John Crewdson

Little, Brown and Company, $27.95/£19.67, pp 670 

ISBN 0 316 13476 7

Rating: 0

 

It's fairly clear that Robert Gallo is not a very likeable man. In the race to identify the cause of AIDS, he threatened his rivals, bullied his collaborators, and lied to editors of journals. Although never proved, it seems more than possible that HTLV-III, the retrovirus that he claimed to have discovered, had been deliberately misappropriated from cell lines sent to him from the Pasteur Institute in Paris and given a new name.

Crewdson, an investigative journalist on the Chicago Tribune, is apparently appalled that a scientist could behave in this way. In 1989, he wrote a long article for his newspaper about the Gallo-Montagnier controversy in which he accused Gallo of malpractice. Here, after exhaustive scrutiny of correspondence, memoranda, laboratory notebooks, and the transcripts of the official investigations, he takes nearly 700 pages to tell an updated version of the same story.

Crewdson believes that Gallo abandoned all moral and scientific principles in the singleminded pursuit of a Nobel prize. To persuade us that this judgment is correct, he overwhelms us with evidence, often quoting verbatim from the protagonists' own accounts. This makes the book tough going because it is hard not to lose the scientific plot in the minutiae of who said what to whom. And despite the weight of information Crewdson amasses, it's ultimately unconvincing. One has no way of knowing whether it has been presented in a fair minded way. There's a strong sense of only hearing the case for the prosecution. Don't read the book hoping for a history of AIDS research, an account of the biology of retroviruses, or a psychological profile of the main characters. You'll be disappointed.

The author's shock at discovering that scientists are not always honourable in their dealings must surely be simulated. It's a commonplace observation that important discoveries are made by unpleasant people. (Forgive me if I don't give medical examples here.) And the phrase in the subtitle, the dark legacy of Robert Gallo, which implies that lasting harm was done and which, I guess, Crewdson must need to believe to justify writing the book, is never supported by argument or facts. It's far from clear that progress in understanding the causation of AIDS was slowed up by anything Gallo did. Indeed, the reverse might well be true.

Christopher Martyn. 

BMJ

© BMJ 2002
 

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