Which Paper Do You Read?
The Sun-Times story, which ran inside, was lifted from the Washington Post wire. It began:
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The question long unanswered was whether Gallo had then knowingly claimed the French virus as his own. After two years of research Crewdson had no answer to this question. He could only report, “The evidence is compelling that it was either an accident or a theft.” Scientists already knew this.
Still, Crewdson’s work was intriguing, and Democratic representative John Dingell of Michigan, whose House subcommittee oversees the NIH, was inspired to ask the NIH to look deeper. The NIH promptly launched an “inquiry,” which was conducted by a team from its Office of Scientific Integrity and overseen by a panel of 11 outside consultants.
Crewdson declined the invitation. In fact, in a follow-up article two days later, he insisted that the coming “formal investigation” gives the NIH the opportunity to answer this question: “Did the French virus accidentally contaminate Gallo’s virus cultures, or was it simply appropriated by Gallo or his chief virologist . . . who is also a subject of this investigation?”
Fortunately, Raub’s statement continued, “I have determined, however, that certain issues identified during the inquiry phase warrant a formal investigation.” This investigation, he said, will focus on possible misstatements in a paper from Gallo’s laboratory published in a May 1984 Science, and on trying to establish beyond any doubt if Gallo’s virus came from France.
“One thing that’s come out of this,” Culliton told us, “is that the Gallo lab was almost paralyzed in terms of doing research. They’ve had to spend an enormous amount of time responding. They’ve had to respond to every allegation and innuendo in Crewdson’s article, even to the ones that refer not to ‘crimes’ but to whether Gallo is a nice guy.”
