Gallo Investigation: A `Messy Business' Raises Many Issues

Gallo Investigation: A `Messy Business' Raises Many Issues Author: SCOTT HULER As the probe into alleged misconduct by the National Cancer Institute lab of Robert Gallo in its search for the AIDS virus deepens, the scope of the investigation broadens as well. Recently joining the National Institutes of Health's Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI) in its long-running investigation of Gallo are the General Accounting Office, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. And now, according to recent reports, NIH is investigating its own investigation, asking the FBI to determine how early results of the OSI report leaked to the press. As a result of the affair, the scientific community confronts professional issues whose implications extend beyond the charges leveled at Gallo's lab. The various investigations are considering allegations originally raised in a 1989 special report by the Chicago Tribune. The newspaper charged that Gallo's lab failed to isolate its own human immunodeficiency virus, instead reporting results based on copies of the virus isolated by French virologist Luc Montagnier without proper credit, possibly calling much of Gallo's work into question. No reports of any of the investigations have yet been published, and Gallo, chief of NCI's Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology, continues to maintain his innocence of wrongdoing. (The Scientist has sought comment from Gallo, but he refuses to speak on the record about the matter, citing the advice of his attorney.) Yet the OSI investigation is nearing its conclusion, and as its preliminary results begin to leak, the scientific community has its first opportunity to respond to the investigation. The response is far from united. Among researchers unconvinced of Gallo's theory that HIV is the cause of AIDS, the OSI investigation fuels renewed questioning of the validity of the viral hypothesis. The investigation is expected to conclude that there is at least some error in the research on which Gallo's lab based the conclusions of its May 4, 1984, back-to-back papers in Science (224:497- 505) that announced its discovery of HIV. But many scientists are more interested in the investigation process itself, fearing that the lab is being prosecuted in the media instead of privately investigated through scientific channels. For Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, what is at stake is far more important than whether Gallo's lab committed misconduct by, as has been alleged, using viruses copied from those supplied by the French Pasteur Institute. Duesberg's belief is that the viral AIDS hypothesis has never been proved (The Scientist, July 8, 1991, page 12); and he says that uncertainty about the Gallo lab's results strengthens that belief. "The very basis of [Gallo's] hypothesis may be, in large degree, fabricated," he says. "Who cares if he's a crook?" Duesberg asks. "Who cares about who stole whose fake diamonds? The credibility of the science is at stake." Few scientists share Duesberg's questioning of Gallo's hypothesis, though. And in fact, for many reasearchers, such doubts are beside the point. What's now being brought into question by the investigation process is the credibility of the scientific enterprise. "I think that's fine to have people raise questions like [Duesberg's]," says Edward H. Ahrens, a professor emeritus of medicine and biochemistry at Rockefeller University in New York, adding that questions are at the heart of the scientific method. But Ahrens then notes the similarity of the Gallo probe to that of former Rockefeller University president David Baltimore, who was investigated for impropriety stemming from his coauthorship of a paper in Cell (45:247-59, 1986) that was deemed to contain falsified data. Ahrens recalls a statement made by a faculty member during one of the many meetings Baltimore called to clarify matters. "He [the faculty member] said, `After all, we've got to remember among ourselves that science is a profession where you have to put up with making mistakes all the time.' " Ahrens wishes that after the Baltimore case Rockefeller officials had reminded the public of that point--that a scientist had made mistakes, which is simply part of the scientific process, not the catastrophe it was perceived to be. "If the university had said, `We've had a disastrous year, but everything is straightened out now,' that could have restored the public's perception of the process of science," he says. "The public thinks science is a very orderly, methodical process. Well, it isn't--there's really nothing orderly about it at all." The problem, he says, isn't whether Gallo--or Baltimore-- made mistakes or even committed misconduct. The problem is that the investigation is presenting science's natural disorderliness in a profoundly negative way. "It's up to us as scientists to do a better job of explaining ourselves to each other, to our neighbors, and certainly to society," he says. Nobelist Howard Temin, a professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's McArdle Laboratory, agrees that such high-profile investigations have their most debilitating effects on scientists' relation to society, not on science itself. "Except for those people immediately involved, it has no effect on the course of science," he says. "Dr. Gallo's lab has continued to be productive. Dr. Baltimore's lab has also continued to be extremely productive." Temin wonders, moreover, whether "if the leaks are correct, and they're investigating a paper whose results were never in question, is this the best way to use scarce resources when there is an epidemic that is growing and is still essentially out of control?" Duesberg is not the only observer who is less than certain that Gallo's results were never in question. Phillip Johnson, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Darwin on Trial (Washington, D.C., Regnery Gateway, 1991), a skeptical account of Darwin's theories, is also skeptical of Gallo's AIDS theory. "It's clear to me that Gallo and the people like him developed the view that this was the virus. There never was a time when the theory that this was the cause of AIDS, rather than a passenger virus, was questioned; that seems to me to be the way that you could make a big mistake. "It looks like the paper will have to be withdrawn--this calls into question everything that the paper asserted. It is unconscionable for the scientific establishment to fail to reconsider the research." Yet Temin is unshaken in his support of Gallo's conclusions. "Let's assume the worst that's been claimed: Gallo knowingly went to Montagnier's lab and purloined the virus," he says. This still doesn't call into question the paper's results, Temin says, adding: "It's still the virus, and it still causes AIDS." The valid question being raised, he says, is "how the scientific community should police itself." Temin then describes a diagram he's devised to express his beliefs. It consists of a bullseye, with science--facts and results--at the center. Around the center are scientists, and in the outermost ring is society. "The science is self-correcting," he says, noting that errors in research are routinely caught and corrected by scientists. "But the scientists are not self-correcting vis- a-vis the society. We already know how to take care of the things in science--that's easy. We're finding out how the society wants to handle the scientists. We don't yet have a mechanism in place that will satisfy the society and the scientists." And the only way to learn, he says, "is by the messy business of doing it. These people [Gallo and Baltimore] are the test cases." Says Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology president Robert Cousins: "There seems to be a rather vigorous approach. Scientists haven't seemed to get due process. The process casts doubt on their research long before there is reason to do so--in a way, you're tried and you don't have a lot of chance to defend yourself." He looks forward to a time when it becomes clearer to the public that investigations like that of Gallo are merely proof that the progress of science is rarely orderly. "One lab does something, and another lab will do the same thing and prove or disprove it. And you go on." Until then, he can only echo Temin's statement. "It's a messy business."

Gallo Investigation: A `Messy Business' Raises Many Issues

Gallo Investigation: A `Messy Business' Raises Many Issues

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