Customer Reviews

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

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book is at once a richly told thriller and a prosecutor's brief. With rich, almost unassailable detail, Crewdson writes a compelling narrative about one of the most important scientific quests of our time, the hunt to isolate the AIDS virus and to come up with a cure. It is a tale complete with villains and heroes, with many of the former trying to block Crewdson's investigative efforts at every turn. The book's genius is being both accessible to the average reader and not offensive to the scientific community. And to bolster his arguments, Crewdson offers exhaustive documentation for the curious at a website, sciencefictions.net, in what may be a first in publishing.

This book is a stunning achievement that should win many awards. It brilliantly captures the shocking dishonesty of our top AIDS researchers and government officials. It should make most readers question much of what we have been told by the AIDS establishment about AIDS and HIV. Crewdson portrays Robert Gallo so deftly and dramatically (often with Gallo's own words) that it is hard to believe that Oliver Stone won't make this into a movie. Gallo comes off as the Nixon of AIDS.
Crewdson is a very skilled researcher and writer who knows how to turn complex science into graceful, lucid prose. While this is a deadly serious book, I couldn't put it down and at times I found passages about Gallo and his AIDS cronies absolutely hilarious. But after one stops laughing comes the chilling thought that many of these dangerous clowns are still in control of AIDS research. Anyone who cares about the history of AIDS and the future of the epidemic must read this book. It is the most important contribution to our understanding of the real story of AIDS since Randy Shilts' "And the Band Played On." It certainly deserves the same amount of attention and success.

The trouble with histories of science is that they are almost never contemporary and that historians of science know little of either. This is an enduring history of scientific events, a detailed tragedy of behavior, and a chronicle of John Crewdson's tenacity in learning the subtlities of molecular virology, the NIH bureaucracy, and the complexities of a person he had barely talked to. To those of us who were there as the events played out there are lessons about science, why we do it, and what it's really worth. But understand, I like and admire Bob Gallo. Now I feel I know him better.

Finally a book that puts all the pieces together. Having performed the initial flawed AIDS tests, I have always wondered at the political ramifications. And having worked as a Blood Banker for many years, I can only feel sadness knowing how the nation's blood supply was affected by the greed of one man. This book really needs to be made into a movie so that the public and politicians alike can understand how egos and politics can cause so much damage. I particularly like how the author intersperses true incidents where innocent victims contracted HIV because of the flawed Gallo AIDS test we were forced to use. This really drives Crewdson's point home. A job well done.

What I found most interesting about the book is the description of the appalling research culture at the NIH. This is after all the world's best funded and perhaps the world's leading biomedical research institution at least in quantity of output if not in quality. The book makes it more than clear that the institution was aware, tolerated, and at times rewarded research ethics that stink to high heavens. The possibility that the likes of Gallo and his supervisors may have influenced a generation of scientists is truly appalling. Never having worked at the NIH itself I find it now much easier to comprehend the behavior and the social norms of my NIH trained colleagues. I therefore highly recommend to anybody planning to work at NIH or having to work with alumni of this institution.

This book is still a classic in science history. Crewdson's work began as a series of newspaper articles in the Chicago Tribune. The other great book, although that author's premise is wrong, is "The River." These two books tell the scientific history of the AIDS epidemic in its early years. Along with "And the Band Played On" they are required reading to understand what happened. I relied on these books to write the chapter in my own history of medicine. "Science Fictions" is not only informative but it reads like a detective story.

John Crewdson's extraordinary investigation, unrivalled since Watergate, reveals the awful truth of the misappropriation of the French isolate of HIV by Dr Robert Gallo at his laboratory at the US National Institutes of Health, and exposes the cover-ups of this by the US Health Secretary and the directors of the US Department of Health and Human Services. Multi-millions of dollars were at stake, careers hung in the balance, and the political reverberations over ten years enmeshed Presidents Reagan and Clinton along with French PM Jacques Chirac. The greatest tragedy Crewdson reveals is that AIDS research was entirely derailed by these dark scientific acts and the political infighting caused HIV-infected blood to flood US's blood-banks because the US government refused to use the French HIV test, with the US test known to be fatally flawed, as Crewdson reveals. Crewdson deserves not only the Pulitzer but the Nobel for this painstakingly thorough masterpiece of investigative journalism. It also reveals the startling fact that publication in a scientific journal, which confers cachet to the researchers, involves personal prejudice, scientific wheeling-dealing and is a back-scratching nightmare designed to promote vested interests. As CEO of Positively Healthy, the world's longest-established gay men's holistic AIDS charity, I can not recommend this book highly enough. It is essential reading, not just for those who are HIV-positive or work in the industry, but for all those who enjoy a masterly detective story.