SCIENCE FICTIONS: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Coverup, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, by John Crewdson. Little, Brown. 672 pages. $27.95.
Fasten your seat belts. John Crewdson is at the wheel of a fast-paced nonfiction thriller about a scientific scandal of major proportions, with superstar scientist Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute at center stage.
"This is not a book about AIDS," advises Crewdson, a brilliant, determined, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with a talent for relentless research. "Nor is it really about science. It is a book about how scientists behave when the stakes are high, and the stakes were never higher than in the search for the cause of AIDS."
Drawing upon thousands of pages of correspondence, memoranda, laboratory notes, transcripts and other documents compiled over 10 years of intense investigations, Crewdson meticulously traces how the AIDS virus and its blood test were actually discovered, and by whom; how the French AIDS virus ended up in Gallo's test tubes; and how the National Institutes of Health and other agencies of the Reagan administration struggled to cover up the truth.
He opens his tightly edited saga with President Richard Nixon's declaration of a War on Cancer in 1971, funded with a $1.6-billion appropriation for cancer research -- a huge sum in those days. The war would be waged by the National Cancer Institute, a virtually independent agency, Crewdson points out, headed by a presidential appointee and governed by a NCA Advisory Board "to cheer the virus hunters on."
James Watson, now running a lab at Harvard, worried that "the Gold Rush mentality was likely to 'scare off the sensible [scientists] and leave the field to a combination of charlatans and fools.' "
And so, the stage was set. Enter Robert Gallo, then 27 and a newly appointed lab chief at NIH, later to be described as an "arrogant megalomaniac," by fellow scientists.
For nearly a year, Gallo insisted that the wrong virus, one discovered previously in his own laboratory, was the most likely cause of AIDS, while he publicly denigrated the critical research of the Pasteur scientists in France and also systematically impeding the scientific community here and abroad.
When it became evident that the French had beaten Gallo in the race to find the cause of AIDS, Gallo then chose to engage in an unethical campaign to scramble and rewrite scientific history by writing articles claiming discoveries he had not made with data he did not have.
Crewdson reveals that Gallo wrote papers as a "political exercise, a pollution of the scientific literature, intended to help lay the groundwork for a defense against the French." The scientific press never challenged these articles and leading journalists got nowhere when pressing Gallo for the truth.
Unfortunately, his brilliant tactical strategies were never matched by scientific accomplishments. When French investigators finally challenged U.S. patents, U.S. attorneys simply echoed Gallo's many falsehoods about the primacy of his research, assuring the Patent Office and the federal courts that the AIDS virus and the HIV blood test had been discovered here first.
"What set Robert Gallo apart," Crewdson concludes, "was his profound disinclination to acknowledge his mistakes, preferring instead to ignore them, insist they hadn't occurred, blame someone else, or propagate outlandish explanations and outright fictions that only confused science further and slowed its forward march."
Science Fictions is a profoundly disturbing account, demonstrating that even brilliant minds may trade the truth for fame or fortune. As with the current Enron scandal, there are victims. In this case, add to the list not only the taxpayers footing the bills but also the 18 million people worldwide who had perished from AIDS by the turn of the century.
Crewdson has written a masterpiece on what seems to be a never-ending epidemic of non-accountability in this country.
Jeanne Nicholson is a syndicated columnist and freelance reviewer in Newport.
