Board Clears AIDS Expert of Misconduct

Dr. Mikulas Popovic, co-author of a study that established the cause of AIDS and the focus of a widely publicized federal investigation, was declared not guilty of misconduct charges Thursday by an appeals board.

A review board of the Department of Health and Human Services reversed a ruling by the department’s Office of Research Integrity that had found Popovic guilty of “relatively minor” misconduct. The review board said the agency failed to prove its case.

Popovic was a senior scientist in the National Institutes of Health laboratory of Dr. Robert C. Gallo. In 1984, they were the first to identify a specific virus as the cause of AIDS. The virus was later named the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.

They came under investigation in 1990 after allegations that they falsified information in studies on the AIDS virus.

Popovic’s attorney, Barbara Mishkin, said the whole controversy has been “an Alice in Wonderland investigation” that the review board discredited.

A hearing before the review board on similar charges against Gallo is to start Monday.

Mishkin said the investigation of Popovic has been “devastating” to his career.

Popovic left the NIH after his pioneering work with AIDS and was looking for work at the time the investigation started. Mishkin said the Polish-born scientist has been, in effect, blackballed from the research community and has been able to find only a low-paying job in a Swedish laboratory.

“He wants most of all to come back to the United States and to work for the National Institutes of Health,” she said.

Gallo and Popovic came under investigation by the Office of Research Integrity after a newspaper report claimed that they had falsified information in studies on the AIDS virus. There were accusations that Gallo’s lab misappropriated a virus sample sent there by French scientists.