Volume 38, Number 14 · August 15, 1991
The Case of Dr. Gallo
By Michael Specter
Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and The Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery
by Robert Gallo
New Republic/Basic Books, 352 pp., $22.95
As the summer of 1988 began, many of the world's leading AIDS researchers were gathered in the long twilight of Stockholm for the Fourth International Conference on AIDS—the first in which the virus seemed fully understandable, and perhaps even amenable to treatment. Among the 10,000 scientists wandering about the huge convention center, few could boast of greater achievement than Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute's laboratory of tumor cell biology. Almost always described as the codiscoverer of the first known AIDS virus or the leading AIDS researcher in the US, Gallo had already received every major award in biomedicine (except the one he coveted most, a Nobel Prize). With his name appearing on more than nine hundred scientific papers, Gallo was one of the most prolifically published scientists alive. Recently he had won a second Lasker Award, the highest prize in American medicine, for his work in 'proving that [AIDS] is caused by a retrovirus.'
Review, 6197 words
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