he tale of Dr. Robert Gallo's role in the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS is one of those stories that wouldn't be believable as fiction. The narrative of John Crewdson's new book, "Science Fictions," is bursting with allegations leveled at Dr. Gallo, his associates, rivals and enemies, that include deception, misconduct, incompetence, fraud, sabotage, back-stabbing, double-dealing, overstatements, half-truths, outright lies, a clandestine affair with a co-worker, a bribery attempt, denials, evasions, coverups and serial rewritings of history. All of this would be plausible in politics, but none of it is the normal stuff of science.

Dr. Gallo, indeed, has steadfastly maintained his innocence of all charges. As chief of the National Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology in Bethesda, Md., Dr. Gallo strode onto the world stage in 1983 and set into motion an amazing sequence of events. He had identified a new virus from the blood of four AIDS patients, named it HTLV (for human T-cell leukemia virus) and suggested that it was the most likely cause of AIDS. But as later developments proved, it wasn't.

Meanwhile, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Luc Montagnier, the chief of viral oncology, had isolated a genetically distinct virus from a different batch of AIDS patients. Dr. Montagnier called the virus LAV (lymphadenopathy-associated virus), and said that it was the cause of AIDS. Later events proved he was right. (The virus was eventually renamed H.I.V.)

SCIENCE FICTIONS A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Coverup, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo. By John Crewdson. Illustrated. 670 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. $27.95.   Issue in Depth: AIDS at 20 Federal Official Says He Believes Cause of AIDS Has Been Found (April 22, 1984) New U.S. Report Names Virus That May Cause AIDS (April 24, 1984)   'Science Fictions': Autopsy of a Medical Breakthrough (March 3, 2002)   Track news that interests you. Create A Topic | Manage Alerts Take a Tour Sign Up for Newsletters   Authors in Depth: V. S. Naipaul Read now for just $4.95. A Trinidad-born English writer, Mr. Naipaul was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. This retrospective includes New York Times reviews and interviews with the laureate.

In July 1983, before any of this was nailed down, Dr. Montagnier personally delivered a sample of LAV to Dr. Gallo at his home in Bethesda. Afterward, Dr. Gallo tossed off the incident as of virtually no importance. "Was I so excited to get the thing?" he said. "No, I really wasn't. I put it in my freezer and I went out and played volleyball."

During the subsequent months, however, Dr. Gallo proceeded to "discover" a new virus, one that he named HTLV-3B, and that he said was the true cause of AIDS. It was, but his HTLV-3B was in fact LAV, and although Dr. Gallo was passing it off as his own product, the virus, according to Mr. Crewdson, had come directly from the French researchers. "HTLV-3B and LAV weren't just the same kind of virus," he writes. "They had come from the same patient."

Based on his "discovery," Dr. Gallo proposed a blood test for AIDS. The test kits designed in response to his proposal were quickly approved by the Food and Drug Administration, patented and rushed into production by Abbott Laboratories. In an early field trial, however, the tests attained the notable distinction, Mr. Crewdson says, of "an astounding false-positive rate of 99 in every 100," causing large amounts of good blood to be discarded, and leading many people to falsely think they had AIDS.

A smaller number of false negatives caused some people to acquire AIDS from transfusions of blood that they thought was safe. The Pentagon needed an AIDS test for the armed services. Still, despite the abject failure of the initial Gallo-designed test, the Pentagon refused to consider the earlier French blood test for AIDS, which worked correctly, on the ground that to do so would be un-American. The French finally sued the United States Department of Health and Human Services for violating a noncommercialization agreement, and, almost 10 years later, won $6 million in royalties.

In 1992 a review panel of the National Academy of Sciences accused Dr. Gallo of "intellectual recklessness of a high degree." That same year, the Office of Research Integrity of the National Institutes of Health found him guilty of scientific misconduct. These accusations and findings were later overturned on appeal.

Dr. Gallo, meanwhile, consistently denied wrongdoing. In response to a Time magazine piece about the scientific-misconduct charges, he said: "My colleagues and I isolated the AIDS virus in 1984. Actually, we made many isolates (a total of 48) between 1983 and early 1984. This has been acknowledged by everyone as has been the fact that it is my colleagues and myself who showed that H.I.V. is the cause of AIDS and who also developed the life-saving blood test which has protected our blood supply since 1984."

Dr. Gallo, long immune to embarrassment over the accusations, had acquired journalistic "groupies" who regularly touted him as a medical wonder-worker. He won awards right and left, went on millionaire-style vacations paid for by foreign universities and was pampered like visiting royalty. "They treated me like a maharajah," Dr. Gallo said, speaking of members of the Indian Oncological Society, who had brought him to India. "They put garlands of flowers around my neck and sprinkled me with oil. What a place."

Later, Dr. Gallo left the National Cancer Institute and became director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where he remains today.

This summary, however, is only the bare outline of a story that includes a vast array of characters, a bewildering variety of charges and countercharges and an outsize share of plot convolutions. Mr. Crewdson, the author of two previous books, is a reporter for The Chicago Tribune and a winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1981, when he reported for The New York Times. In this book he explains the science clearly and carefully. Early on, the lay reader will be able to confront a sentence like "Popovic acknowledged growing LAV in Ti7.4 and one other cell line, though without mentioning HUT-78 by name," and understand it perfectly the first time through.

But at more than 500 pages of dense text, most of them packed with equally arcane scientific information, it is all too easy to lose the essential plotline in a sea of detail. The text is supplemented by a 5-page chronological summary of major events, a 13-page glossary of technical terms and a 7-page list of dramatis personae, all of which function as a life raft for the drowning reader.

Still, for all of its impressive depth, breadth and staggering length, something important is missing from the book, namely a documentation of its claims, or even so much as a bibliography. Instead, the reader is glibly informed at the end: "The superscript numerals appearing in the text indicate citational notes, which are available online at www.sciencefictions.net." The story, in other words, is here, but the evidence for it is elsewhere.

For a book that purports to be the canonical exposé of a shameful episode in the history of science, this is a major lapse. It assumes, for one thing, that anyone reading it, or at least anyone crazy enough to care about proof, has convenient Internet access at every moment, whether on vacation, or on a plane, a train or reading in bed. And it assumes that the documentary Web site will exist indefinitely, or at least for the lifetime of the book — all of which is highly dubious. Indeed, the Web site could vanish tomorrow.

Let prospective purchasers be warned: if you buy a copy of "Science Fictions," you will be paying the whole price, but you will not be getting the whole book.

A publisher's dream method of cutting costs, perhaps: part book, part e-book. One hopes it is not the start of a trend.

Ed Regis is the author of "The Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project" and other books about science.