Science Fictions by John Crewdson, Little, Brown, $27.95, ISBN 0316134767
IN 1989, the Chicago Tribune published a harshly critical 55,000-word report on virologist Robert Gallo and his conduct of AIDS research, written by Pulitzer Prize journalist John Crewdson. In that rendition, Crewdson judiciously attributed Gallo’s claim of priority in AIDS research to “an accident or a theft”. Gallo escaped an official guilty verdict. In the eyes of the law, he had not cheated the Pasteur Institute of its deserved glory for discovering the AIDS virus.
Now, over a decade later, with the ardour of Captain Ahab and Inspector Javert, Crewdson continues his pursuit, though with his doubts resolved, as reflected in his title Science Fictions: A scientific mystery, a massive cover-up, and the dark legacy of Robert Gallo.
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As pre-publication news of this book circulated, there were groans of despair all round. Was there any need to revisit the Gallo affair? For devotees of historical accuracy and completeness, the answer is an emphatic yes. As a blow to the mystique of scientific purity, Crewdson’s work is the most powerful and revealing since James Watson’s The Double Helix. Readers should be warned, however, that it is dense and long, at over 600 pages, and does not hurry past the complexities of virology intrinsic to the Gallo case.
Crewdson tells the tale of how US prosecutors, facing Gallo’s legal specialists in the intricacies of scientific fraud, dropped the misconduct charges in 1993. Gallo was by then a powerful figure in virology, chief of the multimillion-dollar Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology at the National Cancer Institute. Yet he was also derided for crude personal manners and aggressive professional behaviour. Occasionally these attributes came into public view, spectacularly so in Crewdson’s Tribune article. The prosecutors, says Crewdson, dropped the charges because they feared that they could not prove law-breaking intent on Gallo’s part.
The 1989 Tribune article ignited investigatory spirits at the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Scientific Integrity and on Capitol Hill, where Representative John Dingell had been sniffing out scientific fraud. In 1991, government investigators brought charges of scientific misconduct against Mikulas Popovic, who managed Gallo’s virus cultures, alleging that he had falsified data on the source of the AIDS virus in a 1984 Science paper, to the detriment of the French.
The investigators concluded that Gallo merited “significant censure”. Six months later, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences condemned him for “essentially immoral” behaviour in rebuffing collaboration with other AIDS researchers and thus impeding research on the disease. Nevertheless charges of scientific misconduct against Gallo and Popovic were dropped.
Crewdson follows the trail to 1994, when Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, the newly appointed director of the NIH, agreed to the Pasteur Institute’s demands for a greater share of the blood-test royalties. Asked whether Gallo would comment, Varmus replied, “Dr Gallo is no longer here.” Crewdson writes that “the enmity between Gallo and Varmus was legendary”.
Gallo moved smoothly from NIH to the $300,000-a-year founding directorship of the Institute for Human Virology, financed by the state of Maryland to bring biotech riches to economically depressed Baltimore. Little, however, has actually come out of the institute, Crewdson asserts, despite claims of important findings. In a final blow at Gallo, Crewdson scorns his scientific record, stating that “for the tens of millions of dollars that flowed into Gallo’s lab the taxpayers had gotten precious little …”
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.
