Unfinished Blog-Post: "February 1983: Gallo proposes that AIDS is probably caused by a retrovirus, presumably a variant of HTLV-1 or II"

A long time ago I started some blog-posts, but never found the time nor energy to finish them. Now I have long lost interest in the matter and will publish them all "as is" – maybe someone will find these raw thoughts helpful.

Unfinished Blog-Post: To Pull A Gallo

A long time ago I started some blog-posts, but never found the time nor energy to finish them. Now I have long lost interest in the matter and will publish them all "as is" – maybe someone will find these raw thoughts helpful.

BTW: It is this post I most regred not finishing – it is mainly missing one table in the middle, listing some parallels between the story of "Fictional Gallo" and those who brought us the XMRV fraud. However the so inclined readers might be able to find parallels by themselves.

Unfinished Blog-Post: Team Gallo

A long time ago I started some blog-posts, but never found the time nor energy to finish them. Now I have long lost interest in the matter and will publish them all "as is" – maybe someone will find these raw thoughts helpful.

John Maddox and "Self-"Correcting Science

There is one nice angle about John Maddox and his "courage to stand up science": In the mid- to end-eighties he launched an "investigation" into the Gallo/Montagnier/HIV disaster. When Gallo told Maddox things that shed serious doubt on Gallo's version of events, Maddox choose not to publish his findings.

While John Maddox choose not to pursue any leads he had, Abraham Karpas continued to turn up unpleasant facts about Gallo's research. And he would write them to Nature (I guess to "correct science"), where Maddox resided. And what courage did Maddox have? Karpas described it as "writing for Nature's wastebasket".  His research into Gallo's research ended up being published in the New Scientist and Scientific American, but not in Nature.
(John Crewdson, "Science Fictions", page 340)

So much for Maddox's "courage to stand up for science".

And so much for science being "self-correcting". It seems to me that personal biases and the mechanisms of the academic institutions strongly obstruct any corrections.

This whole "self-correcting science" meme seems like something told to little children, so they stop asking annoying questions.

(In Crewdson's book at the beginning of chapter 17 there is a nice side story involving Margot O'Toole turning up troubling "inconstancies" in the work of David Baltimore, after being a postdoc on one of his studies. His answer? Not to worry, these problems don't matter and the scientific process was "self-correcting" anyway – so she should let the matter rest.)

Gallo a Quack?

Well, who knew that? It seems like Gallo was quite a quack. In 1990 he claimed to have a cure for Kaposi's Sarcoma, when all he had was some experiments with mice (Crewdson, page 354-355).

Any other scientist doing such a thing would qualify as quack, so should we make an excuse for him?

The dog ate my shipment of LAV

"We never got any LAV."

"Oh, on second thought, we had LAV, but we couldn't get it to grow."

"We had 48 isolates of HTLV-3B, long before we heard of LAV, or got any samples."

"And when we handled LAV, it was never in the same lab as our HTLV-3B."

"Oh, HTLV-3B might be similar to LAV, but that's because the patient was in France!"

"The contamination happened at Pasteur's lab, not ours! So Pasteur must have contaminated their LAV with the stuff we send them."

"What we send Pasteur, and when? I think it might have been that we send them our HTLV-3B long after we received LAV, actually."

"Our 48 isolates? That might have been 48 frozen blood samples, not isolates – isn't that the same?"

"Oh, come to think of it, LAV might have contaminated our HTLV-3B pool. But it doesn't make a difference, we discovered HTLV-3B first. And HTLV-3B is something different than LAV."

Any similarities to how Ruscetti/Mikovits played their XMRV saga ("The contamination happened at Silverman's lab, not ours!") are purely coincidental.

(By the way, this was my 500th published post…)

John Maddox and having the courage to stand up for science

More from John Crewdson's "Science Fictions" book, chapter 12:

John Maddox could have singlehandedly sunk most of Robert Gallo's claims regarding his work in 1982/1983, had Maddox published in Nature the interview he had with Gallo on September 19, 1986.

But John Maddox choose not to publish the interview, later stating that:

I think that it literally is impossible to tell who's right and who's wrong.

That is John Maddox, standing up for science.

And from the "can't make this shit up" department:

The tapes of the Maddox/Gallo interview, that were kindly provided to John Crewdson, contained "a gap of several minutes during which the conversation is obliterated by music".

o.O

The Augean Stables of NCI Frederick

In response to the latest John Maddox prize for scientific BS, I have picked up John Crewdson's book "Science Fictions" again, as John Maddox has some involvement of the lost years of HIV. And boy, I can't help to notice that NCI Frederick resembled – to my eyes – already back than in the Nineteen-Eighties an Augean Cesspool.

(Some of it is burried in the copious notes at the end of the book – which I have inexcusably ignored – e.g. page 579 about the sacking of George Todaro after he refused to "fall in line" with regards to the BS the HHS put up to defend Gallo against the legitimate claims by the Institute Pasteur.)

HIV and The American Isolate

Why does BRU remind my of VP62?

FIG. 1. Phylogenetic relationships among HIV isolates. Each isolate name is accompanied by the year of isolation (see table 1); e.g., BH8 is given as BH/83. Although BRU was taken from a French man, it is considered as an American isolate because the subject had probably become infected during his stay in the United States (Alizon et al. 1986). RF was isolated from a Haitian man in Philadelphia, and WMJ 1, WMJ2, and WMJ3 were isolated from a Haitian child in Miami. See text for the determination of the branching order. The branch lengths are determined by Li’s ( 1981) method. The number on each branch is the percent sequence divergence.

From:
Rates and Dates of Divergence between AIDS Virus Nucleotide Sequences
Wen-Hsiung Li, Masako Tanimura, and Paul M. Sharp
Center for Demographic and Population Genetics, University of Texas

Just like "VP62" from Lombardi et al. 2009, almost no difference:

Robert Gallo is an honest scientist

Robert Gallo was honest about HIV if and only if (iff) Luc Montagnier was not.

(Kudos to Maarten Maartens giving me the idea for the "if and only if (iff)" phrase)

The Lost Year with Robert Gallo

About the "Gallo machine", a letter from Abraham Karpas ScD, Assistant Director of Research, University of Cambridge, Department of Haematology:

Dear Dr Windom
…
In conclusion the AIDS virus could and should have been isolated in the USA for the following reasons:

1. It was in the US that AIDS was first recognized as a new disease of man in 1981 by Gottlieb and others
2. The US had the largest number of diagnosed AIDS patients
3. The US scientific and medical might, in particular having excellent retrovirologists in Tenim, Bishop, Baltimore etc.

The latter reason could have been sufficient for the US to be the first to isolate the causative virus. However, because of Dr Gallo, the French were first. Progress in AIDS research has been delayed by a full year while Drs Gallo and Essex published eight articles on HTLV, the rare human leukaemia virus, as the cause of AIDS. In the process they prevented directly and indirectly the publication of medical and scientific data that HTLV was not involved in AIDS and that another virus was the cause of this new disease. As a result many thousands of individuals became infected with contaminated blood and the virus kept spreading at an accelerated pace. Only after Dr Gallo received the AIDS virus from France and managed to grow it did he change its name from LAV to HTLV-III and claim himself as the discoverer. In order to justify calling it HTLV-III, Gallo with Wong-Staal presented scientific "data" on the similarity of the HTLV-I and HTLV-III which they published in Science and Nature, thereby causing further delay in AIDS research by sending newcomers to this field into blind alleys.

There is no question in my mind that Dr Gallo is responsible for the large number of infections especially through blood transfusions during the lost year. …

(PDF)

Gallo's 48 isolates spoke French with a single voice.

Gallo had his 48 samples, and the 48 samples all spoke BRU with a single voice. Mikovits has her "68" samples… and the 68 samples spoke VP62 with a single voice.