Bumbling Toward the Nobel

By Dick Thompson/Washington

Who deserves the credit -- and a likely Nobel Prize -- for being the first to track down the AIDS virus? For more than seven years, that question has generated a transatlantic duel, during which accusations of mistakes became tainted with bitter murmurs about dishonesty, between rival scientists in France and the U.S. Now the mystery may have been solved. New evidence to be published later this month in the journal Science offers a simple explanation of how two laboratories came to claim credit for the same discovery.

The slugfest became public after Dr. Robert Gallo and his colleagues from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., announced in 1984 that they had isolated the AIDS virus. But it turned out to be virtually identical to one that had already been cultured in the lab of Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. That was surprising, since strains of the AIDS virus from different people have noticeably different genetic structures.

Montagnier said he knew why the viruses matched: he had sent Gallo samples of the virus in 1983. Though Montagnier did not accuse Gallo of intentional wrongdoing, the revelation raised suspicions that the brash American had snatched both the virus and the discovery from the French. Gallo, however, insisted that the American version of the virus was homegrown.

With prestige and profits at stake, the dispute became a standoff. Finally, in 1987 the French and U.S. governments agreed that the two labs should share credit and split the royalties generated by patented AIDS blood tests. But doubts remained. A lengthy investigation in 1989 by the Chicago Tribune raised once again the possibility that Gallo had stolen his competitor's work and prompted Michigan Congressman John Dingell to call upon the NIH to investigate Gallo for possible misconduct.

Over the past two years, the American has tried to exonerate himself by reanalyzing the virus samples sent from France in 1983. Last February Gallo triumphantly announced that the virus in the French specimens, taken from an AIDS-stricken fashion designer known as "Bru," was markedly different from the virus discovered in the U.S. But this news only heightened the mystery of how the two labs eventually isolated identical viruses.

The upcoming article in Science, based on new evidence from Montagnier's team, helps solve the puzzle. The French researchers have found that one of the specimens from Bru was accidentally contaminated in Montagnier's lab by a fast-multiplying virus taken from a law student known as "Lai." Montagnier's records show that this contaminated Bru sample was among those sent to Gallo. Apparently, the Lai virus, which spreads easily, also contaminated Gallo's own cultures. When Gallo went back to analyze his Bru specimens, he did not find the Lai virus because the sample that was contaminated had already been used up. Gallo agrees that Montagnier's latest theory explaining the mixup is most likely correct.

So how will this chapter read in the history books? Probably as a tale of brilliance, bickering and blunders. Montagnier apparently isolated the virus first, but there is no reason to believe that Gallo purposely stole it. For his part, Gallo first used the virus to develop an AIDS blood test. In this case, success had two fathers, and both can lay a legitimate claim to that coveted Nobel.

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CAPTION: HOW THE CONFUSION PROBABLY AROSE

With reporting by Edward M. Gomez/Paris