Robert Gallo Testifies for the Prosecution

Picture of Robert Gallo from the Houston Voice:

The testimony of Robert Gallo is available in a 312 KB PDF file, created by OCR from the paper transcript. If you detect any errors please let us know.

This is a disease that science is keeping up with [no vaccine, no cure, no non-toxic drugs] but you have to keep fighting to keep up with it because treatment is life-long and in combination. Life-long treatment is…almost invariably associated with problems of side effects or problems with drug resistance

a lot of material is out of context or material that is stopped in time. A good example is Padian, a woman who has done epidemiology who is quoted as refuting heterosexual transmission because she found heterosexuals not with AIDS and heterosexuals who have got AIDS. What is not said is she never looked for HIV.

Gallo is presumably referring to:

Padian NS et al. Heterosexual Transmission of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Northern California: Results from a Ten-Year Study. Am J Epidemiol. 1997 Aug; 146(4): 350-7.

In this study Padian looked for HIV not AIDS. Quoting directly from the study “We observed no seroconversions after entry into the study...No transmission occurred among the 25% of couples who did not use their condoms consistently, nor among the 47 couples who intermittently practiced unsafe sex during the entire duration of follow-up.” In other words, Padian, over a period of 10 years, looked at couples who were serodiscordant (one HIV+ and one negative) and, despite many practicing ‘unsafe’ sex, not a single one of the negative partners became infected.

We agree with the Gallo that the study was of heterosexuals. There was no information on diagnoses of AIDS. There was, in fact, little information on the health of these people, but the authors did comment that “the prevalence of STDs [sexually transmitted diseases] was so low…[that] we could not include this variable in statistical analysis”.

I was called from Europe to come back to the press conference [at which it was announced that Gallo had discovered the probable cause of AIDS] that I didn’t know was going to be called because the Secretary of Health [Margaret Heckler] got hold of our papers that were [in press] in Science and in Lancet…when she got wind of those papers in the press, she felt compelled to release it.

The court should know that a retrovirus comes out of chromosome membrane. [huh? Chromosome membrane?]

a sucrose gradient barely purifies…when we succeeded in mass producing the virus in a continuous culture, you have got an enormous purification far beyond the sucrose gradient alone because you are now producing loads of virus with little amounts of cell

He keeps stressing that mass production of HIV makes purification unnecessary. Very strange! They probably had developed, in Gallo’s lab, very large size cell culture systems, giving them large samples of cell culture supernatant. But even if they had gallons of supernatant, this still had to go through sucrose gradients (probably "continuous flow") centrifugation to separate the virus! Larger culture systems do not make the basic approach to virus isolation any different!

The evidence [of the existence of HIV] for us began in the latter part of 1982, in 1983 more evidence accumulated, but it was based only on reverse transcriptase and we were only detecting it periodically…Little by little we would learn on how to find it with regularity, starting with just reverse transcriptase and that was about the spring of '83…we were finding reverse transcriptase now frequently

He seems to completely forget that what was demonstrated, by detection of reverse transcription from RNA to DNA, was the RT enzyme activity, not the presence of the enzyme itself. This is not enough, however, to demonstrate that the enzyme supposedly from retroviruses is clearly different from the enzyme one can demonstrate in all cells of the biological world!

In a collaboration with [CDC]…we received coded samples of blood from people who developed AIDS by blood transfusion, along with many controls. We picked out those that were antibody positive, they were the ones who had developed AIDS.

If the French intended to use the CDC to prove they had found the cause of AIDS, Gallo would do the same…[after blinded testing of a number of samples] only 48 percent of Gallo's AIDS patients' samples were positive, compared to the Pasteur [Institute]'s 72 percent…Almost all Sarngadharan's [a member of Gallo’s lab] equivocal blood-testing scores, recorded as ‘plus/minus’, had come from AIDS patients'…Gallo thought the CDC should allow him to change his borderline results to positive. Pasteur hadn’t asked to change any of its results after the fact and Don Francis [of the CDC] was against allowing Gallo that extra advantage. [However] Jim Curran agreed to Gallo’s request…now Gallo and the French each scored 92 percent of the pre-AIDS patients positive. Among AIDS patients, the French had gotten 80 percent right to Gallo’s 78.

Gallo later admits this on page 1315 of the transcript.

[Referring to a scientific misconduct investigation by the Office of Scientific Integrity]…No, OSI did not publish a drafted report, Congressman Dingell disavowed it [the report was never released by the congressional committee because the Democrats lost control of congress to the Republicans and the investigation was ended]. You should know that – it was disavowed by Dingell and done by the same lady. I cannot comment on that lady's overall capacities, only that she had to be released. The lady who released that [report] wrote it herself. She was released from NIH. She was not a scientist. She's a sociologist. She had other problems also that I will not go into but if I were on trial, I would let you know about them and for you to use her and quote that release document suggests that your clients have led you down a really fuzzy path that they don't understand. That was circulated around by people that wanted to attack HIV. That document doesn't exit as any accepted document by anyone. It was not only thrown out of the appeals court, it was disavowed in Science Magazine by Congressman Dingell. The woman who released it used to work for Congressman Dingell, had a job at NIH, until they found out what she was doing. She was discredited. That is her document.

From a November, 1993 letter posted on the “Science Fictions” website:

“The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) announced today that it is withdrawing its Dec. 29 1992, legal determination that Dr. Robert C. Gallo had committed scientific misconduct.

ORI is taking this action in light of recent Research Integrity Adjudications Panel decisions…These decisions established a new definition of scientific misconduct as well as a new and extremely difficult standard for proving misconduct…

'ORI found that Dr. Gallo misstated the role that the French virus, LAV, played in his work with the AIDS virus. We also found that he failed to identify, in a timely manner, the origin of the cell line used to propagate the virus and that he inappropriately restricted access to the cell line,’ said Dr. Lyle W. Bivens, director of the ORI…

ORI maintains that the standards applied by the panel reflect a fundamental disagreement with ORA as to the importance of clarity, accuracy and honesty in science. However, because ORI is bound by the panel’s decisions, it will not continue its proceeding against Dr. Gallo…

In its Popovic decision and others, the panel announced its standard for finding misconduct based on false statements. The panel ruled that ORI must prove deliberate intent to deceive, that a false statement have a material or significant effect on the research conclusions of the paper, and that there by no possibility of honest error…”

[Referring to an investigation of scientific misconduct by the Office for Research Integrity]…But because it was technically not true, they said it was false, therefore that could be falsification. That is how far Madam Hadley went with the lawyers downtown – they were lawyers not scientists

Where [endogenous retroviruses] have been seen occasionally is in normal human placenta. I’ve never seen a report to this day of any verified endogenous human retrovirus particle coming out of normal blood

Only after placental cord blood lymphocytes were added to Montagnier’s cultures at Institut Pasteur in 1983 were retroviruses seen by the Electron Microscope in their cultures!

All retrovirus particles that form, form from lifting off the cell membrane, pulling out of the cell…All such viruses carry within them, right within the virus, if you purify you see it is all over, cellular proteins that are not virus encoded

This is sheer nonsense. Of course we knew (since my observations on budding back in 1960) that the viral envelopes derive directly from the plasma membrane of the infected cells. But that didn’t prevent us from highly purifying type C virus particles from the blood of leukemic mice! No matter how complex the assembly of these particles is! But that purification has never been achieved; today, from the blood of “high viral load” AIDS patients! Could Gallo explain why?

The ELISA is very sensitive, it gives too much false positives…we in our papers told the scientific world screen with the ELISA but confirm with the western blot…there would be too many false positives with ELISA alone. Very sensitive. So yes, you get some cellular debris and you make it from antibodies reacting and you think that person is positive when the person won't be positive. Having said that, nonetheless, ELISA alone isn't bad…it just gives too many false positives [which is a big problem if you happen to be charged criminally due to a false positive!]

According to the United States Centres for Disease Control 'In adults, adolescents and children infected by other than perinatal exposure, plasma viral RNA nucleic acid tests should not be used in lieu of license HIV screening tests'. Is that the position?

I don’t know. I don’t know that. I don’t know if that’s the position anywhere.

What we are putting to you is that the only evidence you had that HIV causes AIDS was two things, firstly isolation of HIV from 48 out of 119 patients, that is, 40%. Second, the finding of positive antibody tests in 88% of the patients in the Science papers and 10% [100%?] in the Lancet papers. Do you agree with that proposition?

I agree but I think the denominator is wrong in the virus isolation but that's part of the argument, yes. There are more.

“we found HTLV-III [HIV] [by 'isolation'] in...13 of 43 of adult AIDS patients with Kaposi’s sarcoma, and 10 of 21 adult AIDS patients with opportunistic infections”
Gallo RC et al. Frequent Detection and Isolation of Cytopathic Retroviruses (HTLV-III) from Patients with AIDS and at Risk for AIDS. Science. 1984 May 4; 224: 500-3.

in and of itself 40% isolation of a new virus I wouldn’t say is the cause

they love to quote Robert [Koch] - where were made from bacteria and not viruses because it is impossible to fulfil the way [Koch] wrote them…[as they] can't survive outside a cell very long. But Robert [Koch], thank goodness, was smart enough not to be be so obsessive with his own [postulates] that he didn’t fulfill very many when he acted on column[?], he never fulfilled anything but one or two of his four or five [postulates]

why isn't HTLV[-I] the cause of AIDS?

Simple. Because first of all Essex was using an immune fluorescence reactivity…it’s a notoriously inaccurate test. Moreover, 10% of people with HIV in the United States at that time were doubly infected with HTLV-1 and HIV, so his percent comes down now from 20% to 30%. So it’s 20% with HTLV[-I], doubly infected

If the tests were improved how do you know that you wouldn't find HTLV1 in all AIDS patients.

Because I looked, I discovered the virus and no-one knows how to test better than I do

nobody but the dumbest of the dumb could confuse a retrovirus reverse transcription by innumerable parameters from the reverse transcription process that Dr. Varmus has talked about

All living cells contain an enzyme that can induce DNA synthesis from RNA templates (reverse transcriptase). But this is the enzyme activity, not the enzyme itself! I was never convinced that differences in the enzyme itself could be demonstrated by subtle variations in its mode of activity, like the concentration of Mg++ ions. I still believe, instead, that relying on RT activity as a specific retroviral marker has been the major factor responsible for putting AIDS research on the wrong track. And that mistake originated 100% from the unacceptable papers by Nobel laureates Temin and Baltimore in 1970. Unacceptable papers because, although they unquestionably demonstrated RT activity in retroviral samples, the purity of these samples had not been verified by EM! Most likely, the samples used by these most celebrated authors were contaminated by innumerable, microvesicular cell debris, that explain the observed RT activity.

In that same paper…you say 'For each of the following categories for AIDS, the number positive [for] HTLV3, the number tested and percent positive are listed. For juvenile AIDS the percentage positive was 37.5%, for adult AIDS with Kaposi’s sarcoma, 30.2%, and for adult AIDS with opportunistic infections 47.6%’. Would you accept those figures, that’s what you reported?

I don’t remember but, okay, I accept the figures.

In 1983 and ‘84 you were saying these [electron micrographs] show a typical type C particle and in 1998 you say the same pictures do not show a typical type C particle but a virus particle belonging to a totally different family of retrovirus

You are right. The subclassification of retroviruses into different families is subtle and, ultimately, of no consequence, either to the science or to the human health. It is a subtlety. I, no doubt, was overwhelmingly influenced by my prior influence with HTLV1 and HTLV2.

Frankly speaking, I never relied on electron microscopy. I don’t think electron microscopy does much, except for the person who’s a structural biologist and wants to look at real structure. No-one uses electron microscopy [in] virology any more – nobody. It is as rare as hen’s teeth.

if Electron Microscopy had been properly used, at Pasteur in 1983, to verify whether their sucrose gradient 1.16 density bands contained mostly retroviral particles or mostly cell debris, AIDS research would not have been put on the wrong track, billions of research dollars would have been more properly directed, and perhaps prevention and cure of AIDS efficiently reached.

Does all this mean particles with the morphology of retroviruses which have reverse transcriptase activity are not necessarily retroviruses because they do not replicate?

Absolutely. If you had a virus that didn’t replicate you couldn’t call it a virus, unless you transmitted it.

does the detection of reverse transcriptase prove detection of a retrovirus?

If it is in a particle - with definitive reverse transcriptase that you distinguished [i.e. distinguished from cellular reverse transcriptase]

Gallo is saying that the detection of particles is critical to prove detection of a retrovirus, yet the only way to know if particles are retroviruses is to purify them, something that has never been done.

How could [Luc] Montagnier [of the Institut Pasteur] say he has found a retrovirus in his culture based upon his detection of reverse transcriptase activity?

It is in a particle, he took a picture, it had particle form, we acknowledge not a great picture, but enough to say it is a virus, and if it is a virus with reverse transcriptase, it belongs to the retrovirus family, with rare exceptions, rare exceptions.

Gallo is now admitting that electron microscope evidence is critical after saying that it was obsolete a few pages back.

Is it true that around March 1984 Francis and Jim Curran of the CDC arranged a blinded test of [the] HIV antibody test using tests from the Institute Pasteur, your laboratory and their own test? Is it true that a number of samples that the Institute Pasteur recorded as positive were recorded as indeterminate on your test?

I honestly don’t remember the details but something like that is probably true…we thought that the cut-off for the ELISA - the bar was too [low] down so there would be too many false positives.

After you got their positive tests back your institution changed the results which you had previously had as indeterminate to positive?

I don’t - I don’t recall that being the case but if we did we made the sensitivity better and returned to the Western blots that’s perfectly plausible.

In 1994 did you say [HIV viral proteins] have not been found in the tumour cells of Kaposi sarcoma?

Sure that’s true. I don’t known if I said it in [1994]. I would have said it much earlier. It must have been in 1988 or ‘89…HIV is not the sine qua non of Kaposi’s sarcoma.

Western blot was not adequately adequate [justifying the use of PCR/viral load tests]

Do you agree that the nucleic acid tests, that is the PCR tests [aka “viral load”], cannot be used to prove HIV infection?

I mean of course you can use it as a component of evidence. You couldn’t use it to prove necessarily a virus.

what do you say to the proposition that's been advanced by the defence in this case, 'Well, if you know so much about HIV and if it exists why haven't you found a cure for it'?

Well, if the person wasn't a layperson I would speak more harshly. You know, I would say that that's silly. But let me explain with an analogy. The best analogy I can give is what I said to lay persons 20 years ago. If I know everything about Mt. Everest there is to know; every cape, every rock, every strata, every bush or every tree, I can't climb it until you develop the helicopter for me [note that only specially adapted helicopters can fly at the altitude of Mt. Everest]. That analogy is apropos to HIV. Obviously this is full of tricks and there are many microbes that have been around a long, long time that we desperately need vaccines for that are much longer around than HIV. Malaria being one obvious example; a bacterium that is a parasite [Malaria is caused by Plasmodium, which is a protist, not a bacteria] - a bacterium tuberculosis is another one. How many examples would one want? The question has no meaning.

Well, we don’t really have an explanation. This analogy seems like the peak of absurdity to us. Or, maybe it's just a snow job. It’s amazing these profound words came from someone working in the bowels of the NIH (well Gallo was until he was helicoptered out)…