Science Fictions: a Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo.

• Author: Longman, Phillip J.
• Position: Political booknotes: lab rat

SCIENCE FICTIONS: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo by John Crewdson Little, Brown & Co., $27.95

THE INTERNATIONAL CONtretemps over who really discovered the AIDS virus--Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md. or Luc Montaignier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris--made headlines around the world for 10 years, starting in the mid 1980s. The story as it unfolded made for great reading, involving accusations of fraud in the highest citadels of scientific establishment, and a vicious cover-up reaching far up into the U.S. government. Gallo's eventual admission that the virus he claimed to have discovered had actually been supplied to him by Montaignier was widely savored as the downfall of an arrogant, abusive, globe-trotting self-promoter who was ultimately undone by his overweening ambition to secure a Nobel Prize. The story was so compelling that Hollywood even made a movie about it, with a sinister Alan Alda playing Gallo.

But that was a long time ago and, for that reason, the prospect of reviewing John Crewdson's densely footnoted, highly technical, 657-page account of this long-settled and complex scientific controversy aroused only self-pity. The lessons to be learned from the affair had surely long since been established in no small measure by Crewdson himself, who in 1989 published a 50,000-word expose in the Chicago Tribune that blew the lid off the story and set in motion Gallo's downfall.

The first 100 pages of Science Fictions only deepened my sense of burden. Crewdson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, is a "just the facts, ma'am" type of writer. He affords himself no speculation on the psychological factors that may have driven Gallo to sacrifice truth to ambition, and offers the reader few if any reasons up front for revisiting the scandal. Moreover, the nature of Crewdson's subject matter necessarily forces him into difficult explications of virology, and involves a cast of hundreds of scientists, bureaucrats, lawyers, and politicians around the globe. (To keep track of them all, Crewdson offers an all too necessary list of dramatis personae at the end of the book.)

Yet about one-third of the way through my forced march across these pages, I started to become captivated. By the end, I could hardly put the book down out of a mounting realization that this was more than a story about human vanity and political corruption. It was a compelling account...