first recognition of a novel, complex and deadly disease to the
first blood test for its germ agent. The stakes of the race for the
AIDS virus—fame, riches, a possible Nobel
prize—instilled a sense of desperation in scientists already
intensely competitive. What's remarkable is that science
survives—even flourishes—despite obsessive, vindictive
behavior. Science Fictions suggests a similar principle for journalism.
Is that the phone?