BY AIDS OBSESSED
By Barry Werth
GQ Aug. 1991
Dr. Robert Gallo is determined to receive the recognition he feels is
owed him for discovering the AIDS virus. Pulitzer Prize-winner reporter
John Crewdson is even more determined to prove that Gallo is a fraud.
For the first time in many months, Dr. Robert Gallo could look out over
his immediate circumstances and feel some small comfort. It was August
11, 1990, the first night of his annual lab meeting, an event attended
by many of the world's top virologists and AIDS researchers. They
had come to the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, to
see one another and - especially - Gallo, who despite his mounting professional
problems still clung to his position as a central figure in their world.
Gallo was hosting a banquet for more than one hundred of them that night
at the Far East, a Chinese restaurant in neighboring Rockville. With him
would be Dr. Flossie Wong-Staal, one of his chief scientific collaborators
and the woman whom Spy magazine the month before had named, in the
open season that now beset him, as his "former mistress." In
Gallo's universe, a universe starkly polarized between friends and enemies,
between manic highs and profound lows, the lab meeting was a rare chance
to relax. Whatever else was going on in his world, the coming week of high-level
science and scientific schmoozing was ineluctably Gallo's show.
He needed it. Nine months earlier, a book-length supplement in the Chicago
Tribune about the discovery of the AIDS virus, the result of a twenty-month
investigation by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Crewdson, had resurrected
doubts about Gallo's role in that discovery. The article, by far the most
exhaustive recounting to date, found "compelling" evidence that
Gallo's lab had gotten its virus either as a result of accidental contamination
or by the theft of a virus originally discovered by researchers in Paris.
These were old charges, but the Tribune had produced enough new
information and presented it so convincingly that it spawned at least two
investigations - one by Congress, the other by the NIH's own Office of
Scientific Integrity - that had haunted Gallo for the better part of a
year. For months he had done almost nothing else but try furiously to defend
himself and his crumbling reputation. As the investigations expanded, so
had Gallo's sense that he was fighting an enemy that wouldn't be satisfied
until it had destroyed him. Though the investigations were independent
of the Tribune's, and though Crewdson, who'd recently moved to Bethesda,
had largely gone on to other projects, Gallo had come to see Crewdson as
a demon, the unique source of all his troubles.
Gallo was right about one thing: Crewdson was a formidable accuser,
certainly the most accomplished reporter ever to cover AIDS. By the reckoning
of some of the nation's best newspaper editors, those who knew him
at the Tribune and at his previous paper, The New York Times,
Crewdson was perhaps the best reporter in the country, period. "John's
right up there at the top," says David Jones, assistant managing editor
of The Times. "You could say to him, 'John, see that
brick wall over there? I want you on the other side of that wall,' and
he'd get there."
"You've heard the expression about a snapping turtle, 'They won't
let go until it thunders'?" says Bill Kovach, curator of the Neiman
Foundation at Harvard and a former Timesman. "That's John."
To Crewdson's admirers, this fabled determination becomes its most fearsome
when Crewdson senses official abuse. He loves breaking big, complicated
stories that no one else can get or, as with Watergate, that are being
deliberately buried. To Gallo, however, what Crewdson seemed to want to
get most was him. As probably the world's most famous scientist,
a man whose name was synonymous with the discovery of the AIDS virus even
though he no longer claimed co be the sole discoverer, Gallo knew he was
journalistic big game. Indeed, he'd done extraordinary things to make himself
so. Now Crewdson was beginning to question Gallo's vaccine research, arguably
the one thing that could make people forget his role in the controversy
over the virus, and Gallo too was heavily determined - as determined as
Crewdson. In July 1990, Gallo's lawyer, Joseph Onek, had written the Tribune's
publisher, threatening possible legal action if the paper printed allegations
that Gallo had improperly provided viral materials for unapproved vaccine
trials on humans, allegations that Crewdson had put in a letter to several
officials, including the acting head of the NIH, Dr. William Raub. "We
strongly advise that the Tribune's libel counsel contact us before
the Tribune commits itself to publishing a defamatory and irresponsible
article," Onek wrote.
Gallo left the restaurant that night in good spirits, arriving sometime
after midnight at his home in the wooded sector. of Bethesda known as Bradley
Park. His wife, Mary Jane, had returned earlier after a night out with
friends, at about eleven, and, as she would later tell police, instinctively
began checking the upstairs rooms after sensing that something was wrong.
It appeared that someone had pried open a window in a downstairs playroom,
entered and gone upstairs, leaving behind a scene of, if not exactly crime,
malice. A diamond ring that the investigating officer would later refer
to as "huge" and two other expensive pieces of jewelry were undisturbed
on top of her dresser, but her underwear had been flung about the room;
a purple bra hung comically from a window latch. Several desks were ransacked,
though not the one in Gallo's study. On immediate inspection. nothing had
been taken.
Mary Jane Gallo called the Bethesda police, who dispatched an officer
to the house. With Crewdson much on her mind, she didn't hesitate to share
her suspicions with policeman Dave Falcinelli. There was nothing to place
Crewdson at the scene, but when Gallo returned he too identified Crewdson
as his main suspect, obliging Falcinelli with a detailed physical description
of the journalist (though the two had never met) and a street listing in
Bethesda that turned out to be a block away from the house where Crewdson
had moved with his family in July. He told Falcinelli that Crewdson had
been "following and harassing him for years" and that he believed
Crewdson was searching for "some kind of documents." Adding to
the impression that Crewdson was obsessive to the point of derangement,
one of the Gallos also said that the reporter had been a suspect in death
threats against Gallo. (Both Gallos deny making such a statement; says
Falcinelli, who recorded it in his report, "I'm not that creative.")
Mary Jane Gallo would later identify Flossie Wong-Staal to police as
another possible suspect, and Wong-Staal would be asked in for questioning
- a session that Gallo, as her alibi, attended. But the morning after the
break-in, Wong-Staal played a different role. Riding to a conference in
an NIH van, she told at least one other AIDS researcher that Gallo's house
had been broken into overnight and that Crewdson had been seen driving
in the vicinity.
Soon Gallo was volunteering a similar story to Newsday reporter
Laurie Garrett. He cold Garrett that his house had been broken into, that
vital documents concerning his vaccine work had apparently been gone through
and that he thought Crewdson was involved. Newsday decided not
to run a story, but Gallo persisted and finally got a similar piece
published in Science, although with no mention of Crewdson. Within
weeks the Bethesda police, convinced that Crewdson had nothing to do with
the break-in, let the investigation lapse.
Still, by that time the situation was clear: Gallo, at the peak of his
fame, and Crewdson, at the peak of his, had become antagonists in a public/private
endgame from which there was no turning back. They were at war. Given his
view of the havoc Crewdson had caused with his initial investigation, Gallo
could conceive of no other course.
The chemistry between them roiled from the start. Temperamentally, Gallo
and Crewdson could hardly be more different. Gallo, 55, is a second-generation
Italian-American who grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, a small, slowly
dying industrial city. The first professional in his family, he's razor-sharp
and acerbic and favors a slashing, back-of-the-envelope approach to science,
never speaking from notes and disdaining details in favor of grand intuitive
leaps. "This flamboyant Italian creature," one close friend of
twenty years calls him. No phone call from Gallo lasts less than twenty
minutes, and many go on for an hour or more, with Gallo doing almost all
the talking, fulminating in an oddly affected baritone.
By contrast, the 45-year-old Crewdson, who grew up in Berkeley, California,
is brooding, laconic, meticulous and measured. He exalts details, documents
everything slavishly and is painstakingly incremental in his research.
For his 50,000-word AIDS piece in the Tribune, he tape-recorded
scores of interviews, then dutifully transcribed them all to make sure
he understood them. "He's very difficult to communicate with verbally,"
says Kovach. "John gives almost nothing up in a conversation, even
a casual one."
Their physical disparity is equally striking. Gallo is small, kinetic
and wiry, with impatient eyes and an angular profile; with his longish
gray hair, he looks like a middle-aged bandleader. Crewdson is six feet
two, weighs as much as a nose tackle and has dark curly hair, a beetle-brow
and a beard. He shambles when he walks and squints ponderously when he's
thinking. Coworkers call him Bluto, after the hulking character in the
Popeye cartoons. A caricaturist would draw Gallo as a ferret, Crewdson
as a bear. Neither is to be trifled with.
What has made their interaction so sulfuric, however, is its timing.
Never had Gallo's career arc looked so commanding; never had the one honor
that has eluded him and which he covets above all else, the Nobel prize,
seemed so within reach as the moment when Crewdson, against his will, was
assigned by the Tribune to cover AIDS.
That was in early 1987. The venomous controversy with the French over
the discovery of the AIDS virus had, officially at least, finally been
resolved after three years of highly embarrassing and much-publicized rancor.
In March. with Jonas Salk standing by as enforcer in a Frankfurt hotel
room, Gallo and French virologist Luc Montagnier agreed to an official
chronology that accorded each side equal credit for the discovery and,
bizarrely, an equal number of lines. A week later, Ronald Reagan and French
Prime Minister Jacques Chirac announced the truce to the world in the East
Room of the White House. The French agreed co drop their various lawsuits
against the United States in return for a joint patent on the first AIDS
test - a patent that eventually would bring the U.S. government millions
of dollars and Gallo about $100,000 a year in royalties. Gallo's place
as one of the most celebrated scientists of all time seemed secure: Three
years of "extreme stress," as Gallo would later write, were finally
at a close.
Crewdson knew only vaguely who Gallo was and cared little. He was living
in Los Angeles with his pregnant wife, Prudence, and their son and had
just finished a series on Mexico that was longer than his major AIDS piece
would turn out to be. He was looking for his next big project. Very few
newspaper reporters, even at Crewdson's level, get to choose where they
live, what they cover, how they go about it and for how long, with a practically
unlimited travel budget and unlimited column space for their stories. But
all these had been virtual conditions of Crewdson's employment at the Tribune
since the paper snatched him away from The Times in 1982.
Crewdson chafed, understandably, at his new assignment. "I knew nothing
about science or medicine or AIDS and really didn't want to know anything,"
he says. "I wanted to go to Central America."
Crewdson spent the next three months immersing himself in the literature
of AIDS, characteristically seeking out everything that had been written
on the subject. He then started considering what aspect of the epidemic
to write about. Always suspicious of official numbers, he began questioning
the government's estimates of how many people would get the disease. He
flew to Atlanta, interviewed the government's chief statistician at the
Centers for Disease Control and found that the numbers were, in fact, "guesses."
No one knew how many people would get AIDS, but clearly the government's
calculations, repeated endlessly in the media, were too high - something
the CDC and the media now acknowledge, though they roundly attacked Crewdson
at the time of his initial story.
His next major piece was about the possibility of cofactors in the cause
of AIDS. It is now widely suspected that the human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV) is necessary but not sufficient to cause AIDS and that other agents
must be present. But at the time, Crewdson was contradicting the dogma
promoted by the federal government and especially by Gallo's lab. Again,
Crewdson was chastised.
Less controversial was Crewdson's next story, about the bizarre case
of Robert R., a 15-year-old black youth from St. Louis who had died of
AIDS in 1969 - more than a decade before anyone knew what AIDS was. Unlike
most medical stories - particularly in the area of AIDS and especially
in regard to Gallo - this one had not resulted from a researcher's seeking
publicity. Crewdson had initiated the story himself. Curious about the
two main diseases from which AIDS patients died - pneumocystis carini pneumonia
and Kaposi's sarcoma, a type of skin cancer that usually affects older
men - he went to the UCLA medical library and read everything he could
on both diseases, dating back to 1940. He discovered a 1974 letter in The
Journal of the American Medical Association about Robert R. and flew
to St. Louis. Asking whether anyone familiar with the boy's case had considered
that he might have had AIDS, now that the disease was known, he found a
pathologist who was willing to dig through laboratory freezers in search
of the youth's tissue samples. By using the test developed by Gallo and
the French, researchers were able to determine that the boy, incredibly,
had been infected with HIV. Plodding and sniffing, Crewdson had discovered
one of the most baffling curiosities of the epidemic - that AIDS existed
at least a decade before it was diagnosed.
All three stories were marked by an independence of mind that was then,
and to a striking degree still is, rare in the closed world of AIDS research,
and in science reporting in general. Science reporters typically feel themselves
unable to challenge the findings about which they write: a view that most
scientists, who feel that they should be judged only by their peers,
are only too happy to reinforce. There were other good reporters working
on AIDS, but by the summer of 1987, when Crewdson inevitably began to turn
his attention to the first American scientific superstar of the AIDS era
- Gallo - it was clear that the coziness between the research community
and the press was about to be upset by the presence of an enterprising
outsider who held himself equal to those he was writing about. Crewdson,
who dismissed most science writers as "stenographers," was determined
to make researchers account for their work.
Gallo, even in his euphoria, seemed especially to sense the risks connected
with Crewdson's arrival. For his fourth story, on how scientific infighting
might be hurting the search for a cure for AIDS, Crewdson called the NIH
media office for a copy of a recent talk by Gallo. Five minutes later.
Crewdson's phone rang. It was Gallo. "Mr. Crewdson." he introduced
himself, "this is our last conversation."
It was not their last conversation. Now that Crewdson had his teeth
in the AIDS story, he was intrigued. He wasn't about to back off - for
Gallo or anyone else. As a young reporter at The Times, Crewdson
had been assigned to investigate Watergate, and it has defined his assumptions
ever since. One of those was that when somebody slams down the phone on
you, it's worth trying to determine why.
During the Watergate scandal, Crewdson broke several stories that led
to some of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. He later
investigated improper practices within both the FBI and the CIA. Even before
winning the Pulitzer Prize, in 1981, for some forty articles tracing the
flow of illegal aliens from Mexico, Cuba and
Haiti and investigating corruption in the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, Crewdson had proved adept at confronting people far more skillful
than Gallo at stonewalling the media and still getting what he wanted.
In January of 1988, Crewdson attended a World Health Organization conference
on AIDS in London, then flew on to Paris. He still wasn't sure what had
so irked Gallo and decided he should see the researchers at the Pasteur
Institute with whom the Americans had quarreled. As it turned out, he was
as unwelcome at the Pasteur as he was at the NIH. Montagnier wouldn't see
him; he couldn't get past the press office.
"I did get a couple of the younger guys to meet me in cafes,"
he recalls, "but they were scared. They'd all signed this agreement,
which said that no one who signed it could say anything in contravention
of the official history. Now, of course, it's a joke, because a lot of
people have said a lot of things in contravention of the official history,
but at the time, they were afraid they'd lose their jobs. So I ended up
meeting people in cafes at midnight."
It was an element familiar to Crewdson: "You know, one person said,
'Why don't you call this person? Maybe he'll talk'... Well, that's what
I've done my whole career. That's my kind of reporting... get a little
piece at a time."
Crewdson stayed in Europe for a month, traveling to Germany, Sweden,
Finland, back to France, England; then back to France again, piecing together
bits of information. "By the time I came home, I thought, I don't
know what happened, but there's more to this. A lot of it I still didn't
understand. But I had talked to some people who had seemed quite earnest
who were telling me there was more to it, that the settlement had been
politically driven by the French government - the Pasteur hadn't wanted
to settle, really - and that Gallo didn't deserve half the credit for anything."
Suddenly, the discovery of the AIDS virus began taking on the hallmarks
of the kind of story that interested Crewdson most: an official cover story
that strained the truth, political intrigue, people afraid to talk about
what they knew, unanswered questions, abuse of power - in other words,
a mystery. Crewdson flew to New York City, where he spent a month in the
basement of the Chrysler Building, sifting through boxes of lab notes and
correspondence that the Pasteur's American lawyers had subpoenaed from
the NIH. He then went home to L.A. and spent another month sorting out
what he had found. He still understood little of it, especially the lab
notes, which to the untrained eye simply looked like columns of undifferentiated
numbers and letters. But he sensed that in these "hieroglyphics"
was the real story of the discovery of HIV.
"I still didn't know what had happened," he says, "but
I was curious to try to understand. So at that point I called Chicago.
I said, 'I don't know what I've or., maybe something, maybe nothing, but
I'm gonna look at this for a while and see if anything emerges.'"
To Gallo, Crewdson's extraordinary interest in the minutiae of subjects
he knew nothing about was the mark of some sort of idiot savant,
a fanatical creature who had intelligence but no judgment. ("Crewdson
is detailed to the nth degree," he now says. "He's the kind of
guy who would know how many molecules there are in a glass of water but
not know it's water.") But, slowly, Crewdson was understanding. He
consulted with scientists. He catalogued data on the hundreds of patient
samples that were coming into Gallo's lab at the time. He studied the material,
going over it again and again until it made sense. And what emerged, especially
on the key question of who had discovered the AIDS virus first, was a clear,
documented chronology that showed that Gallo not only had isolated his
virus almost a year after the French but had been beaten by San Francisco
AIDS researcher Jay Levy as well.
By now, Crewdson was asking the kinds of questions that no journalist
covering AIDS had asked before, and he was asking them directly of those
who had done the research and had written the subsequent lab notes. Unaccustomed
to such intimately detailed interrogation, many of them complained to Gallo,
who encouraged them not to talk with Crewdson and to write letters to the
Tribune documenting his "harassment." (These letters were
not always what they seemed. One from Dr. Bernard Kramarsky, an associate
of Gallo's, complained, for instance, of Crewdson's "abusive"
and "threatening" manner, but an internal memo written by
Kramarsky, obtained by Crewdson, mentions no such behavior. It says Crewdson
tried for twenty minutes to "cajole" him into an interview and
that another Gallo associate "made some suggestions" about how
to revise his letter to influence Crewdson's superiors at the newspaper.)
In September of 1988, Crewdson called Zaki Salahuddin, a top researcher
in Gallo's lab. The two men spoke for twenty minutes. Afterward, Gallo
called Crewdson at his hotel in Washington - he'd been listening in on
an extension - and he and Crewdson talked for four hours. As Gallo remembers
it, Crewdson's first words to him were. "Do [you] think [you're] going
to win a Nobel prize this year? Ha, ha. ha." But Crewdson's transcript
of a tape of that conversation shows that it was Gallo who brought up the
issue of prizes, much later on. He was referring to the conversation they'd
had during Crewdson's researching of his piece on scientific rivalry in
AIDS research.
"You said, quote, '[We made] a claim to have isolated the AIDS
virus,'" Gallo said during the conversation. "That's an innuendo
straightaway. It's not a claim. We have. Makes me a Nobel candidate. It's
not my claim to have isolated, we did isolate. And that's what makes me
a Nobel candidate."
Gallo has been party to so many scientific and legal furors throughout
his rise to fame that he is unique among scientists in his dependence on
lawyers and public-relations handlers. Now, with Crewdson asking for an
in-person interview, Gallo said he'd like to agree but that his advisers
wouldn't allow it. The result of their conversation was an attempt by former
Indiana Senator Birch Bayh, a longtime friend of Gallo's and now a Washington,
D.C., attorney, to work out a compromise. Bayh got Gallo to agree to an
inperson interview on the condition that Crewdson would submit all his
questions beforehand, in writing. Crewdson despised such conditions, but
he assented, delivering to Bayh's office a list of 187 detailed questions
a few days before his scheduled meeting with Gallo.
The lateness of Crewdson's letter, even more than its content, disturbed
Bayh. "It certainly caused real questions in my mind about Crewdson's
determination to be fair," he recalls. Bayh advised Gallo to cancel
the interview, but he still thought Gallo should answer Crewdson's questions
and Gallo agreed to try. The following week, Bayh, working pro bono, sat
through two all-day sessions in Gallo's lab while Gallo and his top associates
dissected the questions and prepared written answers. By that time, though,
another pro-bono "adviser," Frank Mankiewicz, had been called
in to represent other considerations.
Mankiewicz, a fixture in liberal circles in Washington, had become famous
as press secretary to Robert Kennedy, in 1968, and to George McGovern,
in 1972. He had been the head of National Public Radio and was now vice-chairman
of the U.S. division of Hill and Knowlton, the largest public-relations
firm in the world. Asked to review Crewdson's questions by another Hill
and Knowlton executive, Jim Jennings, Mankiewicz told Gallo to steer clear.
Recalls Gallo: "He told me, 'I don't know this man, but one thing
I know as sure as I've known anything in my life, this guy's not trying
to hurt you, Bob, he's not trying to harm you. He's trying to kill
you.... Till the day you die, if you ever see this guy, go to the other
side of the street.'"
Mankiewicz dismisses Gallo's dramatization as "Goodfellas
stuff," but he did find the number and the tone of Crewdson's questions
"prosecutorial."
"I said to Bob, 'This man does not mean well by you.' I advised
him not to answer," Mankiewicz says. Gallo took Mankiewicz's advice
and refused to speak with Crewdson again. The Tribune responded
by offering to send then executive editor Jack Fuller (now the paper's
top editor), a graduate of Yale Law School and a friend of Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia, in Crewdson's place. Gallo declined. "I
don't work for John Crewdson," he would say, "and I don't work
for the Chicago Tribune."
It took another ten months for Crewdson to write his story and for the
Tribune to get it into print. A 50,000-word science story
with a complex and wandering chronological narrative - a "smorgasbord,"
Crewdson calls it - is not the sort of thing newspapers generally nun,
and then-editor James Squires was concerned about how to make it accessible
to readers. Given the gravity of Crewdson's charges, Squires also wanted
to satisfy himself that the piece was correct - that it would stand up
to the inevitable scientific scrutiny and, quite possibly, the libel actions
that would follow. Squires hired as a consultant a high-level scientific
expert in Boston to review the piece line by line. He flew east with Crewdson's
initial draft while Crewdson resumed to L.A. to have his own expert review
it. Two weeks later they reconvened in Chicago.
"I said to Squires, 'Well, what did your guy say about the story?'"
Crewdson recalls. Squires paused. "'He said it was the best piece
of scientific journalism he'd ever seen - and he hoped we never printed
it... because he thinks it'll do great damage to science.' And I said,
'Well, we're just the messenger. If damage is done to science, it won't
be by us - it'll be by the scientists.'"
Somewhere around the time of the aborted interview with Crewdson, Gallo
and Montagnier met with editors and reporters from the Los Angeles Times
in an off-the-record session in L.A. Such joint appearances had become
a public relations necessity after their settlement, and Gallo and Montagnier,
understanding that the Nobel committee abhors controversy, barnstormed
together when they could. At one point in the conversation, Gallo began
attacking Crewdson. He implied that the journalist was psychologically
unbalanced and was out to "get" him. A reporter present remembers
Gallo calling Crewdson a "wacko."
Raising questions about Crewdson's sanity was not all that Gallo was
doing during this time. He also began telling others, including Crewdson's
journalistic competitors and his superiors at the Tribune, that
Crewdson and the Tribune had been paid by Gallo's scientific enemies
to destroy him. The names of the enemies changed - though the alleged payoff
Gallo cited was always about $100,000.
As with Gallo's later attempt to connect Crewdson with the break-in
al his home, none of these stories made it into print. But they left a
striking impression. Gallo got people, especially those in the media, wondering
whether Crewdson's efforts weren't out of all proportion to the story,
a story that, as Gallo skillfully pointed out, was already largely known
through the media's own efforts. Stung by Crewdson's "innuendos,"
Gallo had begun planting his own.
The problem in writing about Gallo, as Crewdson discovered, was that
the scientist did have an extraordinary array of enemies. Whether many
people in and out of the scientific community might want co destroy him
was questionable; that they loathed and distrusted him was not. "Bob
Gallo is a uniquely disliked person," says Barbara Culliton, deputy
editor of Nature - a British publication - who covered Gallo for
twenty years for Science and knows him better than does any other
journalist. "He's also uniquely creative and uniquely famous."
Heavily dependent on Gallo's competitors for information, Crewdson had
become, it seemed to Gallo, a proxy for them. Characteristically, Gallo
began attacking Crewdson as he did his enemies.
In a way, such hostile conduct - and not the chronology of who made
what discoveries - was the most damning part of Crewdson's findings. What
he had uncovered in nearly a year of research was a pattern of behavior
by Gallo that was alarming even to some of Gallo's friends. There were
the famous outbursts - at one scientific session organized by Gallo, when
Montagnier first challenged Gallo's connection between the putative cause
of AIDS and a class of leukemia-causing retroviruses that Gallo had discovered
and been promoting, Gallo attacked him so blisteringly that, another scientist
recalled, Montagnier looked "like he'd been beaten over the head with
a sledgehammer." (Gallo has since apologized for this.) There was
his credit mongering - his insistence that his name be placed on hundreds
of scientific papers, including many to which his only contribution was
that someone in his lab had produced the materials used in other researchers'
experiments - which has made him one of the mostly widely referenced researchers
in the world. All along, there was Gallo's self-serving interpretation
of events, such as his making much of being the first to grow HIV in a
continuous line of replicating T cells despite what Crewdson revealed,
by examining notes from both labs, as being a "dead heat" with
the French.
Yet ultimately what most undermined Gallo was something he didn't
do. When it became clear that the virus he had publicly identified in the
spring of 1984 as the cause of AIDS was practically indistinguishable from
a virus identified earlier by the French, Gallo did everything but attempt
to find out why. Viruses are compared by their genetic makeup's, and by
late 1984, it was clear that Gallo's and Montagnier's were almost carbon
copies. To most experts, it was unthinkable that the two isolates could
have been discovered independently, a year apart and an ocean away. Confronted
with this information, Gallo apparently never ordered the sort of laboratory
review that might have explained how this could be possible; he resisted
on every front.
This was the Gallo that emerged in Crewdson's reckoning: a man so obsessed
with his own priority that nothing else seemed to matter. Says another
researcher who has worked both with and against Gallo for more than a decade,
"Gallo is a brilliant scientist who simply cannot stand the possibility
of not discovering the next important thing in his field." In 1983
and 1984, that "next important thing" was the cause of AIDS,
and Crewdson was now about to reveal to the world the enormity and consequences
of Gallo's self-obsession at that time.
Crewdson's article "The Great AIDS Quest" was published on
Sunday, November 19, 1989, in a sixteen-page special section in the Tribune.
As an investigative tour de force, it was an immediate flop. Crewdson hadn't
produced - as has been repeated endlessly in the postmortems over why he
didn't win a rare second Pulitzer Prize - a "smoking gun." He
had found no singular proof that Gallo or one of his coworkers stole their
virus from the French or that Gallo's virus had been contaminated by the
French one. As measured by prizes and media attention, two areas in which
Gallo had always excelled, the story (to use Gallo's word) "bombed."
But such acclaim, Crewdson says, was never his intention. His purpose
was to explore a piece of history that had been officially suppressed,
and in that he had been at least as successful as Gallo in putting forward
his own version of events. On December 5, two weeks after the story appeared,
Representative John Dingell. Congress's leading critic of scientific misconduct,
wrote to Dr. William Raub, interim director of the NIH, asking whether
Raub intended to investigate the Tribune's charges. Raub wrote back
to Dingell that he "recognized the need for an inquiry" and had
already authorized one. Suddenly, Gallo was faced with an unprecedented
ethics investigation (Dingell would later launch his own probe), which,
unlike Crewdson's, would be difficult to explain away as the imaginings
of an obsessive reporter.
And this time, he would have to answer his accusers' questions.
After the publication of his article, Crewdson figured he was
through with Gallo. He had gone as far as he could with the story and was
disgusted by much of what he'd seen of big-time science. But he was not
easily let go. As often happens, publication had invited others co come
forward with more information. And there were the investigations to cover,
which no one else at the Tribune was likely to do as authoritatively.
In the past, Crewdson had twice written books after lengthy projects, but
he now planned to follow with a project looking at AIDS-vaccine research
- a field in which Gallo was involved, though not centrally.
Crewdson wrote a few more stories about AIDS in early 1990, but they
were not his main interest. After years of traveling extensively and spending
long periods away from his family, he wanted co be home. The Tribune,
meanwhile, wanted more big pieces from him, which by the calculus of the
news business meant being based on the East Coast. He and Prudence had
always preferred California, but they decided now to move to Washington.
They bought a roomy postwar house in a wooded section of Bethesda; they
chose the Washington suburb not, as the Gallos would later imagine, to
be near Gallo but for the schools.
For Gallo, the period was one of rare public silence and characteristic
private anger. He worked on a book - published in April 1991 under the
title Virus Hunting, AIDS, Cancer, and the Human
Retrovirus, which despite its seeming broadness is largely a point-by-point
rebuttal of Crewdson's allegations - and, on the insistence of his lawyer,
stopped granting interviews. He spent much of his time preparing his venous
defenses. Privately, Gallo complained that dealing with Crewdson and the
subsequent investigations had all but stopped him from working on AIDS
- a claim that seemed to be borne out by the almost total lack of new work
coming out of his lab. Typically, he expressed a lack of comprehension
about why such problems should be befalling him. "I've been honest
with everybody, yet look at the shit I've gone through since 1988,"
he would say. "I cannot have more pins put in me."
It was in July 1990 that this "cold war" phase erupted irrevocably
into open conflict. Based on information he'd obtained as part of his recent
research, Crewdson wrote to Raub about Gallo's vaccine work. Specifically,
he was interested in the relationship between Gallo and French immunologist
Daniel Zagury, who'd become famous briefly in 1987 for injecting himself
with an untested AIDS vaccine. According co Crewdson's information, Zagury
was also testing experimental vaccines on children in Zaire and was receiving
the viral materials for making them from Gallo, who, Crewdson said, had
circumvented NIH regulations designed to protect humans from being subjected
to dangerous experiments.
The new allegation, which Gallo considered preposterous, was more than
he could stand. The case that he had been building against Crewdson - that
he was obsessive, that he was doing the bidding of others - now exploded
into the bizarre interpretation that Gallo would soon provide to the police
and to Newsday reporter Laurie Garrett. As Gallo saw it, Crewdson
had been unable to give up his search for the "smoking gun" that
would ruin Gallo. So fierce was Crewdson's obsession, he believed, Crewdson
had uprooted his family and moved 3,000 miles to pursue it. He'd even taken
to crime, obtaining documents belonging to a collaborator of Gallo's, Takis
Papas - in whose lab the viral materials for Zagury had been produced -
which Papas insisted had been stolen. (The NIH is investigating, but the
papers were more likely leaked than stolen.) Crewdson, Gallo was now convinced,
would stop at nothing to destroy him.
Onek had kept Gallo muzzled for more than six months, not wanting to
inflame investigators, but now Gallo fought back against Crewdson in the
best way he knew how - through the media. Newspapers had obvious constraints
on libel, but Gallo could - and did - try publicly to turn the tables.
On August 17, 1990, six days after the reported break-in at Gallo's house,
The Washington Post ran a story by reporter Malcolm
Gladwell containing the first major counterattack against the NIH inquiry
into Gallo's lab. Gallo wasn't quoted, but the piece more than made his
case for The Post's readers, the country's most politically sensitive.
The investigations into Gallo's lab, Gladwell asserted, had diverted the
world's most brilliant AIDS researcher from helping to find a cure. And
the unmistakable cause was John Crewdson.
"'In an ideal world where a scientist is working on an epidemic
involving millions of people,'" Gladwell quoted Nobel laureate Howard
Temin as saying in a thinly veiled criticism of Crewdson, "'one might
consider that historical questions be left for a time until the epidemic
was over.'" (Gladwell failed to note that Temin, who teaches at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, has had close ties to the National Cancer
Institute, where Gallo works, and that he is on a committee that oversees
expenditures in Gallo's lab.)
Though Gladwell's main story was largely a point-by-point refutation
of Crewdson's work and of his reporting style, he saved his most strident
attacks - faithfully echoing Gallo's - for a sidebar about Crewdson's use
of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Here, finally, were all of Gallo's
most bitter complaints assembled into a single compelling brief - that
many scientists, who were unnamed, likened Crewdson's questioning to "intimidation
and harassment"; that Crewdson was "obsessed with minute details
of Gallo's life and work"; that Crewdson was fanatical and paranoid,
"apparently... convinced that he himself had become the target of
someone else's investigation"; and, finally and most damagingly,
that Crewdson wanted desperately to get at documents in Gallo's home. "In
October," Gladwell wrote, "Crewdson - evidently suspecting that
Gallo was trying to hide documents from him - asked the NIH FOIA office
to search Gallo's home and to photocopy anything at all 'marked or labeled
personal.'"
Here was Gallo's case writ large and with the moral authority of the
newspaper that had exposed Watergate. The story came as close to saying
that Crewdson had gone over the edge as it reasonably could, and Gallo,
whose stance the article reflected, had not had to say a word. He now appeared
to be the victim, and an altruistic one at that, of Crewdson's twisted
fantasy.
Crewdson had refused to be interviewed by Gladwell, preferring, he said,
to avoid debating Gallo publicly on any subject other than science. As
long as Gallo was denouncing him for his obsession and his "bias,"
Crewdson had decided to let it go. But Gladwell's sidebar forced him to
respond. By the time Laurie Garrett called him to ask about the break-in
at Gallo's house, Crewdson told her icily that the Tribune's lawyers
were ready to sue if Newsday in any way linked Crewdson to the incident.
Newsday backed away.
Now it was Crewdson who had to defend himself publicly, and, not surprisingly,
he was far more meticulous and persuasive than Gallo when taking up his
own case. His documentation was, as usual, impeccable. For instance, he
could prove, in response to Gladwell. that someone had in fact, been investigating
him. On November 23, 1988, Boston lawyer Janet Lundberg had written to
the NIH FOIA office for copies of all of Crewdson's requests for information
(Lundberg refuses to say whom she was representing or why she wanted the
documents). Likewise, Crewdson had recorded the phone conversation in which
Gallo had told him that he had taken home from the NIH dozens of letters
complaining about Crewdson so that Crewdson would be unable to obtain them.
Crewdson hadn't simply "suspected that Gallo was trying to hide documents
from him," as Gladwell had written; Gallo had told him that he had
done so.
Crewdson was not alone in his defense. On the day The Post story
appeared, Joanne Belk, acting NIH FOIA director, wrote an angry memo to
her boss complaining of distortions by Gladwell. That Crewdson had requested
that the office search Gallo's home" is simply not true," she
wrote. Crewdson had written to Belk's office urging that, as a matter of
principle, public employees should not be allowed to privatize public documents
by taking them home. But he had never asked for a search. Later, Belk also
punctured Gallo's oft-stated complaint that the necessity of satisfying
Crewdson's multitudinous FOIA requests had cut sharply into the vital work
of Gallo's lab. "We've gotten very, very little from [Crewdson],"
Belk says. "That's a fairy tale."
By now, though, Gallo had created an impression of Crewdson that was
nearly impossible to wash off. Crewdson had become linked in the public
mind with a grand scheme to keep the world's foremost AIDS researcher from
his work. The more he wrote, the more it seemed to confirm that he couldn't
let go. Crewdson knew more about who had discovered the AIDS virus than
probably anyone else in the world - more than the lawyers. more than the
NIH's own investigators, more even than the principals knew individually.
But that was history and obviously less important than who would discover
a cure. Crewdson may not have wanted, as he had said, to write about Gallo
anymore, but by now he had no choice. He had become a hostage of knowing
too much about a story that people had grown tired of, a story whose main
subject was desperate to have the world forget.
What the world didn't know, of course, is how much Gallo had done to
create the image of an obsessed Crewdson. Only Crewdson, who recorded the
defamation of his character with the same diligence and care that he recorded
everything else, knew. He knew it from having to answer when his
sons asked why the police were coming to the door at dinnertime. And he
knew it from the rumors he kept catalogued in a file at home. Only one
of those, he says, truly bothered him, because it reflected on his family.
It was that Crewdson had divorced his wife to join a gay commune in San
Francisco, and had then "set up housekeeping with his boyfriends"
in Bethesda. Though it was unclear if this tale, like the others, had originated
with Gallo, Gallo had often tried to label his critics in AIDS as being
gay; the story seemed to bear his stamp.
"I've caused problems for other people in my career," says
Crewdson, understating the damage he helped unleash upon the Nixon White
House, the FBI and the CIA, all of which were known to retaliate against
journalists for less. "But I don't ever remember a government official
engaging in a sustained personal attack on me or any other reporter."
That Gallo is a physician, sworn to compassion, seems to make the situation
all the more unusual.
Washington, March 6, 1991. Gallo must spend this day on Capitol Hill
being lectured by Representative Dingell - often described as the most
feared man in Congress. For the second time in a year, one of Gallo's chief
lieutenants has been accused of illegally accepting payments from drug
companies - a felony. Still, things for Gallo are not altogether bleak.
He and one of the original members of the Pasteur team have just had a
piece published in Nature, his first major paper in some time. Showing
that some of the earliest French virus samples sent to Gallo's lab appeared
to be genetically distinct from the U.S. virus and the later French strains,
the article gave, as The Wall Street Journal put it, "a
circumstantial boost to Dr. Gallo's oft-assailed credibility" by suggesting
that any mix-up of viral samples might actually have occurred at Pasteur
- a possibility for which Gallo, in his most recent defense, has studiously
been building a case. Meanwhile, his book is set for release. He's scheduled
to fly to New York to sign several hundred copies in a promotional kickoff.
Already, Newsweek has plugged it in a Gladwell-like piece lauding
Gallo and attacking the investigations as a "distraction."
A substantial part of Gallo's momentary good fortune is that Crewdson,
still happily ensconced in Bethesda, has recently been out of the country,
traveling to Amman during the early weeks of the Gulf war co research a
series on U.S. Mideast policy.
But there is no such thing as stasis in Bob Gallo's world. His travails
are so enormous now, so never-ending, so intertwined and thickly rooted,
that every day, even the good ones, seems to bring new setbacks. Within
days of the Dingell hearing, other leading researchers will challenge Gallo's
Nature paper, saying it was based on incorrect methods and exaggerated
conclusions, and force Gallo to back down. Even before that, a page-one
story by Crewdson in the Tribune will reveal that the NIH has shut
down Gallo's work with Zagury, "the government's longest-running AIDS
vaccine collaboration." Following up on Crewdson's inquires
from July 1990, the agency has discovered that Gallo "repeatedly ignored
federal regulations intended to protect subjects" from risk.
Perhaps inevitably, things will get worse for Gallo before they get
better. In a follow-up to the Zagury story, Crewdson will soon write that
Gallo and Zagury's vaccine trials actually killed three patients
and that Gallo, who knew about the deaths, never reported them. The story
will force the Office of Scientific Integrity to open yet another line
of inquiry... clouding the news, later in the month, that Montagnier now
concedes that his original virus too was contaminated and that his and
Gallo's viruses may well be the same after all.
"We are now back co where we were in 1984 or 1985," Gallo
will announce triumphantly to The New York Times, ignoring the fact
that Montagnier's discovery of cross-contamination in his own lab means
that Gallo's virus can only have come from the Pasteur. "This vindicates
us."
Gallo will soon be forced to address the obvious - that he has lost,
that it is the French who are vindicated, that his seven-year blood feud
with Montagnier is over and that Montagnier is clearly the sole discoverer
of HIV. That Gallo makes such a painful concession, in effect admitting
his failure and renouncing any future claim to a Nobel, seems co suggest
that there will be worse co come. Freed of the need to support Gallo, Montagnier
will state publicly that Gallo lied in 1984 and 1985, when he published
his initial data on HIV and filed for the U.S. patent. Gallo's publications
are a prime focus of the OSI investigation, and with the agency's report
imminent Gallo will face the possibility of being charged with scientific
fraud. A review of Gallo's patent claim might well lead to his and the
U.S. government's losing their share of the royalties and, quite possibly,
to criminal proceedings.
Crewdson, once again, would break the story. He refused to gloat. Yet
clearly Gallo was becoming isolated. Only the most loyal members of the
press - Newsweek, true to the end, characterized Gallo's concession
as "historic" and said that Montagnier "promptly swatted
the olive branch out of Gallo's hand"- remained with him.
But if some observers were still willing to listen to Gallo, others
were not. Two weeks prior co his appearance before the Dingell committee,
before all the news stories put him back in the public eye, the alarm system
Gallo bought after last summer's break-in went off in the night. He phoned
the Bethesda police, saying he thought Crewdson was again trying to break
into his house. The detective bureau concluded it was a false alarm. Despite
Gallo's insistence , the police disregarded the complaint. Whatever Gallo's
personal turmoil, whatever his issue with Crewdson, they decided, it was
of no concern to the people of Bethesda.
For four years Crewdson fought a natural inclination to psychoanalyze
Gallo. He tried, as with other people he'd written about, to address only
his subject's actions and leave the interpretation of them to others. But
after this latest incident, he found it impossible not to speculate publicly
about the man whose life he had so consumed.
"What Gallo can't see, in his own mind, is that everything that's
happening to him now is his own fault," Crewdson says. "So he
casts around for a villain. But he doesn't see that it's him. What's really
happening to him is because of Gallo. He's done all this to himself."
*