Word: gallos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gallo has long maintained that no matter who actually discovered the virus, his lab was first to grow large quantities of it; this tricky step, he insists, was crucial to developing a workable blood test. "We had the science first," says Acting Assistant Secretary of Health Donald Macdonald. "We feel strong in our position." But mass-producing the virus "doesn't matter," counters Lipsey. "What matters is who made the invention first...
Last week Gallo angrily accused the Montagnier team of greediness. "I don't get any money," he emphasized, pointing out that royalties on the test go to its manufacturers and the U.S. Treasury, not his personal bank account. "The fight is theirs--to get the money," he charged. "My name is used in vain." But Pasteur scientists would not reap personal profits either. The proceeds, explains Spokeswoman Caroline Chaine, would go to the institute, which "lives on the funds and the patents of its research." Says she: "We want our work to be recognized...
Money aside, no one doubts that Gallo is as eager as the French to get the glory for one of the more important discoveries in late-20th century medicine. "It's what we call the race for the Nobel Prize," says one cynical scientist. In their second action, the Pasteur researchers are attempting to prove that they were the first to identify the AIDS virus. They hope to show either that the Americans derived their virus from French samples--essentially appropriating the virus as their own--or that the American discovery depended on key information provided by the Pasteur samples...
Much of the case will rest on the significance of subtle differences between the French and American viruses. Gallo insists that his virus is too genetically distinct to have been derived from the French strain. But according to James Swire, an attorney for Pasteur, "there is a body of scientific opinion" that disagrees. Swire has been seeking lab notebooks and memos from the NIH, under the Freedom of Information Act. So far, he says, "we've found lots of things that strengthen our complaint and nothing that damages it." Among the findings: a photograph illustrating one of Gallo...
Meanwhile, a secondary battle over what to call the AIDS virus may have been resolved last week by the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses. The name of the virus had itself become a political football as the French insisted on LAV (lymphadenopathy-associated virus), while Gallo's group used HTLV-3 (human T-cell lymphotropic virus, type 3). In a statement published in the journals Nature and Science, a taxonomy group subcommittee proposed a third name, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and urged scientists to adopt it. Because of the pending legal actions, Gallo refused to endorse the change...