Deep within the Gallo case lies a perplexing question: Why did Dr. Robert C. Gallo`s huge laboratory at the National Institutes of Health, the same laboratory in which the first human retrovirus had been discovered just a few years before, lose the race to discover the retrovirus that causes AIDS?
The answer ought to stand as a reminder for generations of future scientists to put aside their preconceptions and ask, ”What if?” Like nearly everything turned up by its investigation, it is a story the NIH would rather keep under wraps.
As told in closed-door sessions with NIH investigators by Gallo`s former chief virologist, a Czechoslovak refugee named Mika Popovic, Gallo and his assistants spent the better part of 1983 surrounded by the AIDS virus but unable to see it-a pack of duffers searching for a lost ball in the high weeds, blinded by an improperly calibrated test and their mistaken belief that the AIDS virus must resemble Gallo`s leukemia-causing retrovirus. Agonizing months went by before an American colleague`s photograph of an AIDS virus candidate discovered in Paris showed that the French virus bore no physical resemblance to the Gallo model.
”At that point,” Popovic testified, ”I came to (the) conclusion that we were wrong and (the French were) right.”
Not only were they right, by then the French were far ahead. Weeks of hurried experiments followed in which Popovic used a virus sample provided by the Pasteur Institute to learn what the AIDS virus was, how it functioned and, most important, how to make it grow. But when Popovic tried to acknowledge those crucial experiments in what would become the most consequential scientific article of his career, Gallo stopped him cold.
”Mika, you are crazy,” Gallo wrote in the margin of the manuscript where he excised Popovic`s references to the French virus. ”I just don`t believe it. You are absolutely incredible.”
Popovic had meant to claim credit only for figuring out how to grow the AIDS virus, not for having discovered it. It was Gallo, having ridden Pasteur`s coattails to the finish line, who jumped off and declared himself the winner of the race.
Gallo told the world he didn`t know what the French had found, perhaps a different virus altogether. He hadn`t been able to compare the French virus to his new discovery because Popovic hadn`t been able to make the French virus grow. Only time would tell.
Some version of the same story would be told by Gallo and the government again and again in the years to come: in the scientific literature and the courts, before the Patent Office and the public, to anyone who wondered why the AIDS virus discovered by Gallo bore such a remarkable genetic resemblance to the virus the French called LAV.
In January 1986, when a reporter suggested that Gallo`s AIDS virus might actually be the one from France, Gallo dismissed the question as ”the height of outrage.” Didn`t the reporter understand that it had been ”physically impossible” to grow the virus sample sent from Paris?
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Six years after he first claimed the French virus sample wouldn`t grow, Gallo told NIH investigators the truth. ”And so there has been confusion in the response of what we did to LAV,” he testified in May of 1990, ”in my response during the passionate period. Not to go into this now, but, for example, `Oh, we never grew LAV,` and of course we did grow LAV.”
Now that the NIH investigation of Gallo`s laboratory is virtually complete, what transpired there during 1983 and 1984 must be the most closely examined episode of research in the history of science. Although they have immense current and historical value, the thousands of pages of documents and transcripts that form the evidence base of the investigation are secret and likely to remain so. Under the agency`s rules for investigating scientific misconduct, the most that is likely ever be made public is an abbreviated final report.
A story about how the Americans finished second to the French in nailing down the cause of AIDS was not the story the NIH wanted to hear. The final report of the Gallo investigation is still making its way up the chain of command in the Department of Health and Human Services. But various drafts that have been widely leaked in Washington are designed to find Gallo guilty of nothing more than bad manners.
In absolving him of any serious wrongdoing, the report goes to wondrous lengths, admitting in one instance that Gallo`s explanation for an apparent transgression amounts to an admission of fraud, then avoiding a finding of guilty by declining to accept his explanation.
Although the Gallo report does unearth numerous anomalies, discrepancies and falsifications in the landmark 1984 article published by Gallo and Popovic in Science magazine, the responsibility for nearly all of these is assigned to Popovic. Most of these offenses have rightly been described as ”nickel and dime stuff”-substituting the numerical value 10 for ”very few,” or recording an experiment as not done when in fact it was negative.
Gallo, by contrast, took full responsibility for the most egregious aspect of the Science article: replacing Popovic`s acknowledgment that he had grown and studied LAV with the assertion that LAV hadn`t been grown or studied and might not be the AIDS virus after all. When the investigators asked Gallo why he made the changes, he admitted that the manuscript had contained ”more on LAV than I was aware . . . more than I would have appreciated.”
The NIH`s rationale for finding Gallo, the chief of its largest and richest laboratory, not guilty of misconduct defies both logic and common sense.
Popovic, against whom a guilty verdict has been lodged, is not the beneficiary of any similar twisting of the facts.
”The weakest guy will be beaten up,” says Popovic, now two years out of work and awash in lawyers` bills. ”It always was in history. It always was that the weakest was beaten.”