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AIDS researcher Mikulas Popovic is not guilty of scientific misconduct,
according to an appeals panel at the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The government’s Office of Research Integrity had earlier found Popovic
guilty of ‘relatively minor’ misconduct based on what the appeals board
called a ‘handful of words and notations . . . in one heavily edited paper
written by a scientist with limited English skills during a volatile period
of scientific discovery a decade ago’.

Popovic was the lead author on the paper, published with Robert Gallo
in 1984. It described the growth in cell cultures of the virus that causes
AIDS, a breakthrough which led eventually to a blood test for HIV infection.

The appeals panel called the paper ‘possibly the most important paper
in virology in the 20th century’. It concluded that the ORI failed to prove
that Popovic had intentionally falsified any part of it, and speculated
that the attention of the ORI may have been ‘diverted’ by the allegations
of theft of HIV from a French laboratory and the subsequent dispute over
patent rights.