The French Connection : AIDS-test royalty flap is over; now on to the real challenge

Officials of the National Institutes of Health have brought a merciful end to a rancorous decade-old dispute with the Pasteur Institute in Paris over how much each agency deserves in royalties from sales of the blood test for the AIDS virus. They agreed last Monday to increase the amounts to be paid to the French over the next eight years before the patent runs out.

While the NIH’s statement was couched in legalese meant to blur the obvious, the inescapable conclusion was that the U.S. government now admits that its scientists used the French-discovered virus without proper credit.

The French said the Pasteur Institute sent samples of the AIDS virus it had isolated to Drs. Robert C. Gallo and Mikulas Popovic of the National Cancer Institute and that they had improperly patented the blood test with it. Gallo contended that his cultures were inadvertently contaminated with the French virus. The NIH’s Office of Research Integrity at first charged the men with misconduct but dropped the charges on appeal.

The inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services had been looking into whether the two scientists had committed perjury, mail fraud and other criminal acts. He turned the findings over to the U.S. attorney in Maryland, where the NIH is located. The U.S. attorney declined to prosecute on the grounds that it would be difficult to prove Gallo acted with criminal intent and that the statute of limitations had expired. Gallo, who has received more than $688,000 in royalties, stoutly denies wrongdoing.

Not just scientific egos but millions of dollars of potential royalties until the year 2002 are involved. Last Monday, Dr. Harold Varmus, director of the NIH, and Dr. Maxime Schwartz, director of the Pasteur Institute, finally worked out an agreement that alters the formula for royalties. We hope that ends this unseemly dispute and lets researchers and clinicians get on with the real task of finding a cure and vaccine for this deadly disease whose reckless path respects neither privilege, status or money.