U.S., France to End Legal Dispute, Share in Patent Rights for AIDS Test

President Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac announced Tuesday that the United States and France have agreed to share patent rights for tests to screen blood for the presence of AIDS antibodies, ending a longstanding legal dispute that has divided AIDS researchers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The settlement, reached out of court, provides for joint ownership of the patent by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department and the Pasteur Institute of France. It calls for the establishment of an international research and education foundation to fund worldwide AIDS programs.

The agreement, however, skirts the touchy issue of credit over who first discovered the AIDS virus, the kind of international recognition that often leads to such prestigious awards as the Nobel Prize. Instead, the agreement includes a document that acknowledges the contributions of both nations in a straightforward, non-interpretive chronology of who did what and when.

Reagan and Chirac announced the agreement at the end of an hourlong meeting in the Oval Office on a wide variety of subjects, including arms control, trade and agriculture. Reagan said that the settlement “will foster international cooperative efforts in research, education and the exchange of technology dedicated to the eradication of AIDS.”

The agreement will allow each party to keep 20% of its royalties; the foundation will be funded by the remaining 80%, estimated at about $4 million annually.

It also earmarks 25% of the foundation’s funds for AIDS education and public health programs in developing countries; the remaining money will be awarded to AIDS researchers around the world. The foundation also will solicit private funds.

For the President, the meeting in the Oval Office and the ceremony in the East Room at which the resolution of the conflict was announced marked the first time in more than a year that he had publicly mentioned the fatal acquired immune deficiency syndrome, although his remarks were limited to the dispute with France.

On Tuesday night, Reagan went further, giving his endorsement to AIDS education in schools. He also said children also should be taught that sexual abstinence is the best way to avoid the disease.

“We want an all-out campaign,” Reagan said, responding to reporters’ questions at a state dinner for Chirac.

Asked whether he thinks children should be taught about the dangers of the AIDS epidemic, Reagan said, “Yes, I think so--as long as they teach one of the answers to it is abstinence.”

The President said education that does not offer instruction about proper values is wrong.

Today, Reagan, who has been criticized for his long silence on AIDS, is expected to speak in greater detail on the subject at a forum sponsored by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

“This agreement opens a new era in Franco-American cooperation, allowing France and the United States to join their efforts to control this terrible disease in the hopes of speeding the development of an AIDS vaccine or cure,” Reagan said.

Both sides praised the settlement. “I think the agreement is fair, and I feel good about it,” said Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the National Cancer Institute researcher who is the American credited with discovering the virus, known as HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus.

“There is the recognition that there was extensive scientific cooperation from the beginning--and throughout,” Gallo said. “Now, instead of being distracted by all the legal business, I’ll be able to return full time to trying to do something about this disease.”

Ira Millstein, an attorney who represented the Pasteur Institute, agreed. “None of us feels anything but a high degree of enthusiasm for this agreement,” he said. “It represents the result of mutual respect these scientists have for one another--and they will be working collegially henceforward in this extraordinarily serious war against this disease.”

Dr. Jean Claude Chermann, an AIDS researcher in the Pasteur Institute, was quoted in a published report in Paris, however, as saying: “I cannot help thinking, deep inside me, that it was a surrender. With time, everyone would have seen that we were right. But, with that said, I am happy for the Institut Pasteur, which can thus continue to work effectively in the battle against AIDS.”

Dr. Luc Montagnier, the director of the Pasteur Institute virology lab who led the Pasteur team, could not be reached for comment.

The chronology states that in February, 1983, Gallo was the first to propose that the agent responsible for AIDS was a human retrovirus, a theory that sent scientists down the right path. Also, it says that in May, 1983, Montagnier and his colleagues were the first to publish a scientific paper that identified and described a case report of a virus that turned out to be the right one.

A year later, according to the chronology, Gallo and his team were the first to demonstrate that they could grow large amounts of the virus, a process considered critical for scientists to analyze the virus and understand its genetic makeup. Gallo has said privately that he had identified the virus as early as 1982 but wanted to be certain before publishing his findings.

Critics of the original Pasteur paper have acknowledged that while the French team identified the correct virus in May, 1983, it failed to prove that it was the cause of AIDS, while Gallo’s later work enabled researchers to pinpoint the virus as the agent responsible for the deadly disease.

Both sides acknowledged the major contribution of Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the first polio vaccine and no stranger to scientific rivalry himself, in settling the dispute. Salk, embroiled in a disagreement for nearly 30 years with Dr. Albert Sabin over whose vaccine is more effective, was a mediator during the last year and helped draw up the chronology.

The dispute began in April, 1984, after the U.S. government filed its patent application with the U.S. Patent Office, four months after the French filed. The application was granted to the United States several months later--and no action was taken on the French application. The French scientists argued their case with the U.S. government for months without success.

Finally, the French filed a suit in the U.S. Court of Claims in December, 1985, charging that viral samples Montagnier had sent to Gallo for cooperative research had been used by the American team to develop its blood test. In a separate action, the French asked the U.S. Patent Office to revoke the U.S. government’s patent and give it instead to the Pasteur Institute.