It has been accepted for years that the viruses the two men succeeded in growing-Gallo at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and Montagnier at Paris’s Pasteur Institute-were almost surely the same strain. Since Montagnier had sent lab samples to Gallo, the suspicion was that virus from Paris had contaminated Gallo’s work. Earlier this year, however, Gallo dug out remnants of Montagnier’s original samples from his freezer, analyzed them again and announced a surprise: the samples bore little resemblance either to his own virus, which he called HTLV-IIIb, or to Montagnier’s nearly identical LAV-BRU.
That sent Montagnier back to his test tubes, and he announced a discovery of his own last month: his BRU samples had been contaminated by a virus called LAI, from an early AIDS patient in Chicago. It was now clear that the virus grown in both labs was really LAI.
In a short letter last week to the British journal Nature, Gallo dropped the final shoe: one of the samples from Paris, he now said, had contained LAI, and “it also appears” that the LAI had contaminated samples in Gallo’s lab. The similarity of his and Montagnier’s viruses, he wrote, “now seems to be explained.” But he insisted that “none of this affects” the question of credit for the work, which the Pasteur Institute and the U.S. government had agreed to share equally. It was time, Gallo concluded, to end the quarrel and focus on fighting AIDS.
In Paris, however, Montagnier wasn’t pacified. Gallo’s letter brought him “a certain relief,” he said, but there had been “lying at some point.” Further, Montagnier suggested he might ask for a renegotiation of the 50-50 split on royalties from the AIDS test. “Horse manure,” Gallo retorted: Montagnier was “trying to rewrite history.'
But that left the two in an odd deadlock: while Gallo conceded that his work was based on a virus from Montagnier’s lab, Montagnier was staking his claim to fame on a scrap of virus he didn’t even know he had. And the last word is still to come. The NIH, which cleared Gallo last year of outright stealing the virus, is still probing the tangled case and has yet to issue a final report.
