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player ready...In a statement issued through his attorney, Barbara Mishkin, Dr. Mikulas Popovic denied that he had deliberately added the French AIDS virus LAV to the pool of AIDS patient samples from which he claims to have isolated the U.S. virus HTLV-3B.
“That is nonsense,” Popovic said. “If I had done that, I would have put it in the paper. Besides, my notebook entries clearly describe the methods and materials I used to establish the pool. That is why OSI and ORI made no finding that I used LAV in the pooling experiment. As the Departmental Appeals Board pointed out, `The Roche analysis concluded that the most likely explanation for the similarity between the strain called HTLV-IIIB and one of the French isolates was contamination, both in the French laboratory and at the (Gallo laboratory).’ “
The Popovic statement fails to take account of several established facts, including Popovic’s own testimony to NIH investigators in which he acknowledged that some portions of his laboratory notebooks were written or reconstructed after the experiments they described had been performed. The authenticity of the Popovic notebooks is being evaluated by a document analysis unit of the U.S. Secret Service.
Neither the Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI) nor its successor, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), ever concluded that Popovic had not used LAV in the pool experiment. The final ORI report on the Popovic case, issued in December 1992, concluded that it was “not possible to resolve the question” of whether someone in the Gallo laboratory had deliberately misappropriated the French AIDS virus.