Science Fictions: a Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo. . - Political booknotes: lab rat - book review

Washington Monthly, March, 2002 by Phillip J. Longman

SCIENCE FICTIONS: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo by John Crewdson Little, Brown & Co., $27.95

THE INTERNATIONAL CONtretemps over who really discovered the AIDS virus--Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md. or Luc Montaignier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris--made headlines around the world for 10 years, starting in the mid 1980s. The story as it unfolded made for great reading, involving accusations of fraud in the highest citadels of scientific establishment, and a vicious cover-up reaching far up into the U.S. government. Gallo's eventual admission that the virus he claimed to have discovered had actually been supplied to him by Montaignier was widely savored as the downfall of an arrogant, abusive, globe-trotting self-promoter who was ultimately undone by his overweening ambition to secure a Nobel Prize. The story was so compelling that Hollywood even made a movie about it, with a sinister Alan Alda playing Gallo.

But that was a long time ago and, for that reason, the prospect of reviewing John Crewdson's densely footnoted, highly technical, 657-page account of this long-settled and complex scientific controversy aroused only self-pity. The lessons to be learned from the affair had surely long since been established in no small measure by Crewdson himself, who in 1989 published a 50,000-word expose in the Chicago Tribune that blew the lid off the story and set in motion Gallo's downfall.

The first 100 pages of Science Fictions only deepened my sense of burden. Crewdson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, is a "just the facts, ma'am" type of writer. He affords himself no speculation on the psychological factors that may have driven Gallo to sacrifice truth to ambition, and offers the reader few if any reasons up front for revisiting the scandal. Moreover, the nature of Crewdson's subject matter necessarily forces him into difficult explications of virology, and involves a cast of hundreds of scientists, bureaucrats, lawyers, and politicians around the globe. (To keep track of them all, Crewdson offers an all too necessary list of dramatis personae at the end of the book.)

Yet about one-third of the way through my forced march across these pages, I started to become captivated. By the end, I could hardly put the book down out of a mounting realization that this was more than a story about human vanity and political corruption. It was a compelling account of how the scientific fictions fostered by Gallo and those who believed his claims led to the deaths of innocents. The early AIDS test based on his work, for example, was prone to false negatives. The Pasteur Institutes test, which avoided this problem, was seldom used in this country largely because of the patents Gallo and the US. government had secured based on Gallo's false claims to have discovered the AIDS virus. Even though the American Red Cross knew about the flaws, it continued to use the Gallo test for legal as well as political reasons. As a result, scores of individuals contracted AIDS after receiving blood that had tested negative for HIV. In one instance, the mother of a Virginia gas station attendant who had been killed in a robbery offered up her son's organs and tissues for transplants. Though the man's blood was twice tested for HIV, at least seven people contracted the AIDS virus after receiving his transplanted organs. "It's like Petey died all over again," his aunt Emma said.

Science Fictions is ultimately a scientific detective story, with dramatic plot twists, inspired sleuthing, and unlikely heroes. My favorite heroine is Susanne Hadley, an incorruptible mid-level researcher at the National Institutes of Health who refused to whitewash an internal investigation of Gallo even after being ordered to do so by Bernadine Healy (then the imperious head of the NIH, who was recently deposed from her equally imperious presidency of the Red Cross). One can only admire Hadley, who, despite lacking any training in microbiology, and totally unaware of the deep-pocketed commercial interests intent on preserving the patent rights to Gallo's test, persevered in uncovering the big picture and forcing her bosses to own up to their mistakes.

Like the investigators who came before him, Crewdson is unable to establish definitively that Gallo and his team purposely substituted the virus first isolated by Montaignier for their own (there remains the possibility of inadvertent cross contamination in the lab). But there is extraordinary evidence that Gallo's lab engaged in deception and falsification of data to preserve the appearance of discovery. Forensic evidence performed by the Secret Service shows that lab notes, for example, were altered, if not entirely fabricated. It's a crime with many victims, and one that is well worth the effort to understand.

PHILLIP J. LONGMAN is a Washington, D.C., writer.