Scrutiny of AIDS Research Widens : Health: Preliminary inquiry clears renowned expert of charges he misappropriated key virus. But new questions arise.

Although a preliminary inquiry appears to have cleared prominent AIDS researcher Dr. Robert C. Gallo of charges that he stole the first identified AIDS virus, the announcement of a new, expanded investigation has raised fresh concerns about Gallo and the future of federal research on the virus.

The conclusions of the initial inquiry, conducted by the National Institutes of Health and released last week, supported Gallo’s claim that he had obtained multiple samples of the AIDS virus from various sources during his research in the early 1980s.

As a result, he apparently did not misappropriate--either deliberately or accidentally--samples that he obtained from Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Paris-based Pasteur Institute, another AIDS researcher who was cooperating with Gallo at the time, the inquiry determined.

But National Institutes of Health officials said that the preliminary inquiry had raised new questions of possible scientific misconduct, prompting their decision to launch another, full-scale investigation.

The new investigation centers on discrepancies between a report published in the Journal Science in May, 1984, and records kept in Gallo’s laboratory. The paper, one of four published by the Gallo team in that edition pinpointing the virus as the cause of AIDS, was by Gallo and his laboratory colleague, Dr. Mikulas Popovic.

Also, the National Institutes of Health said that it intends to conduct a number of tests to determine the origins of HTLV-IIIB, the sample of the AIDS virus that Gallo and his colleagues used to develop the AIDS antibody test, now in widespread use.

At stake is the reputation and credibility of Gallo and the National Cancer Institute, the agency where he works, as well as the National Institutes of Health, its parent agency. Also at issue may be millions of dollars in royalties from the antibody blood test patented by the U.S. team in 1985.

Gallo heads the cancer institute’s laboratory of tumor cell biology.

“Is it serious? Yes, or we wouldn’t be doing an investigation,” said Dr. William F. Raub, acting director of the National Institutes of Health.

The original dispute between Gallo and his French rival over who was the first to discover the virus was settled in a 1987 agreement in which both agreed to share the credit. The feud was revived last year by a Chicago Tribune article that found no solid evidence of fraud but implied that Gallo had not found the virus independently in 1984, as he had claimed. The article raised the possibility that Gallo either intentionally stole the virus from a blood sample Montagnier sent him, or mistakenly identified it as his own.

“For those who have accused or implied that Dr. Gallo had nothing else in his laboratory and therefore must have misappropriated samples from Dr. Montagnier--this finding (from the inquiry) shows this to be unwarranted,” Raub said. “We found no evidence to believe that there was misappropriation.”

The new investigation, Raub said, will focus on the “significant differences between the work described in the paper and what seems to have been done in the laboratory” based on lab records and interviews.

Finally, Raub said, National Institutes of Health investigators will attempt “to shed some light on where HTLV-IIIB came from using (testing) methods not available in 1984.” This raises the possibility that the virus used to develop the blood test could have been “by misappropriation or contamination” the one from the Pasteur Institute, Raub said.

“It also could have been one of Gallo’s own samples,” Raub said.

The latest development in the ongoing scrutiny has left Gallo and his colleagues, as well as outside AIDS researchers, puzzled and worried about the possible impact on AIDS viral research.

Gallo said in an interview that he was pleased the investigators had proved “what we said all along--that we had many isolates (virus samples).”

He added: “I knew we’d really solved the problem of the cause of AIDS. No one can take that away from our group.”

Gallo acknowledged, however, that the investigatory process “has been a considerable detriment to our work in cancer and AIDS.”

Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, a former AIDS viral researcher at UCLA, said that the latest development “has to be a blow for Gallo, and this cannot be good for his research.”

Dr. Robert T. Schooley, an AIDS researcher who heads the infectious diseases division at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, agreed.

“The best case scenario for Gallo will be that he’ll waste 2 1/2 years of his life dealing with (the investigation) and be found not to have done anything wrong--and there will still be people who will believe he has not been exonerated,” he said. “It’s difficult to imagine how any of this can be good for him or for AIDS research.”

Raub agreed that the process is “hard on everybody who is involved.”