HIV Pioneer Gallo to Open New Institute : AIDS: The famed researcher is leaving the National Institutes of Health after 30 years. Center will be created at University of Maryland.
Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the peripatetic and controversial co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, announced Wednesday that he will leave his job at the National Institutes of Health to create a major human virology research institute at the University of Maryland.
Long regarded as a brilliant if flamboyant scientist who conducted pioneering research in the field of human viruses, Gallo has spent much of his time and energy in recent years fighting accusations of scientific misconduct related to the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus--charges that were dropped in 1993.
He also had been embroiled in a years-long feud with French researchers over who first discovered HIV, and who was entitled to royalties from the blood test developed as a result of the discovery.
A 1987 accord established that the United States and France would share the credit and split the money, but the French sought to renegotiate the agreement in the ensuing years and the controversy continues to simmer.
The departure of Gallo, 58, after 30 years at the federal institutes, had been rumored for months, and he had been wooed by several academic institutions and biotechnology companies.
“I loved NIH,” Gallo said in an interview. “I had 25 good years. I went through a period of hell, which made it easier to break the cord. But I would have broken the cord anyway. It’s time. If it’s not now, it’s never.”
Gallo, who ran the National Cancer Institute’s laboratory of tumor cell biology, is the latest in a series of defections from the NCI, the largest of the institutes that make up the NIH. Dr. Sam Broder, the former institute director who had conducted pivotal research into AZT, the first major AIDS drug to be approved, left to join a private drug company in Florida.
Gallo has received virtually every major scientific honor except the Nobel Prize. He will establish the institute at Maryland’s Baltimore campus with $12 million from the state and city, with other funds expected to come from the university and adjacent hospitals.
Gallo will be joined there by two other government AIDS researchers: Dr. William Blattner, an NCI epidemiologist, and Dr. Robert Redfield of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening described the trio Wednesday as the “dream team of AIDS research.”
Gallo said he was eager for the opportunity to interact with students, patients and the community, something he said had been difficult as a researcher at the NIH.
The institute will conduct basic research and population studies and run a patient treatment clinic, he said.
While the institute’s main focus will be AIDS, the work will incorporate research into cancer, neurological disease and other disorders, he said. “Our primary goal is to help develop better therapy for HIV-infected people,” Gallo said.
In 1980, Gallo was the first to identify a human retrovirus, a special class of viruses that includes HIV. Until the discovery of HTLV-1, the first known human leukemia virus, most scientists believed retroviruses occurred only in animals. In 1981, Gallo and his team discovered a second human retrovirus.
It was Gallo’s work on retroviruses that many believe speeded the way to identifying HIV.
