The biggest-ever investigation of fraud in a government laboratory took an abrupt turn Wednesday, with a former National Institutes of Health scientist claiming he was not responsible for several allegedly falsified statements published in a landmark 1984 article on AIDS.
The virologist, Dr. Mikulas Popovic, maintained in a statement released by his lawyers that three key assertions in the article, all reportedly labeled false by NIH investigators, were actually penned by others.
The Tribune reported Sunday that some experiments described in the article, which recounts the first American report of the discovery of the AIDS virus, were never done or done differently than depicted, while others that gave negative results were falsified.
In addition to throwing new light on the NIH`s investigation of the article`s veracity, the Popovic statement hints at a possible rift between Popovic and Dr. Robert C. Gallo, chief of the NIH AIDS lab where Popovic then worked.
According to Science magazine, NIH investigators already have concluded, partly on the basis of the three allegedly false statements, that Popovic is guilty of scientific misconduct.
As defined by the Public Health Service, misconduct includes falsification, fabrication or plagiarism of scientific research and can ultimately lead to ”debarment” from science.
Science magazine also reported that Gallo, one of the article`s four co-authors, while not guilty of formal misconduct himself, is ”sharply”
criticized in the draft report of the investigation.
Sources familiar with the investigation said a committee of three university scientists assembled by NIH to oversee the investigation had split 2-1 against finding Gallo guilty of actual misconduct.
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Two members argued that findings of misconduct should be reserved for scientists who actually falsify the results of their own experiments, sources said. As chief of the National Cancer Institute`s huge Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology, Gallo played no part in performing the actual experiments described in the article.
Gallo reportedly told investigators he assumed at the time Popovic`s data were accurate. But sources said the panelists strongly criticized Gallo for failing to question obvious inconsistencies in those data and for not reviewing Popovic`s laboratory notebooks prior to publication.
Another Gallo assistant was responsible for inserting one of the three statements disavowed by Popovic, sources said, and none of the article`s four co-authors has admitted writing the second statement.
Responsibility for the third statement, which implies that the Gallo lab could not grow or study an AIDS virus sample sent by French researchers, is understood to have been attributed by investigators to Gallo.
That statement assumed critical importance after it was later discovered that the AIDS virus Gallo and Popovic claimed to have isolated independently in 1984 was identical to one they received from France the year before.
Gallo and other NIH officials attempted to deflect suspicions that the French virus had accidentally gotten into Popovic`s culture-or was
deliberately stolen-by insisting that the French sample hadn`t grown in the first place.
After years of insisting otherwise, Gallo recently acknowledged that the two viruses were one and the same and that an accidental contamination must have occurred. The NIH investigation has not reached a conclusion on that point, sources said.
As the Tribune reported in 1989, and as investigators later confirmed, Popovic`s lab notes show he did grow the French virus at the time the Gallo lab was struggling to isolate an AIDS virus of its own.
Without naming Gallo, Popovic said in his Wednesday statement that his original draft of the questioned article, published in Science magazine in May of 1984, had ”acknowledged my work with the French virus.”
”There was considerable disagreement about the extent to which, and how much of, those data would be incorporated in this or subsequent
. . . papers,” Popovic said. ”A decision was made which was not my preferred approach.”
As published, the article contains no mention that Popovic grew the virus from France, or even that it had been received, stating instead that the French AIDS virus ”has not yet been” grown.
In addition to the three-person committee empaneled to decide the fates of Gallo and Popovic, the NIH assembled a second group from the National Academy of Sciences to oversee the investigaton.
Gallo`s role in preparing the article, as well as his overall conduct in managing NIH`s largest laboratory, have become the focus of a simmering dispute between the NIH and some of the outside consultants.
Members of the Academy panel flew to Washington last month to read the draft Gallo report, which NIH has placed under the tightest possible security. They also heard from Gallo, Popovic and NIH Director Bernadine Healy.
A few days later, top NIH officials met to discuss the Academy panel`s reactions. Notes taken at that meeting, a copy of which was obtained by the Tribune, reflect the panel`s opinion that the report placed too much responsibility on Popovic and not enough on Gallo.
”G(allo) was at fault,” the notes read. ”G(allo) guilty-close to fraud. P. inocent (sic).”
One source familiar with the meeting confirmed the Academy group`s conclusion that, even with the report`s critical assessment of Gallo`s performance, it ”probably would have found him guilty of misconduct.”
Gallo`s lawyer, Joseph N. Onek, said his client had done ”absolutely nothing improper.” Onek said any information taken from the draft NIH report was ”invalid, because that report is incorrect in numerous respects. We have no doubt it will be completely rewritten at some later date.”
Concern that the Gallo report might be watered down instead of strengthened arose last month after the NIH official in charge of the Gallo case said she had been ordered by NIH Director Healy to rewrite the report in ways that would ”substantially weaken” its findings.
Healy later denied she had intended the report`s conclusions be changed, saying she had only asked the official, Suzanne W. Hadley, to make it clearer and more succinct.
Asserting that Healy had questioned her competence and integrity, Hadley withdrew from the Gallo case last month. Healy later withdrew from all NIH misconduct investigations herself after it was disclosed that she had come under Hadley`s scrutiny in her previous role as research director of the Cleveland Clinic.
With the NIH investigative unit in disarray, one member of the Gallo investigative panel, Priscilla Schaffer of the Harvard Medical School, expressed concern about Hadley`s departure from the case.
”That (Hadley) is no longer in charge concerns me a great deal,”
Schaffer told The Washington Post, ”and I can`t say that strongly enough.”
Schaffer added that she was ”concerned about the effect this will have on our report and our conclusions and the reasons for our conclusions.”
None of the outside scientists involved in the Gallo case would speak for attribution. But sources said they agreed with Schaffer that the draft report`s assessment of Gallo should not be watered down.
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”I think there are several of them who are pretty well determined that they`re not going to be whitewashed,” one scientist said. ”They`re certainly not going to let NIH put out a namby-pamby report that says Gallo`s a swell guy.”
Another of the scientists went further, asserting that ”neither Bernadine Healy nor God himself has any right to touch that report, because they didn`t write it. Everyone who worked on this took great care that what was said in all aspects of the report was precisely what they wanted it to be. ”Bernadine Healy`s concern is that she doesn`t want the NIH to look bad,” the scientist said. ”If the Gallo report came out as it is now written it would not make one of their stellar people look very good.
”For a variety of reasons that isn`t going to make Bernadine Healy happy. She must be looking, in addition to the patent thing, at the long-term effect of this on the NIH.”
The ”patent thing” refers to a separate report by Hadley, disclosed in the Tribune last Sunday, which notes that much of the allegedly falsified data in the Science article was reproduced in a 1984 application for a government patent.
That patent, which covers the human blood cell culture Popovic used to grow the AIDS virus, forms an integral part of another government patent on the AIDS blood test developed by Gallo and Popovic.
Several patent lawyers interviewed by the Tribune said federal regulations provided that any false statement made knowingly in a patent application could invalidate the patent in question.
Although Healy is out of the Gallo-Popovic investigation, she must still decide what punishment to mete out in each case. One NIH official said Healy planned to convene a third panel of outside scientists to advise her in making that decision.
Popovic, who is no longer employed by NIH, could be debarred, which would end his access to NIH funding. The official said Gallo, as an intramural NIH scientist, ”can`t be debarred because he doesn`t get grants (but) he could be fired.”
Gallo has told friends in recent days that he already has been placed under one set of sanctions-an order from cancer institute director Samuel Broder to review the notebooks of his staff.