Blinded By Science

Scientists aim to save and prolong life with their honorable quests, from curing cancer to encouraging Americans to eat less at Burger King. Yet while everyone knows that fast food is unhealthy, few remember the researchers that pored over test tubes, assays and cultures to prove that bacon-and-cheese sandwiches are a shortcut to heart disease.

Even Nobel Prize-winning scientists fail to become superstars or media darlings, nor does the Nobel improve their chances of getting a choice table in a New York City restaurant. But a scientist who can make a discovery with the potential to directly save millions of lives and alter the path of a disease ravaging the globe will not just be remembered—he will also be a hero.

Robert Gallo, of the National Institute of Humanities and the National Cancer Institute, was one scientist determined to be a household name. He had a killer on his hands, AIDS, a major federally financed laboratory for research and the unceasing desire for the glory of solving the mystery of the world’s newest and potentially deadliest threat.

But Gallo also had an ego that would drive him beyond the realm of the unethical to make him the indirect killer of thousands of people transfused with HIV-tainted blood between 1982 and 1986. In Science Fictions, John Crewdson vilifies Gallo for misleading the world and provides a nearly day-by-day record of the history of HIV and AIDS from the time of their discovery to the present.

Science Fictions is at its core a tale that helps the layperson understand, according to Crewdson, “how scientists behave when the stakes are high.” Non-scientists will discover that scientists are just as tempted by corruption and driven by personal fame as politicians or Hollywood stars. Scientists court the media, wine and dine their colleagues and try to scoop the discoveries of rival labs. In the meantime, they also do research.

The stakes were high in 1982, as Crewdson explains. When Gallo made his first appearance, AIDS had just started to hit the western world. At this point, scientists knew how to recognize the disease’s symptoms—they just had no clue what caused patients’ T-cells to wither and their bodies to become susceptible for opportunistic diseases. Homosexuals were the first to experience the leukemia-like symptoms: large lymph nodes, fatigue and weight loss. Then hemophiliacs, unbeknownst to health practitioners at the time, were also succumbing to the virus, infected by the blood transfusions intended to keep them alive.

Crewdson delineates the challenges for scientists. AIDS clearly had epidemic potential, as cases mounted without anyone understanding how AIDS spread. Whoever could figure out what caused the disease and how it was transmitted would gain prime-time media coverage. Whoever could figure out a way to test for the disease stood to make millions on a patent. The grand prize, which hindsight proves was an optimistic goal, would surely go to the scientist responsible for a cure or vaccine.

To his credit, Gallo made a risky move in deciding to focus on AIDS. Ronald Reagan had declared war on cancer and AIDS had the stigma as a “gay disease.” But in 1983, the French at the Pasteur laboratories were ahead and looked likely to seize the glory, making Gallo’s decision to devote himself to the disease original and ambitious.

Science Fictions does have juicy tidbits of the race to link HLTV (HIV’s former name) to AIDS. Crewsdon tells of incubators being shut off, fights between the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the National Institute for Health (NIH) in Bethesda, snubs at scientific conferences and botched research papers. Isolates of virus went missing and scientists snuck into each others’ labs to glance at rival research efforts.

Gallo emerged as the villain, even in the early stages of HIV research. He refused to share supplies, from virus isolates to cell lines needed to grow the white blood cells necessary for research. Crewsdon holds Gallo accountable for the delay in AIDS research as Gallo wanted to be the first to isolate the virus that causes AIDS—even when NIH dictum commanded Gallo to share supplies and information with rival labs in the name of the search for scientific truth.

Crewdson, bogged down in the details only a microbiologist would care to understand, loses his reader amid a sea of technicalities and descriptions of virus strains until the drama of 1985. At this point, Gallo claimed to have discovered the virus that causes AIDS, dubbed HLTV-3B. With this virus, Gallo created the first blood antibody test and garnered all the accolades minus the Nobel Prize, including a nomination to the National Academy of Science.

Seeking the patent for the test and the profit and honor they deserved, the scientists of the Pasteur Institute sued the United States. The French claimed Gallo had stolen their virus to mass produce the antibody test. But the American antibody test, which used Gallo’s genetic sequence, produced false negatives at an alarming rate. Not only was Gallo wrong, but he refused to admit that he had made a mistake. As a result, Crewdson suggests that Gallo is single-handedly responsible for delaying the development of an accurate HIV test.

Science Fictions switches from textbook to maudlin TV movie as Crewdson relates cases of innocent hemophiliacs given tainted transfusions, birthing mothers who received bad blood and otherwise healthy people whose infections could have been prevented if Gallo had acknowledged his error.

After the French sued Gallo and the Department of Health and Human Services, Gallo admitted his errors and the Red Cross adopted the French version of the antibody test. But Gallo’s fall from grace and the revelation of his illegal and unethical manipulation of data feel anti-climatic. In fact, the tedium of the nearly six-year government investigation, with its 300 pages of Congressional evidence, makes Science Fictions feel more like a Lexis-Nexus search than a story of scientific sleuthing. Instead of mentioning every slip-up, Crewdson could have focused on Gallo’s most heinous attempts to steal headlines.

Instead, the impact of this brilliant scientist’s pursuit of glory at all costs is hidden in a litany dinner meetings. And the difficulties of searching for clues to HIV and the efforts of other well-intentioned scientists are entirely forgotten. In trying to portray the futility of egoism in science, Crewdson commits the ultimate irony: Gallo emerges as the only memorable, potentially household name in the story.

books

Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo

By John Crewdson

Little Brown & Company

604 pp., $27.95