Victory At Last for a Besieged Virus Hunter

By Christine Gorman

Nine years ago, Dr. Robert Gallo was one of science's supernovas. When the National Cancer Institute researcher unveiled proof that a virus caused AIDS, he had every reason to look forward to fame, tidy royalties from the sale of blood-test kits and, down the road, maybe even a Nobel Prize. Instead he soon faced doubt, criticism and accusations of fraud. In 1985, just a year after his historic announcement, a dispute erupted over who really identified the AIDS virus -- Gallo or Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The two agreed in 1987 to share credit for the discovery, but Gallo's travails weren't over.

Two years later, the researcher was crucified by reporting in the Chicago Tribune, and Michigan Congressman John Dingell demanded a government investigation. Perhaps the low point for Gallo came this year when Alan Alda portrayed the scientist as a self-promoting snake in And the Band Played On, an HBO movie about the AIDS epidemic.

But Gallo's most serious problem was a probe by the Office of Research Integrity in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services into charges of misconduct -- chiefly that Gallo was guilty of deception in failing to give enough credit to the French for their role in finding HIV. Last week ORI abruptly dropped its case for lack of proof, giving Gallo a victory in his long battle for vindication. "I feel good, of course," he told TIME. "It's been tough. There were moments of personal harm, feeling down, wondering why this is all happening."

All the fuss began when it was discovered in 1985 that the strain of HIV Gallo presented to the world the year before was virtually identical to a strain isolated by Montagnier in 1983. Since Gallo's lab and the Pasteur Institute cooperated regularly and swapped viral cultures, suspicion arose that Gallo had appropriated the French virus as his own. Gallo acknowledged that the two viruses were the same and that Montagnier had found it first. But Gallo maintained that his lab had independently isolated it from patients' blood samples, not stolen it out of one of Montagnier's samples. Furthermore, % Gallo said, his team had done the bulk of the work that proved this virus caused AIDS.

Even after the U.S. and France struck a deal to split patent royalties fifty-fifty, the controversy swirled on. Finally in 1991, when Gallo and Montagnier had their staffs again analyze the original HIV samples, the mystery was solved. The strain that Gallo had presented as the AIDS virus -- and used to develop a blood test for the disease -- had been accidentally contaminated by a virus from a French sample. Gallo insisted that this mistake did not diminish the achievements of his researchers, because they had also isolated several other strains of HIV.

But the Office of Research Integrity was not convinced that Gallo had been completely candid every step of the way. It concluded in a report last December that Gallo had taken credit that belonged to the French and that one of his associates, Dr. Mikulas Popovic, had fudged evidence in a 1984 research article about methods of culturing HIV. The ORI report was the final blow for Popovic, whose reputation had already been so tarnished in the affair that he had been out of work for most of three years. He finally went to Sweden in August to get a job.

After ORI's December verdict, lawyers for Gallo and Popovic moved to get the rulings overturned by an appeals board of the Department of Health and Human Services. Two weeks ago, that panel exonerated Popovic. "One might anticipate . . . after all the sound and fury, there would be at least a residue of palpable wrongdoing," the HHS board wrote. "That is not the case." Instead, the panel concluded, Popovic's unfamiliarity with English led the Czech-born researcher to make a couple of sloppy, but ultimately harmless mistakes.

Once ORI officials realized how badly they had lost the Popovic case, they decided that they could not prevail against Gallo, and last week they withdrew the charges. Even so, they tried to put their own spin on the outcome and tweaked the HHS panel for, as they saw it, relaxing the rules against fraud. "It is clear that the panel now applies different standards from those applied by ORI to review findings of 'scientific misconduct,' " said Lyle Bivens, who heads ORI. Although Bivens would not comment on whether he still believed misconduct had occurred, he declared he was "dismayed by the panel pronouncements."

The reluctant decision by ORI to drop the accusations against Gallo will not immediately erase all the damage done to his reputation. He probably would have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had admitted the possibility of error and solved the puzzle of the contaminated lab samples years earlier than he did. But with the charges of wrongdoing dismissed, Gallo has the right to proclaim, "I have been completely vindicated." He can now hope that history will be kinder to the co-discoverer of the AIDS virus than the past nine years have been.