Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo [Hardcover]

John Crewdson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 31, 2002

Science Fictions is John Crewdsons exhaustive yet riveting narrative of how one of North Americas star bioscientists, Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute, falsely claimed to have been the first to isolate the AIDS virus, then garnered the resulting honours and riches at the expense of the true discoverers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Science Fictions recounts the most notorious biomedical scandal of our times: the Robert Gallo affair. It is not, author John Crewdson says, "about AIDS. Nor is it really about science." Indeed. It is a tale of behavior most base in circles most rarified.

In 1983 Gallo, of the National Cancer Institute, and a group of scientists at Paris's Pasteur Institute announced their isolating of separate AIDS viruses. The stakes--moneyed prizes and patents, not to mention cures--were stratospheric. By 1985, the Pasteur Institute filed suit claiming that Gallo--whose discovery was actually a dead end--had appropriated "their" virus as his own. In 1992, the National Academy of Sciences agreed, accusing Gallo of "intellectual recklessness" and "essentially immoral" behavior.

This definitive, chilling book is also, unfortunately, a daunting one. Its sheer size--notes, glossary, and list of characters alone occupy 100 pages--and scientific complexity will defeat all but the most determined and scientifically informed reader. --H. O'Billovitch

From Publishers Weekly

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Crewdson (The Tarnished Door) provides a comprehensive and compelling examination of the controversy surrounding the discovery of the AIDS virus. Although the basic facts of the story have been documented before, largely via Crewdson's reporting in the Chicago Tribune, the level of detail and drama here is unprecedented. By quoting extensively from interviews with many of the principals, from the public record and from documents obtained via the federal Freedom of Information Act, Crewdson is able to weave a story that is impossible to put down. Robert Gallo, the National Cancer Institute researcher originally credited with virtually every important AIDS-related discovery, is portrayed as a self-serving scientist willing to manipulate both the data and everyone he encounters in his quest for fame. Described as a "thug" by Harold Varmus, head of the National Institutes of Health, Gallo has won every major award short of the Nobel Prize. Yet, by this account, Gallo's actions have slowed the progress of AIDS research and to have kept the world's blood supply at risk for far longer than necessary. Crewdson also details the alleged complicity of the federal government, which defended Gallo's behavior and methods for years. The only flaw with Crewdson's meticulous reporting is his lack of direct contact with Gallo himself, and so the complexity of the man is not fully realized. Nonetheless, Crewdson's effort deserves high praise and a wide readership.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown; 1st edition (January 31, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316134767
• ISBN-13: 978-0316134767
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,695,541 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A political thriller in its own right, March 5, 2002

By 

"tji-boston" (Jamaica Plain, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (Hardcover)

I loved this book on two levels: sheer entertainment, and political history.

On the entertainment side, I somehow can't get enough of "abuse of power" stories and their wretched central characters. Crewdson is the first to unequivocally and clearly document the most egregrious example on record in our most hallowed halls, those of science. Watch (and wonder) as the supposedly magisterial and wise drop everything but the thinnest pretense of honorable, rational behavior in a lust for fame, status, and patent annuities. It is a great white collar crime story, aided and abetted by many of Gallo's government loyalists, all of whom share the blame.

On the political history side, Crewdson has exposed the modern myth of the infallible scientist, a kind of Macbeth of microbiology whose need for power threw his community into disarray. Although Crewdson doesn't say so, an interesting result may have been this: twenty years ago scientists were reported as baffled by AIDS, and today they are reported as still baffled (just scan over the "AIDS at 20" area of The New York Times Web site). Now take Crewdson's ghastly tale - never before fully told - and sandwich it in. You finish wondering if the entire course of AIDS research wasn't derailed from the beginning by Gallo's behavior and "gold rush" mentality.

The bonus for the reader is that buying this book is like voting for a free press. Crewdson is the rare journalist whose own sweat and sacrifice is evident on every page, and without whose kind we could hope for little truth where it matters most.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Robert Gallo and the U.S. government as tragic heroes, April 12, 2002

By 

Robin Wolfson "Reliza" (Cameron Park, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (Hardcover)

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain known as "A reader from Baltimore, MD." It's clearly Dr. Gallo himself. After reading more than six hundred pages of Gallo rants, you get to recognize the style pretty easily.

So, the question is, is Dr. Gallo a tragic hero or just a bullying fraud? In his "Poetics," Aristotle defines a tragic hero as someone as good or better than we, brought low by his own tragic flaw. Certainly Dr. Gallo has plenty of tragic flaws, of which hubris or "overweening pride" must be uppermost. Other flaws include greed, vaingloriousness, bullying, a nearly complete inability to admit being wrong, a callous disregard for the injury he does others, and, most certainly, vanity. But is he any worse than the rest of us, which would make him, in Aristotle's definition, a comic hero? Probably not by much. He appears to be a weak man thrust into a situation that brought out the worst in him: big science.

There's big money in big science -- big money, big egos, and big living. And, most of all, there's the Nobel Prize, which Gallo clearly covets desperately. And there's la vida, the lavish lifestyle of first-class tickets, fine hotels, jetsetting around the world, international prizes, a far cry from the everyday drudgery of the lab. So did Dr. Gallo give in to his lust for la vida and the Nobel Prize and commit scientific fraud? Almost certainly. But the more troubling aspect of Mr. Crewdson's book is the willing, nearly gleeful, complicity of the U. S. Government in perpetuating the fraud and intimidating any who would expose it.

That the government put people's lives at risk by insisting on using the Gallo-sponsored AIDS test with its alarmingly high rate of false positives and even more troubling rate of false negatives is bad enough. Were patients infected with AIDS as a result? Absolutely. Like Dr. Gallo, the government too was thrust into a situation guaranteed to exploit its greatest weaknesses. And in the Reagan administration Dr. Gallo found his perfect match: people who were equally prideful, vainglorious, and bullying.

In "Science Fictions," Mr. Crewdson protrays a government that has sold itself to the big American pharmaceutical companies. And for this portrayal alone the book is well worth its price. But what is even more fascinating is the sheer breadth of the research involved. Mr. Crewdson covers in depth not only the science but also the politics and legal wrangling involved in the US-French dispute of the discovery of the AIDS virus.

One ironic note: Nicholas Wade, one of the science reporters who had hailed Dr. Gallo as a true hero, was at the same time writing his own history of scientific fraud, "Betrayers of the Truth" (now lamentably out of print) which is a fitting companion to "Science Fictions."

It's too bad there aren't more stars. "Science Fictions" is an extraordinary work.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Explosive expert expose of HIV research, February 23, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (Hardcover)

Science Fictions is an important investigative work by a Pulitzer Prize author that should be on every congressman's reading list. John Crewdson writes with the pace of a Grisham or a Clancy and the precision of a safecracker. The book unlocks the doors of NIH and uncovers a rogue's gallery of confidence men with microscopes and burglar's wearing lab coats. Rather than Robert Gallo facing jail for his foul play, falsifications,and misrepresentations, Crewdson reminds the reader through his detailed reconstruction of events that Gallo has to endure a scientist's most painful sentence, a loss of credibility.