Heckler’s participation at Gallo’s press event was important stagecraft because it gave the imprimatur of NIH’s institutional gravitas to a theory that had not been subject to peer review.
Only later did the public learn that NIH allowed Gallo to delay the announcement until he had personally patented an antibody kit that he claimed capable of detecting HIV. He had developed the test at taxpayer expense.
Crewdson writes that Gallo conspired with a CDC official, James Curran, to improperly certify Gallo’s test as equivalent in quality to a far better test developed by Montagnier. Gallo would make himself a millionaire from his innovation while fanning fears of the presumably deadly virus, which coincidentally drove sales. A subsequent lawsuit over Gallo’s swindle by the French government ultimately forced Gallo to disgorge half his proceeds.
Gallo’s premature announcement pioneered a new strategy of “Science by Press Release” that would become a familiar mainstay in Dr. Fauci’s arsenal of narrative control, culminating in the COVID-19 pandemic. The journal Science did not publish Gallo’s paper until over a week after his spectacular TV press conference. At the time, Gallo’s tactic marked a severe breach of professional scientific etiquette. This gimmick assured that nobody could review Gallo’s work prior to his proclamation.
Both Dr. Gallo and Dr. Montagnier, who had devoted their careers to studying retroviruses, were cancer researchers. Before the appearance of AIDS, both men had vainly strived to implicate retroviruses as the culprit in leukemia. In 1975, before he ever published a paper on the subject, Gallo gained national headlines when he publicly announced his discovery of a human retrovirus HL-23 that he claimed caused leukemia.13 He told colleagues he expected to win the Nobel Prize for his detection of HL-23 in human leukemia cells.14 He didn’t.
Major labs around the country were intensely interested in HL-23, but when they requested samples from Gallo, he ordered subordinates to damage the infected cells, before sending them out, to make them useless for research by others.15 Leukemia incidence was exploding at the time, but ethical elasticity apparently insulated Gallo against qualms about purposefully delaying vital research during a global pandemic. Other scientists complained that they could not reproduce Gallo’s success. Subsequently, two groups of US researchers literally made a monkey out of Gallo’s discovery—if not Gallo—by proving his HL-23 virus was actually a humiliating laboratory contamination consisting of a mélange of three viruses from a gibbon, a woolly monkey, and a baboon.16 Instead of a Nobel laureate, Gallo became a laughingstock.
Undeterred by mortification, Gallo declared that a so-called HTLV virus, which he also claimed to have discovered (he had stolen the work of Japanese researchers, according to Crewdson), was the cause of AIDS.17 Puzzled that he could not reproduce Gallo’s results, another AIDS researcher, working with gay patients, asked Gallo if the discrepancy was because Gallo might be studying a different risk group. “Was your patient a Haitian? A hemophiliac?” the scientist queried. “It was a fucking fag,” replied Gallo.18
When asked to address Duesberg’s announcements about the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, Gallo often dismissed Duesberg’s objections because, Gallo suggested, Duesberg was gay and/or mentally disturbed (Duesberg is straight, and sane): “[Duesberg] comes to meetings with guys with leather jackets and the hair and so on in the middle. I mean, that’s a little bit odd. Doesn’t it speak of something funny?”19 These were the sorts of petty defamations that Gallo generously offered, instead of argument, to defend his work.
But Gallo’s failure to demonstrate that he could find HTLV in the blood of men suffering from AIDS threatened to put the final nail into his naked Nobel ambitions. At the height of that personal crisis, Gallo learned of Montagnier’s success. Unwilling to accept defeat by the French, he gulled the credulous virologist into sending him a sample, which he cultured on a substrate that, according to Crewdson, he stole from yet another scientist. When he succeeded in finding signs of Montagnier’s virus in the blood of gay men suffering from immune system collapse, Gallo rebranded it HTLV and claimed it to be the same virus he had lately “discovered.”20 Gallo’s lab notes, obtained by the Chicago Tribune, show that Gallo renamed the French virus repeatedly, apparently to further obscure its pedigree.
The following spring, Science published the four papers from Gallo’s lab, upon which Gallo’s celebrity as the “Superman of AIDS” entirely rests. The first paper reported Gallo’s isolation of a so-called “new” virus from AIDS patients. (Gallo’s lab had apparently cultivated and rechristened the French virus.) The second paper declared that the new virus had been “isolated from a total of forty-eight subjects,” a finding that would go far toward proving that the virus caused the disease.21 Examination of Gallo’s lab notes by the Chicago Tribune found no traces of these forty-eight isolates.22
American and French governments skirmished over which scientist “discovered” HIV, until the combatants agreed in 1987 to call it a “co-discovery.” The WHO delayed its response for two years as Gallo employed a series of artifices to pretend that there were two different viruses. By delaying the announcement of the French scientist’s earlier discoveries, Gallo stalled the introduction of a widely available blood test for the AIDS virus by about a year. During that 1983–1984 interregnum, thousands of hospital patients and hemophiliacs received tainted blood from blood banks and became infected with HIV, and many of the already infected unwittingly spread the virus.23,24
The Nobel committee awarded Montagnier its prize in 2008, conspicuously snubbing Gallo, whose notorious ethical lapses were, by then, abundantly documented. Gallo’s unsupported claims and sketchy conduct resulted in two US government inquiries into his professional ethics (NIH and congressional).25,26 Pulitzer Prize–winner John Crewdson’s 55,000-word exposé in the Chicago Tribune documenting Gallo’s theft provided a withering portrait of Gallo as a sociopath and pathological liar who employed thieving felons to run his lab, a pirate enterprise engaged in pilfering money from the federal government and swiping discoveries from other scientists.27