Robert Gallo And The Human Element

There is a nasty little sideshow to the war against AIDS that has wasted precious talent, time, and lives. And it ought to stop. Its target is the National Cancer Institute's Robert Gallo, two-time winner of the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award and America's preeminent retrovirologist. For years, this sideshow has been produced mainly by Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson. Recently ABC-TV's Sam Donaldson got into the act on "PrimeTime Live," making his strident contribution to the tasteless assault. The vilification of Gallo is bitterly ironic, since it is his team--by pushing ahead with the development of a practical HIV blood test--that has saved thousands of people from contracting AIDS through blood transfusions or blood products. While it is true that Pasteur Institute scientists made a key contribution, the HIV blood test--if left to them--would have been delayed by six months or so. Both Donaldson and Crewdson, hot on the track of scandal involving the HIV test, either overlooked or chose to ignore an obvious fact: Between 3,000 and 5,000 French citizens were infected with HIV during the six-month interval in 1985 when French health authorities held up approval of the available Gallo-developed test until the one engineered by French researchers--which stood a better chance of capturing their domestic market--was ready. In a clear admission of its guilt, the French government has recently pledged to pay $4 billion to the victims of the scandal. Before media critics launch any further attacks on Gallo's reputation, I would ask them to contemplate how many American lives were saved during the interval when blood banks in the United States had the HIV test and the French blood banks did not. The divisive issue of who deserves credit for discovering the cause of AIDS appeared to have been settled by Gallo and Pasteur Institute retrovirologist Luc Montagnier in a 1987 Nature article that they coauthored (326:435-36). Soon following was an agreement between the president of the United States and the prime minister of France to split the royalties from the HIV blood test equally. There is now no question that the retrovirus isolated by Montagnier and coworkers from a patient with an AIDS-like illness and called LAV-BRU represents the cause of the disease. But they could not prove it at the time, since the majority of French AIDS patients tested seronegative for the virus. It was the Gallo team that, by going all-out to develop an accurate blood test, established that the retrovirus Montagnier called LAV-BRU and Gallo called HTLV-III actually caused AIDS. So what stirred up the controversy again? Mainly, it was the overstuffed, 52,000-word "Great AIDS Quest" report by Crewdson in the Nov. 19, 1989, edition of the Chicago Tribune that asked--but failed to answer--the tantalizing question: Was Gallo's ability to isolate and finally propagate the AIDS virus in continuous culture in the winter of 1983-84 an accident or a theft? The answer to Crewdson's crucial question is: No theft by Gallo was involved; there was an accidental contamination that occurred not only in Gallo's and Montagnier's lab, but also in several others around the world. Now that NIH's Office of Scientific Integrity has exonerated Gallo of scientific misconduct charges, I certainly hope the matter will end there. As a physician, I am grateful to Robert Gallo for not playing it safe with his place in the history books after his team's discoveries of interleukin-2 and the human T-cell leukemia retrovirus and taking on the challenge of AIDS. So were my patients who needed blood transfusions or blood products back in 1985. Clearly, the man deserves better from those with the power to shape public opinion. E. Marshall Goldberg is a professor of medicine at Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia.

Robert Gallo And The Human Element

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