1987, Publisher's Weekly
The Road to the Discovery of HIV
Investigation
Months later, a book, And the Band Played On, accused Gallo of misappropriating virus isolates. Two years later, journalist John Crewdson published a Chicago Tribune article suggesting all of Gallo’s data came directly from L’Institut Pasteur. This, along with evidence from the book, prompted a federal investigation by the National Institute of Health.
"The only thing I worry about is that it may give people the notion that I might have done something wrong.”
~Robert Gallo
After lawyers for Montagnier discovered an early handwritten draft of Gallo’s original paper regarding the discovery of HTLV-III, Gallo admitted the original virus he claimed to discover was, in fact, “contaminated” with the virus from France. In the draft, Gallo's colleague acknowledged that their first sample was derived from L'Institut's material, but Gallo retracted this statement from the final publication. Despite this discovery, the investigation eventually cleared Gallo's group of any wrongdoing and still awarded him credit for the discovery of HIV.
1991, New York Times
"I was such a supporter of Bob Gallo's; I really believed in him. It wasn't by any means a national issue... I was not well briefed on the French claims, and I had confidence in Gallo. He had kept me so informed, and he was a brilliant investigator, but also a zealous participant. He was quite confident at that time, and I derived my sense of confidence from my working relationship with him, and the results that he had produced. I really did feel that he had been the actual identifier of the virus."
~Margaret Heckler (Former Secretary of Health and Human Services)
Original manuscript (courtesy of Lisa Martin Esq.)