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AN 11-MONTH inquiry into the discovery of the AIDS virus has partly
cleared Robert Gallo of the US National Cancer Institute of the charge that
he stole the virus from French researchers. But Gallo still faces other
questions about the virus he used to lay claim to the discovery in 1984.

The National Institutes of Health last week announced that its preliminary
inquiry cleared Gallo of using a sample borrowed from Luc Montagnier at
the Pasteur Institute in Paris to characterise the cause of AIDS and to
invent a blood test for it. Investigators at NIH’s Office of Scientific
Integrity, after examining Gallo’s laboratory notebooks and interviewing
his colleagues, said that Gallo’s laboratory had already derived several
viral isolates when it worked with Pasteur’s. Thus, he had no motive for
stealing the French isolate.

NIH will institute a formal investigation, however, to examine biological
samples generated in the hunt for the cause of AIDS. These may explain ‘the
origins of HTLV-IIIB, the virus that Dr Gallo and his colleagues used to
develop the blood test for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)’.

Studies of the DNA of various viral isolates by Gerald Meyers of Los
Alamos National Laboratory and others have shown the Gallo and French isolates
to be remarkably alike. But Gallo’s defenders argue that the source is irrelevant
given that Gallo first developed a way to grow enough virus to make a blood
test.