By AIDS Obsessed

By Barry Werth
GQ Aug. 1991

Dr. Robert Gallo is determined to receive the recognition he feels is owed him for discovering the AIDS virus. Pulitzer Prize-winner reporter John Crewdson is even more determined to prove that Gallo is a fraud.

For the first time in many months, Dr. Robert Gallo could look out over his immediate circumstances and feel some small comfort. It was August 11, 1990, the first night of his annual lab meeting, an event attended by many of the world's top virologists and AIDS researchers. They had come to the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, to see one another and - especially - Gallo, who despite his mounting professional problems still clung to his position as a central figure in their world. Gallo was hosting a banquet for more than one hundred of them that night at the Far East, a Chinese restaurant in neighboring Rockville. With him would be Dr. Flossie Wong-Staal, one of his chief scientific collaborators and the woman whom Spy magazine the month before had named, in the open season that now beset him, as his "former mistress." In Gallo's universe, a universe starkly polarized between friends and enemies, between manic highs and profound lows, the lab meeting was a rare chance to relax. Whatever else was going on in his world, the coming week of high-level science and scientific schmoozing was ineluctably Gallo's show.

He needed it. Nine months earlier, a book-length supplement in the Chicago Tribune about the discovery of the AIDS virus, the result of a twenty-month investigation by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Crewdson, had resurrected doubts about Gallo's role in that discovery. The article, by far the most exhaustive recounting to date, found "compelling" evidence that Gallo's lab had gotten its virus either as a result of accidental contamination or by the theft of a virus originally discovered by researchers in Paris. These were old charges, but the Tribune had produced enough new information and presented it so convincingly that it spawned at least two investigations - one by Congress, the other by the NIH's own Office of Scientific Integrity - that had haunted Gallo for the better part of a year. For months he had done almost nothing else but try furiously to defend himself and his crumbling reputation. As the investigations expanded, so had Gallo's sense that he was fighting an enemy that wouldn't be satisfied until it had destroyed him. Though the investigations were independent of the Tribune's, and though Crewdson, who'd recently moved to Bethesda, had largely gone on to other projects, Gallo had come to see Crewdson as a demon, the unique source of all his troubles.

Gallo was right about one thing: Crewdson was a formidable accuser, certainly the most accomplished reporter ever to cover AIDS. By the reckoning of some of the nation's best newspaper editors, those who knew him at the Tribune and at his previous paper, The New York Times, Crewdson was perhaps the best reporter in the country, period. "John's right up there at the top," says David Jones, assistant managing editor of The Times. "You could say to him, 'John, see that brick wall over there? I want you on the other side of that wall,' and he'd get there."

"You've heard the expression about a snapping turtle, 'They won't let go until it thunders'?" says Bill Kovach, curator of the Neiman Foundation at Harvard and a former Timesman. "That's John."

To Crewdson's admirers, this fabled determination becomes its most fearsome when Crewdson senses official abuse. He loves breaking big, complicated stories that no one else can get or, as with Watergate, that are being deliberately buried. To Gallo, however, what Crewdson seemed to want to get most was him. As probably the world's most famous scientist, a man whose name was synonymous with the discovery of the AIDS virus even though he no longer claimed co be the sole discoverer, Gallo knew he was journalistic big game. Indeed, he'd done extraordinary things to make himself so. Now Crewdson was beginning to question Gallo's vaccine research, arguably the one thing that could make people forget his role in the controversy over the virus, and Gallo too was heavily determined - as determined as Crewdson. In July 1990, Gallo's lawyer, Joseph Onek, had written the Tribune's publisher, threatening possible legal action if the paper printed allegations that Gallo had improperly provided viral materials for unapproved vaccine trials on humans, allegations that Crewdson had put in a letter to several officials, including the acting head of the NIH, Dr. William Raub. "We strongly advise that the Tribune's libel counsel contact us before the Tribune commits itself to publishing a defamatory and irresponsible article," Onek wrote.

Gallo left the restaurant that night in good spirits, arriving sometime after midnight at his home in the wooded sector. of Bethesda known as Bradley Park. His wife, Mary Jane, had returned earlier after a night out with friends, at about eleven, and, as she would later tell police, instinctively began checking the upstairs rooms after sensing that something was wrong. It appeared that someone had pried open a window in a downstairs playroom, entered and gone upstairs, leaving behind a scene of, if not exactly crime, malice. A diamond ring that the investigating officer would later refer to as "huge" and two other expensive pieces of jewelry were undisturbed on top of her dresser, but her underwear had been flung about the room; a purple bra hung comically from a window latch. Several desks were ransacked, though not the one in Gallo's study. On immediate inspection. nothing had been taken.

Mary Jane Gallo called the Bethesda police, who dispatched an officer to the house. With Crewdson much on her mind, she didn't hesitate to share her suspicions with policeman Dave Falcinelli. There was nothing to place Crewdson at the scene, but when Gallo returned he too identified Crewdson as his main suspect, obliging Falcinelli with a detailed physical description of the journalist (though the two had never met) and a street listing in Bethesda that turned out to be a block away from the house where Crewdson had moved with his family in July. He told Falcinelli that Crewdson had been "following and harassing him for years" and that he believed Crewdson was searching for "some kind of documents." Adding to the impression that Crewdson was obsessive to the point of derangement, one of the Gallos also said that the reporter had been a suspect in death threats against Gallo. (Both Gallos deny making such a statement; says Falcinelli, who recorded it in his report, "I'm not that creative.")

Mary Jane Gallo would later identify Flossie Wong-Staal to police as another possible suspect, and Wong-Staal would be asked in for questioning - a session that Gallo, as her alibi, attended. But the morning after the break-in, Wong-Staal played a different role. Riding to a conference in an NIH van, she told at least one other AIDS researcher that Gallo's house had been broken into overnight and that Crewdson had been seen driving in the vicinity.

Soon Gallo was volunteering a similar story to Newsday reporter Laurie Garrett. He cold Garrett that his house had been broken into, that vital documents concerning his vaccine work had apparently been gone through and that he thought Crewdson was involved. Newsday decided not to run a story, but Gallo persisted and finally got a similar piece published in Science, although with no mention of Crewdson. Within weeks the Bethesda police, convinced that Crewdson had nothing to do with the break-in, let the investigation lapse.

Still, by that time the situation was clear: Gallo, at the peak of his fame, and Crewdson, at the peak of his, had become antagonists in a public/private endgame from which there was no turning back. They were at war. Given his view of the havoc Crewdson had caused with his initial investigation, Gallo could conceive of no other course.

The chemistry between them roiled from the start. Temperamentally, Gallo and Crewdson could hardly be more different. Gallo, 55, is a second-generation Italian-American who grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut, a small, slowly dying industrial city. The first professional in his family, he's razor-sharp and acerbic and favors a slashing, back-of-the-envelope approach to science, never speaking from notes and disdaining details in favor of grand intuitive leaps. "This flamboyant Italian creature," one close friend of twenty years calls him. No phone call from Gallo lasts less than twenty minutes, and many go on for an hour or more, with Gallo doing almost all the talking, fulminating in an oddly affected baritone.

By contrast, the 45-year-old Crewdson, who grew up in Berkeley, California, is brooding, laconic, meticulous and measured. He exalts details, documents everything slavishly and is painstakingly incremental in his research. For his 50,000-word AIDS piece in the Tribune, he tape-recorded scores of interviews, then dutifully transcribed them all to make sure he understood them. "He's very difficult to communicate with verbally," says Kovach. "John gives almost nothing up in a conversation, even a casual one."

Their physical disparity is equally striking. Gallo is small, kinetic and wiry, with impatient eyes and an angular profile; with his longish gray hair, he looks like a middle-aged bandleader. Crewdson is six feet two, weighs as much as a nose tackle and has dark curly hair, a beetle-brow and a beard. He shambles when he walks and squints ponderously when he's thinking. Coworkers call him Bluto, after the hulking character in the Popeye cartoons. A caricaturist would draw Gallo as a ferret, Crewdson as a bear. Neither is to be trifled with.

What has made their interaction so sulfuric, however, is its timing. Never had Gallo's career arc looked so commanding; never had the one honor that has eluded him and which he covets above all else, the Nobel prize, seemed so within reach as the moment when Crewdson, against his will, was assigned by the Tribune to cover AIDS.

That was in early 1987. The venomous controversy with the French over the discovery of the AIDS virus had, officially at least, finally been resolved after three years of highly embarrassing and much-publicized rancor. In March. with Jonas Salk standing by as enforcer in a Frankfurt hotel room, Gallo and French virologist Luc Montagnier agreed to an official chronology that accorded each side equal credit for the discovery and, bizarrely, an equal number of lines. A week later, Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac announced the truce to the world in the East Room of the White House. The French agreed co drop their various lawsuits against the United States in return for a joint patent on the first AIDS test - a patent that eventually would bring the U.S. government millions of dollars and Gallo about $100,000 a year in royalties. Gallo's place as one of the most celebrated scientists of all time seemed secure: Three years of "extreme stress," as Gallo would later write, were finally at a close.

Crewdson knew only vaguely who Gallo was and cared little. He was living in Los Angeles with his pregnant wife, Prudence, and their son and had just finished a series on Mexico that was longer than his major AIDS piece would turn out to be. He was looking for his next big project. Very few newspaper reporters, even at Crewdson's level, get to choose where they live, what they cover, how they go about it and for how long, with a practically unlimited travel budget and unlimited column space for their stories. But all these had been virtual conditions of Crewdson's employment at the Tribune since the paper snatched him away from The Times in 1982. Crewdson chafed, understandably, at his new assignment. "I knew nothing about science or medicine or AIDS and really didn't want to know anything," he says. "I wanted to go to Central America."

Crewdson spent the next three months immersing himself in the literature of AIDS, characteristically seeking out everything that had been written on the subject. He then started considering what aspect of the epidemic to write about. Always suspicious of official numbers, he began questioning the government's estimates of how many people would get the disease. He flew to Atlanta, interviewed the government's chief statistician at the Centers for Disease Control and found that the numbers were, in fact, "guesses." No one knew how many people would get AIDS, but clearly the government's calculations, repeated endlessly in the media, were too high - something the CDC and the media now acknowledge, though they roundly attacked Crewdson at the time of his initial story.

His next major piece was about the possibility of cofactors in the cause of AIDS. It is now widely suspected that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is necessary but not sufficient to cause AIDS and that other agents must be present. But at the time, Crewdson was contradicting the dogma promoted by the federal government and especially by Gallo's lab. Again, Crewdson was chastised.

Less controversial was Crewdson's next story, about the bizarre case of Robert R., a 15-year-old black youth from St. Louis who had died of AIDS in 1969 - more than a decade before anyone knew what AIDS was. Unlike most medical stories - particularly in the area of AIDS and especially in regard to Gallo - this one had not resulted from a researcher's seeking publicity. Crewdson had initiated the story himself. Curious about the two main diseases from which AIDS patients died - pneumocystis carini pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma, a type of skin cancer that usually affects older men - he went to the UCLA medical library and read everything he could on both diseases, dating back to 1940. He discovered a 1974 letter in The Journal of the American Medical Association about Robert R. and flew to St. Louis. Asking whether anyone familiar with the boy's case had considered that he might have had AIDS, now that the disease was known, he found a pathologist who was willing to dig through laboratory freezers in search of the youth's tissue samples. By using the test developed by Gallo and the French, researchers were able to determine that the boy, incredibly, had been infected with HIV. Plodding and sniffing, Crewdson had discovered one of the most baffling curiosities of the epidemic - that AIDS existed at least a decade before it was diagnosed.

All three stories were marked by an independence of mind that was then, and to a striking degree still is, rare in the closed world of AIDS research, and in science reporting in general. Science reporters typically feel themselves unable to challenge the findings about which they write: a view that most scientists, who feel that they should be judged only by their peers, are only too happy to reinforce. There were other good reporters working on AIDS, but by the summer of 1987, when Crewdson inevitably began to turn his attention to the first American scientific superstar of the AIDS era - Gallo - it was clear that the coziness between the research community and the press was about to be upset by the presence of an enterprising outsider who held himself equal to those he was writing about. Crewdson, who dismissed most science writers as "stenographers," was determined to make researchers account for their work.

Gallo, even in his euphoria, seemed especially to sense the risks connected with Crewdson's arrival. For his fourth story, on how scientific infighting might be hurting the search for a cure for AIDS, Crewdson called the NIH media office for a copy of a recent talk by Gallo. Five minutes later. Crewdson's phone rang. It was Gallo. "Mr. Crewdson." he introduced himself, "this is our last conversation."

It was not their last conversation. Now that Crewdson had his teeth in the AIDS story, he was intrigued. He wasn't about to back off - for Gallo or anyone else. As a young reporter at The Times, Crewdson had been assigned to investigate Watergate, and it has defined his assumptions ever since. One of those was that when somebody slams down the phone on you, it's worth trying to determine why.

During the Watergate scandal, Crewdson broke several stories that led to some of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. He later investigated improper practices within both the FBI and the CIA. Even before winning the Pulitzer Prize, in 1981, for some forty articles tracing the flow of illegal aliens from Mexico, Cuba and

Haiti and investigating corruption in the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Crewdson had proved adept at confronting people far more skillful than Gallo at stonewalling the media and still getting what he wanted.

In January of 1988, Crewdson attended a World Health Organization conference on AIDS in London, then flew on to Paris. He still wasn't sure what had so irked Gallo and decided he should see the researchers at the Pasteur Institute with whom the Americans had quarreled. As it turned out, he was as unwelcome at the Pasteur as he was at the NIH. Montagnier wouldn't see him; he couldn't get past the press office.

"I did get a couple of the younger guys to meet me in cafes," he recalls, "but they were scared. They'd all signed this agreement, which said that no one who signed it could say anything in contravention of the official history. Now, of course, it's a joke, because a lot of people have said a lot of things in contravention of the official history, but at the time, they were afraid they'd lose their jobs. So I ended up meeting people in cafes at midnight."

It was an element familiar to Crewdson: "You know, one person said, 'Why don't you call this person? Maybe he'll talk'... Well, that's what I've done my whole career. That's my kind of reporting... get a little piece at a time."

Crewdson stayed in Europe for a month, traveling to Germany, Sweden, Finland, back to France, England; then back to France again, piecing together bits of information. "By the time I came home, I thought, I don't know what happened, but there's more to this. A lot of it I still didn't understand. But I had talked to some people who had seemed quite earnest who were telling me there was more to it, that the settlement had been politically driven by the French government - the Pasteur hadn't wanted to settle, really - and that Gallo didn't deserve half the credit for anything."

Suddenly, the discovery of the AIDS virus began taking on the hallmarks of the kind of story that interested Crewdson most: an official cover story that strained the truth, political intrigue, people afraid to talk about what they knew, unanswered questions, abuse of power - in other words, a mystery. Crewdson flew to New York City, where he spent a month in the basement of the Chrysler Building, sifting through boxes of lab notes and correspondence that the Pasteur's American lawyers had subpoenaed from the NIH. He then went home to L.A. and spent another month sorting out what he had found. He still understood little of it, especially the lab notes, which to the untrained eye simply looked like columns of undifferentiated numbers and letters. But he sensed that in these "hieroglyphics" was the real story of the discovery of HIV.

"I still didn't know what had happened," he says, "but I was curious to try to understand. So at that point I called Chicago. I said, 'I don't know what I've or., maybe something, maybe nothing, but I'm gonna look at this for a while and see if anything emerges.'"

To Gallo, Crewdson's extraordinary interest in the minutiae of subjects he knew nothing about was the mark of some sort of idiot savant, a fanatical creature who had intelligence but no judgment. ("Crewdson is detailed to the nth degree," he now says. "He's the kind of guy who would know how many molecules there are in a glass of water but not know it's water.") But, slowly, Crewdson was understanding. He consulted with scientists. He catalogued data on the hundreds of patient samples that were coming into Gallo's lab at the time. He studied the material, going over it again and again until it made sense. And what emerged, especially on the key question of who had discovered the AIDS virus first, was a clear, documented chronology that showed that Gallo not only had isolated his virus almost a year after the French but had been beaten by San Francisco AIDS researcher Jay Levy as well.

By now, Crewdson was asking the kinds of questions that no journalist covering AIDS had asked before, and he was asking them directly of those who had done the research and had written the subsequent lab notes. Unaccustomed to such intimately detailed interrogation, many of them complained to Gallo, who encouraged them not to talk with Crewdson and to write letters to the Tribune documenting his "harassment." (These letters were not always what they seemed. One from Dr. Bernard Kramarsky, an associate of Gallo's, complained, for instance, of Crewdson's "abusive" and "threatening" manner, but an internal memo written by Kramarsky, obtained by Crewdson, mentions no such behavior. It says Crewdson tried for twenty minutes to "cajole" him into an interview and that another Gallo associate "made some suggestions" about how to revise his letter to influence Crewdson's superiors at the newspaper.)

In September of 1988, Crewdson called Zaki Salahuddin, a top researcher in Gallo's lab. The two men spoke for twenty minutes. Afterward, Gallo called Crewdson at his hotel in Washington - he'd been listening in on an extension - and he and Crewdson talked for four hours. As Gallo remembers it, Crewdson's first words to him were. "Do [you] think [you're] going to win a Nobel prize this year? Ha, ha. ha." But Crewdson's transcript of a tape of that conversation shows that it was Gallo who brought up the issue of prizes, much later on. He was referring to the conversation they'd had during Crewdson's researching of his piece on scientific rivalry in AIDS research.

"You said, quote, '[We made] a claim to have isolated the AIDS virus,'" Gallo said during the conversation. "That's an innuendo straightaway. It's not a claim. We have. Makes me a Nobel candidate. It's not my claim to have isolated, we did isolate. And that's what makes me a Nobel candidate."

Gallo has been party to so many scientific and legal furors throughout his rise to fame that he is unique among scientists in his dependence on lawyers and public-relations handlers. Now, with Crewdson asking for an in-person interview, Gallo said he'd like to agree but that his advisers wouldn't allow it. The result of their conversation was an attempt by former Indiana Senator Birch Bayh, a longtime friend of Gallo's and now a Washington, D.C., attorney, to work out a compromise. Bayh got Gallo to agree to an inperson interview on the condition that Crewdson would submit all his questions beforehand, in writing. Crewdson despised such conditions, but he assented, delivering to Bayh's office a list of 187 detailed questions a few days before his scheduled meeting with Gallo.

The lateness of Crewdson's letter, even more than its content, disturbed Bayh. "It certainly caused real questions in my mind about Crewdson's determination to be fair," he recalls. Bayh advised Gallo to cancel the interview, but he still thought Gallo should answer Crewdson's questions and Gallo agreed to try. The following week, Bayh, working pro bono, sat through two all-day sessions in Gallo's lab while Gallo and his top associates dissected the questions and prepared written answers. By that time, though, another pro-bono "adviser," Frank Mankiewicz, had been called in to represent other considerations.

Mankiewicz, a fixture in liberal circles in Washington, had become famous as press secretary to Robert Kennedy, in 1968, and to George McGovern, in 1972. He had been the head of National Public Radio and was now vice-chairman of the U.S. division of Hill and Knowlton, the largest public-relations firm in the world. Asked to review Crewdson's questions by another Hill and Knowlton executive, Jim Jennings, Mankiewicz told Gallo to steer clear.

Recalls Gallo: "He told me, 'I don't know this man, but one thing I know as sure as I've known anything in my life, this guy's not trying to hurt you, Bob, he's not trying to harm you. He's trying to kill you.... Till the day you die, if you ever see this guy, go to the other side of the street.'"

Mankiewicz dismisses Gallo's dramatization as "Goodfellas stuff," but he did find the number and the tone of Crewdson's questions "prosecutorial."

"I said to Bob, 'This man does not mean well by you.' I advised him not to answer," Mankiewicz says. Gallo took Mankiewicz's advice and refused to speak with Crewdson again. The Tribune responded by offering to send then executive editor Jack Fuller (now the paper's top editor), a graduate of Yale Law School and a friend of Supreme Court

Justice Antonin Scalia, in Crewdson's place. Gallo declined. "I don't work for John Crewdson," he would say, "and I don't work for the Chicago Tribune."

It took another ten months for Crewdson to write his story and for the Tribune to get it into print. A 50,000-word science story with a complex and wandering chronological narrative - a "smorgasbord," Crewdson calls it - is not the sort of thing newspapers generally nun, and then-editor James Squires was concerned about how to make it accessible to readers. Given the gravity of Crewdson's charges, Squires also wanted to satisfy himself that the piece was correct - that it would stand up to the inevitable scientific scrutiny and, quite possibly, the libel actions that would follow. Squires hired as a consultant a high-level scientific expert in Boston to review the piece line by line. He flew east with Crewdson's initial draft while Crewdson resumed to L.A. to have his own expert review it. Two weeks later they reconvened in Chicago.

"I said to Squires, 'Well, what did your guy say about the story?'" Crewdson recalls. Squires paused. "'He said it was the best piece of scientific journalism he'd ever seen - and he hoped we never printed it... because he thinks it'll do great damage to science.' And I said, 'Well, we're just the messenger. If damage is done to science, it won't be by us - it'll be by the scientists.'"

Somewhere around the time of the aborted interview with Crewdson, Gallo and Montagnier met with editors and reporters from the Los Angeles Times in an off-the-record session in L.A. Such joint appearances had become a public relations necessity after their settlement, and Gallo and Montagnier, understanding that the Nobel committee abhors controversy, barnstormed together when they could. At one point in the conversation, Gallo began attacking Crewdson. He implied that the journalist was psychologically unbalanced and was out to "get" him. A reporter present remembers Gallo calling Crewdson a "wacko."

Raising questions about Crewdson's sanity was not all that Gallo was doing during this time. He also began telling others, including Crewdson's journalistic competitors and his superiors at the Tribune, that Crewdson and the Tribune had been paid by Gallo's scientific enemies to destroy him. The names of the enemies changed - though the alleged payoff Gallo cited was always about $100,000.

As with Gallo's later attempt to connect Crewdson with the break-in al his home, none of these stories made it into print. But they left a striking impression. Gallo got people, especially those in the media, wondering whether Crewdson's efforts weren't out of all proportion to the story, a story that, as Gallo skillfully pointed out, was already largely known through the media's own efforts. Stung by Crewdson's "innuendos," Gallo had begun planting his own.

The problem in writing about Gallo, as Crewdson discovered, was that the scientist did have an extraordinary array of enemies. Whether many people in and out of the scientific community might want co destroy him was questionable; that they loathed and distrusted him was not. "Bob Gallo is a uniquely disliked person," says Barbara Culliton, deputy editor of Nature - a British publication - who covered Gallo for twenty years for Science and knows him better than does any other journalist. "He's also uniquely creative and uniquely famous." Heavily dependent on Gallo's competitors for information, Crewdson had become, it seemed to Gallo, a proxy for them. Characteristically, Gallo began attacking Crewdson as he did his enemies.

In a way, such hostile conduct - and not the chronology of who made what discoveries - was the most damning part of Crewdson's findings. What he had uncovered in nearly a year of research was a pattern of behavior by Gallo that was alarming even to some of Gallo's friends. There were the famous outbursts - at one scientific session organized by Gallo, when Montagnier first challenged Gallo's connection between the putative cause of AIDS and a class of leukemia-causing retroviruses that Gallo had discovered and been promoting, Gallo attacked him so blisteringly that, another scientist recalled, Montagnier looked "like he'd been beaten over the head with a sledgehammer." (Gallo has since apologized for this.) There was his credit mongering - his insistence that his name be placed on hundreds of scientific papers, including many to which his only contribution was that someone in his lab had produced the materials used in other researchers' experiments - which has made him one of the mostly widely referenced researchers in the world. All along, there was Gallo's self-serving interpretation of events, such as his making much of being the first to grow HIV in a continuous line of replicating T cells despite what Crewdson revealed, by examining notes from both labs, as being a "dead heat" with the French.

Yet ultimately what most undermined Gallo was something he didn't do. When it became clear that the virus he had publicly identified in the spring of 1984 as the cause of AIDS was practically indistinguishable from a virus identified earlier by the French, Gallo did everything but attempt to find out why. Viruses are compared by their genetic makeup's, and by late 1984, it was clear that Gallo's and Montagnier's were almost carbon copies. To most experts, it was unthinkable that the two isolates could have been discovered independently, a year apart and an ocean away. Confronted with this information, Gallo apparently never ordered the sort of laboratory review that might have explained how this could be possible; he resisted on every front.

This was the Gallo that emerged in Crewdson's reckoning: a man so obsessed with his own priority that nothing else seemed to matter. Says another researcher who has worked both with and against Gallo for more than a decade, "Gallo is a brilliant scientist who simply cannot stand the possibility of not discovering the next important thing in his field." In 1983 and 1984, that "next important thing" was the cause of AIDS, and Crewdson was now about to reveal to the world the enormity and consequences of Gallo's self-obsession at that time.

Crewdson's article "The Great AIDS Quest" was published on Sunday, November 19, 1989, in a sixteen-page special section in the Tribune. As an investigative tour de force, it was an immediate flop. Crewdson hadn't produced - as has been repeated endlessly in the postmortems over why he didn't win a rare second Pulitzer Prize - a "smoking gun." He had found no singular proof that Gallo or one of his coworkers stole their virus from the French or that Gallo's virus had been contaminated by the French one. As measured by prizes and media attention, two areas in which Gallo had always excelled, the story (to use Gallo's word) "bombed."

But such acclaim, Crewdson says, was never his intention. His purpose was to explore a piece of history that had been officially suppressed, and in that he had been at least as successful as Gallo in putting forward his own version of events. On December 5, two weeks after the story appeared, Representative John Dingell. Congress's leading critic of scientific misconduct, wrote to Dr. William Raub, interim director of the NIH, asking whether Raub intended to investigate the Tribune's charges. Raub wrote back to Dingell that he "recognized the need for an inquiry" and had already authorized one. Suddenly, Gallo was faced with an unprecedented ethics investigation (Dingell would later launch his own probe), which, unlike Crewdson's, would be difficult to explain away as the imaginings of an obsessive reporter.

And this time, he would have to answer his accusers' questions.

After the publication of his article, Crewdson figured he was through with Gallo. He had gone as far as he could with the story and was disgusted by much of what he'd seen of big-time science. But he was not easily let go. As often happens, publication had invited others co come forward with more information. And there were the investigations to cover, which no one else at the Tribune was likely to do as authoritatively. In the past, Crewdson had twice written books after lengthy projects, but he now planned to follow with a project looking at AIDS-vaccine research - a field in which Gallo was involved, though not centrally.

Crewdson wrote a few more stories about AIDS in early 1990, but they were not his main interest. After years of traveling extensively and spending long periods away from his family, he wanted co be home. The Tribune, meanwhile, wanted more big pieces from him, which by the calculus of the news business meant being based on the East Coast. He and Prudence had always preferred California, but they decided now to move to Washington. They bought a roomy postwar house in a wooded section of Bethesda; they chose the Washington suburb not, as the Gallos would later imagine, to be near Gallo but for the schools.

For Gallo, the period was one of rare public silence and characteristic private anger. He worked on a book - published in April 1991 under the title Virus Hunting, AIDS, Cancer, and the Human Retrovirus, which despite its seeming broadness is largely a point-by-point rebuttal of Crewdson's allegations - and, on the insistence of his lawyer, stopped granting interviews. He spent much of his time preparing his venous defenses. Privately, Gallo complained that dealing with Crewdson and the subsequent investigations had all but stopped him from working on AIDS - a claim that seemed to be borne out by the almost total lack of new work coming out of his lab. Typically, he expressed a lack of comprehension about why such problems should be befalling him. "I've been honest with everybody, yet look at the shit I've gone through since 1988," he would say. "I cannot have more pins put in me."

It was in July 1990 that this "cold war" phase erupted irrevocably into open conflict. Based on information he'd obtained as part of his recent research, Crewdson wrote to Raub about Gallo's vaccine work. Specifically, he was interested in the relationship between Gallo and French immunologist Daniel Zagury, who'd become famous briefly in 1987 for injecting himself with an untested AIDS vaccine. According co Crewdson's information, Zagury was also testing experimental vaccines on children in Zaire and was receiving the viral materials for making them from Gallo, who, Crewdson said, had circumvented NIH regulations designed to protect humans from being subjected to dangerous experiments.

The new allegation, which Gallo considered preposterous, was more than he could stand. The case that he had been building against Crewdson - that he was obsessive, that he was doing the bidding of others - now exploded into the bizarre interpretation that Gallo would soon provide to the police and to Newsday reporter Laurie Garrett. As Gallo saw it, Crewdson had been unable to give up his search for the "smoking gun" that would ruin Gallo. So fierce was Crewdson's obsession, he believed, Crewdson had uprooted his family and moved 3,000 miles to pursue it. He'd even taken to crime, obtaining documents belonging to a collaborator of Gallo's, Takis Papas - in whose lab the viral materials for Zagury had been produced - which Papas insisted had been stolen. (The NIH is investigating, but the papers were more likely leaked than stolen.) Crewdson, Gallo was now convinced, would stop at nothing to destroy him.

Onek had kept Gallo muzzled for more than six months, not wanting to inflame investigators, but now Gallo fought back against Crewdson in the best way he knew how - through the media. Newspapers had obvious constraints on libel, but Gallo could - and did - try publicly to turn the tables. On August 17, 1990, six days after the reported break-in at Gallo's house, The Washington Post ran a story by reporter Malcolm Gladwell containing the first major counterattack against the NIH inquiry into Gallo's lab. Gallo wasn't quoted, but the piece more than made his case for The Post's readers, the country's most politically sensitive. The investigations into Gallo's lab, Gladwell asserted, had diverted the world's most brilliant AIDS researcher from helping to find a cure. And the unmistakable cause was John Crewdson.

"'In an ideal world where a scientist is working on an epidemic involving millions of people,'" Gladwell quoted Nobel laureate Howard Temin as saying in a thinly veiled criticism of Crewdson, "'one might consider that historical questions be left for a time until the epidemic was over.'" (Gladwell failed to note that Temin, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has had close ties to the National Cancer Institute, where Gallo works, and that he is on a committee that oversees expenditures in Gallo's lab.)

Though Gladwell's main story was largely a point-by-point refutation of Crewdson's work and of his reporting style, he saved his most strident attacks - faithfully echoing Gallo's - for a sidebar about Crewdson's use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Here, finally, were all of Gallo's most bitter complaints assembled into a single compelling brief - that many scientists, who were unnamed, likened Crewdson's questioning to "intimidation and harassment"; that Crewdson was "obsessed with minute details of Gallo's life and work"; that Crewdson was fanatical and paranoid, "apparently... convinced that he himself had become the target of someone else's investigation"; and, finally and most damagingly, that Crewdson wanted desperately to get at documents in Gallo's home. "In October," Gladwell wrote, "Crewdson - evidently suspecting that Gallo was trying to hide documents from him - asked the NIH FOIA office to search Gallo's home and to photocopy anything at all 'marked or labeled personal.'"

Here was Gallo's case writ large and with the moral authority of the newspaper that had exposed Watergate. The story came as close to saying that Crewdson had gone over the edge as it reasonably could, and Gallo, whose stance the article reflected, had not had to say a word. He now appeared to be the victim, and an altruistic one at that, of Crewdson's twisted fantasy.

Crewdson had refused to be interviewed by Gladwell, preferring, he said, to avoid debating Gallo publicly on any subject other than science. As long as Gallo was denouncing him for his obsession and his "bias," Crewdson had decided to let it go. But Gladwell's sidebar forced him to respond. By the time Laurie Garrett called him to ask about the break-in at Gallo's house, Crewdson told her icily that the Tribune's lawyers were ready to sue if Newsday in any way linked Crewdson to the incident. Newsday backed away.

Now it was Crewdson who had to defend himself publicly, and, not surprisingly, he was far more meticulous and persuasive than Gallo when taking up his own case. His documentation was, as usual, impeccable. For instance, he could prove, in response to Gladwell. that someone had in fact, been investigating him. On November 23, 1988, Boston lawyer Janet Lundberg had written to the NIH FOIA office for copies of all of Crewdson's requests for information (Lundberg refuses to say whom she was representing or why she wanted the documents). Likewise, Crewdson had recorded the phone conversation in which Gallo had told him that he had taken home from the NIH dozens of letters complaining about Crewdson so that Crewdson would be unable to obtain them. Crewdson hadn't simply "suspected that Gallo was trying to hide documents from him," as Gladwell had written; Gallo had told him that he had done so.

Crewdson was not alone in his defense. On the day The Post story appeared, Joanne Belk, acting NIH FOIA director, wrote an angry memo to her boss complaining of distortions by Gladwell. That Crewdson had requested that the office search Gallo's home" is simply not true," she wrote. Crewdson had written to Belk's office urging that, as a matter of principle, public employees should not be allowed to privatize public documents by taking them home. But he had never asked for a search. Later, Belk also punctured Gallo's oft-stated complaint that the necessity of satisfying Crewdson's multitudinous FOIA requests had cut sharply into the vital work of Gallo's lab. "We've gotten very, very little from [Crewdson]," Belk says. "That's a fairy tale."

By now, though, Gallo had created an impression of Crewdson that was nearly impossible to wash off. Crewdson had become linked in the public mind with a grand scheme to keep the world's foremost AIDS researcher from his work. The more he wrote, the more it seemed to confirm that he couldn't let go. Crewdson knew more about who had discovered the AIDS virus than probably anyone else in the world - more than the lawyers. more than the NIH's own investigators, more even than the principals knew individually. But that was history and obviously less important than who would discover a cure. Crewdson may not have wanted, as he had said, to write about Gallo anymore, but by now he had no choice. He had become a hostage of knowing too much about a story that people had grown tired of, a story whose main subject was desperate to have the world forget.

What the world didn't know, of course, is how much Gallo had done to create the image of an obsessed Crewdson. Only Crewdson, who recorded the defamation of his character with the same diligence and care that he recorded everything else, knew. He knew it from having to answer when his sons asked why the police were coming to the door at dinnertime. And he knew it from the rumors he kept catalogued in a file at home. Only one of those, he says, truly bothered him, because it reflected on his family. It was that Crewdson had divorced his wife to join a gay commune in San Francisco, and had then "set up housekeeping with his boyfriends" in Bethesda. Though it was unclear if this tale, like the others, had originated with Gallo, Gallo had often tried to label his critics in AIDS as being gay; the story seemed to bear his stamp.

"I've caused problems for other people in my career," says Crewdson, understating the damage he helped unleash upon the Nixon White House, the FBI and the CIA, all of which were known to retaliate against journalists for less. "But I don't ever remember a government official engaging in a sustained personal attack on me or any other reporter." That Gallo is a physician, sworn to compassion, seems to make the situation all the more unusual.

Washington, March 6, 1991. Gallo must spend this day on Capitol Hill being lectured by Representative Dingell - often described as the most feared man in Congress. For the second time in a year, one of Gallo's chief lieutenants has been accused of illegally accepting payments from drug companies - a felony. Still, things for Gallo are not altogether bleak. He and one of the original members of the Pasteur team have just had a piece published in Nature, his first major paper in some time. Showing that some of the earliest French virus samples sent to Gallo's lab appeared to be genetically distinct from the U.S. virus and the later French strains, the article gave, as The Wall Street Journal put it, "a circumstantial boost to Dr. Gallo's oft-assailed credibility" by suggesting that any mix-up of viral samples might actually have occurred at Pasteur - a possibility for which Gallo, in his most recent defense, has studiously been building a case. Meanwhile, his book is set for release. He's scheduled to fly to New York to sign several hundred copies in a promotional kickoff. Already, Newsweek has plugged it in a Gladwell-like piece lauding Gallo and attacking the investigations as a "distraction."

A substantial part of Gallo's momentary good fortune is that Crewdson, still happily ensconced in Bethesda, has recently been out of the country, traveling to Amman during the early weeks of the Gulf war co research a series on U.S. Mideast policy.

But there is no such thing as stasis in Bob Gallo's world. His travails are so enormous now, so never-ending, so intertwined and thickly rooted, that every day, even the good ones, seems to bring new setbacks. Within days of the Dingell hearing, other leading researchers will challenge Gallo's Nature paper, saying it was based on incorrect methods and exaggerated conclusions, and force Gallo to back down. Even before that, a page-one story by Crewdson in the Tribune will reveal that the NIH has shut down Gallo's work with Zagury, "the government's longest-running AIDS vaccine collaboration." Following up on Crewdson's inquires from July 1990, the agency has discovered that Gallo "repeatedly ignored federal regulations intended to protect subjects" from risk.

Perhaps inevitably, things will get worse for Gallo before they get better. In a follow-up to the Zagury story, Crewdson will soon write that Gallo and Zagury's vaccine trials actually killed three patients and that Gallo, who knew about the deaths, never reported them. The story will force the Office of Scientific Integrity to open yet another line of inquiry... clouding the news, later in the month, that Montagnier now concedes that his original virus too was contaminated and that his and Gallo's viruses may well be the same after all.

"We are now back co where we were in 1984 or 1985," Gallo will announce triumphantly to The New York Times, ignoring the fact that Montagnier's discovery of cross-contamination in his own lab means that Gallo's virus can only have come from the Pasteur. "This vindicates us."

Gallo will soon be forced to address the obvious - that he has lost, that it is the French who are vindicated, that his seven-year blood feud with Montagnier is over and that Montagnier is clearly the sole discoverer of HIV. That Gallo makes such a painful concession, in effect admitting his failure and renouncing any future claim to a Nobel, seems co suggest that there will be worse co come. Freed of the need to support Gallo, Montagnier will state publicly that Gallo lied in 1984 and 1985, when he published his initial data on HIV and filed for the U.S. patent. Gallo's publications are a prime focus of the OSI investigation, and with the agency's report imminent Gallo will face the possibility of being charged with scientific fraud. A review of Gallo's patent claim might well lead to his and the U.S. government's losing their share of the royalties and, quite possibly, to criminal proceedings.

Crewdson, once again, would break the story. He refused to gloat. Yet clearly Gallo was becoming isolated. Only the most loyal members of the press - Newsweek, true to the end, characterized Gallo's concession as "historic" and said that Montagnier "promptly swatted the olive branch out of Gallo's hand"- remained with him.

But if some observers were still willing to listen to Gallo, others were not. Two weeks prior co his appearance before the Dingell committee, before all the news stories put him back in the public eye, the alarm system Gallo bought after last summer's break-in went off in the night. He phoned the Bethesda police, saying he thought Crewdson was again trying to break into his house. The detective bureau concluded it was a false alarm. Despite Gallo's insistence , the police disregarded the complaint. Whatever Gallo's personal turmoil, whatever his issue with Crewdson, they decided, it was of no concern to the people of Bethesda.

For four years Crewdson fought a natural inclination to psychoanalyze Gallo. He tried, as with other people he'd written about, to address only his subject's actions and leave the interpretation of them to others. But after this latest incident, he found it impossible not to speculate publicly about the man whose life he had so consumed.

"What Gallo can't see, in his own mind, is that everything that's happening to him now is his own fault," Crewdson says. "So he casts around for a villain. But he doesn't see that it's him. What's really happening to him is because of Gallo. He's done all this to himself." *