"Gallo's meeting has juice, that's what it's got," declares Cecil H. Fox, an experimental pathologist, biochemist, and 20-year NIH veteran who is now president of Molecular Histology Laboratories Inc., Gaithersburg, Md. "That is, there's a lot of interpersonal contact, there are colorful people that go to it, there are discussions, disagreements, and, frequently, hard feelings and good feelings that come out of it. It's what scientific meetings are supposed to be about. It's not a group of wooden people flying in on an airplane, getting off the plane, coming to the hotel or whatever it is, delivering a talk that they've delivered six times in the previous two months, getting back on the plane, and leaving."
Fox adds that, among scientific meetings, "this is a folk festival." Surprising, perhaps, to outsiders is the fact that much publicized and long-running official investigations of alleged scientific misconduct by Gallo and members of ...
