Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, by John Crewdson. Little, Brown. 670 pages. $27.95.
Fifteen years ago, Robert Gallo was a star. A researcher at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., he was famed as the discoverer of HTLV-3, the virus that causes AIDS. Gallo was collecting $100,000 a year from the key patent on the test for this virus, and he - and everyone else in the medical world - figured he would win the Nobel Prize.
Today, many in that same world consider Gallo a fraud. He was pushed out of the National Cancer Institute and now works in the far less prestigious Institute of Human Virology in downtown Baltimore. Gallo has admitted that researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris found the AIDS virus first, and Gallo's HTLV-3 has been shown to be identical to LAV, the version of the AIDS virus isolated by the French and given by them to Gallo.
No one knows whether someone in Gallo's lab stole the French virus or if it contaminated their samples through sloppy practice, and it really doesn't matter. What matters is that the world recognizes Gallo as a man who, in the words of television's Sam Donaldson, "almost got away with taking credit for something he hadn't done."
Gallo continues to insist that he did nothing wrong. Yes, he made mistakes, but so has every other scientist. His enemies, he says, smeared his name. And while investigators from the government's Office of Research Integrity found him guilty of scientific misconduct, that determination was withdrawn after Gallo appealed the finding.
In short, readers who want to understand this complicated story will have to wade through the details and make up their own minds. Fortunately, the book's author - a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Chicago Tribune - lays out these details with painstaking care. Yet why would anyone want to slog through more than 500 pages of difficult material to make up their minds about Robert Gallo?
One element of this book's appeal, for scandal-mongers and gossip mavens, is the obvious ill-will between the author and Gallo. Crewdson reports a plethora of incidents revealing Gallo as a posturing bully, and his data will convince many readers that Gallo engaged in scientific fraud. In return, according to footnote (a) in Chapter 19, Gallo once told the police he suspected Crewdson had broken into his house "to photograph scientific data and papers," and told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times that Crewdson was "a dangerous psychotic."
