Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery.

• Author: Kolata, Gina

Virus Hunting: AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus: A Story of Scientific Discovery

Robert Gallo. Basic Books, $22.95. To the naive reader--if such a person exists--who has never heard of Dr. Gallo's troubles, the title of his book might indicate that it is going to be a swashbuckling story of discovery on the front lines of science. But to those who have followed Gallo's blighted career, it is clear what Virus Hunting is going to be. It is going to be an apologia.

AIDS research is a subject exploding with politics and passion. Nearly everyone who researches or even writes about AIDS has been attacked by one interest group or another. Dr. Jerome Groopman of New England Deaconess Hospital still cringes when he recalls AIDS activists who passed out Kool-Aid at one of his lectures several years ago, comparing his recommendation that people with AIDS take the drug AZT to Jim Jones's cyanide solution. I once got several hundred nasty Christmas cards from members of the activist group ACT-UP, with messages like "the blood of people with AIDS is on your hands." A well-regarded scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Ellen Cooper, asked to be reassigned this year so that she would no longer have to deal with AIDS drugs--she felt beaten down by the unrelenting pressure from activists, drug companies, and the government. But even in this company, Gallo has suffered more than his share. Perhaps that's why, reading Gallo's book, I kept thinking of Coleridge's lengthy "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which an old sailor collars a young man and forces him to sit still for his bitter, cautionary tale.

Gallo was attracted to medicine when he was a child, after his sister died of leukemia. But as an adult, he found himself uninterested in, and actually put off by, seeing and treating patients. Instead, he became enmeshed in molecular biology, a science that comes close in its standards and dispassion to physics or chemistry. He began to look for viruses that can cause cancer in humans, focusing on a particular class of viruses that insert copies of themselves among a cell's genes--just like the AIDS virus does.

Gallo's problems began in 1972, when he thought he had made a momentous discovery. He got up at a scientific conference to present his discovery of a virus that can cause human cancer. To his dismay, other scientists at the meeting gleefully informed him that rather than discovering a new human virus, Gallo had isolated animal viruses...