5/22/2021 GALLO ADMITS FRENCH DISCOVERED AIDS VIRUS - Chicago Tribune

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GALLO ADMITS FRENCH DISCOVERED

AIDS VIRUS
By John Crewdson, Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

MAY 30, 1991 | WASHINGTON

A controversial piece of scientific history will be officially rewritten this week, with the publication of
an acknowledgment by Dr. Robert C. Gallo that the AIDS virus he claimed to have discovered in 1984
was in reality a virus sent to him from France the year before.

Gallo`s acknowledgment, in a letter to the British scientific journal Nature, follows by two weeks the
publication, in the American journal Science, of a report from the Pasteur Institute in Paris showing that a
virus discovered there in 1983 is a virtual genetic twin of the Gallo virus.

The letter, which associates said was written at the urging of Gallo`s senior colleagues, appears to put an
end to a six-year effort by Gallo and his employer, the National Institutes of Health, to claim the AIDS virus
as an independent discovery.

By invoking a variety of alternative explanations, Gallo had struggled to persuade the scientific community
that his AIDS virus, known as HTLV-3B, was derived from an American AIDS patient and not from a virus
sample sent to NIH by Pasteur scientists.

The federal government adopted the same position in court after the Pasteur Institute alleged in 1985 that
the AIDS blood test developed in Gallo`s lab, and subsequently patented by the U.S. government, had been
made with the French virus.

The case was settled out of court in 1987, but the controversy has continued until now.

The settlement agreement split annual royalties from the AIDS test equally between NIH and the Pasteur
Institute. Asked Wednesday whether the French lab was now considering the possibility of reopening that
agreement, Michael A. Epstein, a Pasteur attorney, said, ''We are continuing to study developments in the
publications and awaiting the outcome of the NIH inquiry'' into several aspects of Gallo`s AIDS research.

A typewritten draft of Gallo`s Nature letter, obtained by the Tribune, concludes with an expression of regret
''if during this period anything I said shed more heat than light.'' The apology is missing, however, from the
version of the letter to be published by Nature on Friday. John Maddox, the journal`s editor, said it was
deleted for space reasons, but he regretted the decision. Maddox said he would rather have excised Gallo`s
assertion that nothing in his acknowledgment affects the chronological history of the discovery of the AIDS
virus that Gallo and his Pasteur counterpart, Luc Montagnier, published in Nature in 1987.

''Gallo says this (chronology) is historical truth,'' Maddox explained in a telephone interview from London,
''but Montagnier says it`s a kind of shotgun document.''

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5/22/2021 GALLO ADMITS FRENCH DISCOVERED AIDS VIRUS - Chicago Tribune

The published version of the letter, which is signed by Gallo alone, nevertheless subscribes to the version of
events set out by Pasteur scientists in their recent Science article: that a viral culture in the Gallo laboratory
somehow ''became contaminated'' with some of the French virus shipped from Paris in autumn, 1983.

''When workers at the Institute Pasteur and at NIH later cloned viruses from AIDS patients,'' Gallo writes,
''both apparently sequenced HIV-LAI,'' as the French virus is called. Sequencing is the method used to
determine the genetic fingerprint of DNA.

Whether Gallo`s cultures became contaminated with the French virus by accident-or, as the French
suggested in court, on purpose-ultimately may be resolved by the NIH investigation of his laboratory`s
AIDS research. Both Gallo and his former chief virologist, Dr. Mikulas Popovic, who actually isolated HTLV-
3B, are targets of the NIH investigation.

The 18-month-old probe has focused on several discrepancies between Gallo and Popovic`s published
account of how HTLV-3B was discovered and the version of that discovery contained in Popovic`s
laboratory notes.

Popovic`s lawyer, Barbara Mishkin, said her client was not aware of the Nature letter and had no comment
on it.

Popovic did, however, sign a letter published by Gallo in Nature in February, reporting that an analysis of
three virus samples the Gallo lab received from Pasteur in 1983 had shown that they could not have been the
source of HTLV-3B. The origin of that virus, Gallo and Popovic wrote then,

''may be difficult to determine and thus remain unknown.''

Pasteur scientists countered with the article showing that Gallo`s virus was identical to a fourth sample they
sent to the Gallo lab in 1983 but which Gallo and Popovic claimed could not be located.

Following publication of the earlier Nature letter analyzing the three French samples, several experts in viral
genetics noted what they said were a number of flaws in the Gallo analysis.

In another letter, also to be published by Nature on Friday, Gallo concedes that the analytical methods he
used gave an inflated impression of the differences between the AIDS viruses in the three samples tested
and the one from France.

''We regret the conclusions that the earlier calculations created,'' he writes.

Copyright © 2018, Chicago Tribune

This article is related to: Scientific Research, France, Europe, Paris, HIV - AIDS

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