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3. AIDS: In the Footsteps of a Major Scientific Scandal (2/2)

In the second part of this diptych, This is Beirut revisits the rivalry between Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo, which escalated when the American scientist announced in April 1984 that he had discovered the virus responsible for AIDS, without acknowledging the results published by the Pasteur Institute in May 1983 or the virus that he had requested Montagnier to send him. The patent war erupted, fueled by accusations of fraud and data manipulation, as the question of who should be credited with this groundbreaking discovery became a global controversy. Behind this battle for recognition were major political and scientific stakes, the outcome of which would mark the history of medicine.

At the end of the 20th century, AIDS, previously unknown, spread rapidly, plunging the world into an unprecedented public health crisis. Researchers worked diligently to uncover the causes of this mysterious disease. In May 1983, Luc Montagnier and his team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris published an article in Science announcing that they had isolated a retrovirus, HIV-1 (Human Immunodeficiency Virus type 1, according to current nomenclature), from a patient with AIDS. At the time, they named it LAV (Lymphadenopathy-Associated Virus). Following their publication, they filed a European patent application for a test to diagnose HIV-1 infection, which was quickly accepted. They also filed a patent in the United States, which remained pending before ultimately being rejected. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Robert Gallo was conducting parallel research. He requested a sample of the newly isolated LAV from the Pasteur Institute in order to “compare it with the strains he had isolated.” Montagnier responded positively to this request, out of scientific ethical considerations.

Patent War

The real point of friction occurred on April 23, 1984, when Gallo, alongside Margaret Heckler, then US Secretary of Health and Human Services, announced that his team had discovered the virus responsible for AIDS – which the Americans named HTLV-III (Human T-Lymphotropic Virus type III) – and that a commercial test for AIDS would soon be available. During this press conference, Gallo made no mention of the French scientist, even though his article had been published a year earlier. “Gallo and the US government simply attempted to bulldoze Montagnier and the French government out of the competition,” said Professor Udayhumar Ranga, a renowned Indian researcher, in a 2009 article, entitled “The saga of the HIV controversy,” published in Resonance. Following his press conference, the American researcher published his own results on May 4, 1984, also in Science, and simultaneously filed a US patent, which was promptly approved.

Out-of-Court Settlement

“The Pasteur Institute, holder of the patent application from Luc Montagnier, contested the US patent in court,” recounts Professor Ara Hovanessian, a leading researcher in Montagnier's unit. “In his defense, Gallo did not deny that Montagnier was the first to identify the virus, but he claimed that it was he who had made the link between HIV and AIDS, and that this demonstration relied on a virus independently isolated in his own laboratory.” The first dispute between the two scientists was resolved through an out-of-court settlement, mediated by Jonas Salk, the American scientist famous for developing the first polio vaccine. Ultimately, the Pasteur Institute's patent was validated by the US Patent Office.

However, although the conflict appeared to be settled, tensions continued to simmer between the Pasteur Institute and the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), lasting until 1987. That year, a highly publicized meeting took place between Jacques Chirac, then Prime Minister of France, and Ronald Reagan, President of the United States. During this meeting, they announced that the credit for identifying the virus would be shared between the two scientists. “The warring sides reached an agreement to share the royalties from the patents equally. There was peace at last, but only for a time,” explained Professor Ara Hovanessian, former research director at France's CNRS.

Hints of Fraud

After the publications by Montagnier and Gallo’s teams, HIV research became a central field of study in numerous laboratories around the world. As a result, a greater number of HIV-1 strains from AIDS patients were isolated and sequenced. “It was observed that the majority of viruses isolated from different patients exhibited genetic differences ranging from 6% to 20%, due to the virus' remarkable ability to mutate,” explained the Lebanese-French researcher, emphasizing that even viral strains isolated from the same individual could show significant genetic diversity over time. This is due to mutations, or genetic errors, introduced by a key enzyme – reverse transcriptase – in HIV during an important step in the viral cycle: the conversion of RNA into DNA. These mutations can produce new viral particles that could escape immue surveillance, thus promoting viral infection.

“Surprisingly, the HIV isolated by Gallo from an American patient showed less than a 2% difference compared to the virus isolated by Montagnier from a French patient. As a result, many researchers began to support the idea that the virus isolated by Gallo was most probably the French virus, which Montagnier had sent him in 1983,” continued Professor Hovanessian, without irony and with the precision of a researcher. Furthermore, one of the scientists from Gallo’s laboratory, responsible for electron microscopy, whose name was (strangely) not mentioned in the NCI’s patent, published a photocopy of his lab notebook. It showed an image of the virus isolated by Gallo, accompanied by the caption: “Very similar to the Pasteur virus.” According to Hovanessian, it seems that “Gallo had a habit of reviewing the lab notebooks of various researchers during the night.” When he discovered this comment, Gallo added, in his own handwriting: “You must be joking.”

Professional Misconduct

“In order to ease tensions, the administration of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) decided to conduct an investigation, entrusted to committees composed of internal scientists. As expected, these committees acted solely to protect Gallo and American interests,” pointed out Ara Hovanessian. The situation became even more critical when the Chicago Tribune published a detailed article by John Crewdson, questioning the potential appropriation of the virus by Gallo's laboratory at the expense of the French researchers. In 1989, after reviewing Gallo's lab notebooks and interviewing many individuals involved in the research, a committee from the Office of Scientific Integrity concluded that Gallo was indeed guilty of professional misconduct.

However, four years later, in 1993, the charges against him were reduced. “Gallo claimed, directly or indirectly, that it was simply a contamination of their culture by the Pasteur virus, given that in his laboratory, researchers were simultaneously working with both the virus isolated by Gallo and the Pasteur virus,” remarked the Lebanese-French researcher, clearly shocked by this explanation, as such contamination would be impossible in a prestigious laboratory adhering to stringent quality control standards. The 1987 agreement between the Pasteur Institute and the NCI/NIH was modified in 1994, granting France a larger share of the royalties from the HIV-1 test patents. “With this new agreement, the NIH officially recognized that the test kit they had developed was based on the virus provided by the Pasteur Institute,” clarified Professor Hovanessian.

Fairer Distribution

The 1987 agreement allocated a quarter of the total royalties to the World AIDS Foundation (WAF), which funds AIDS research and education in developing countries, and divided the rest equally between France and the United States. The new 1994 agreement awarded France half of the total royalties, with the United States and WAF each receiving a quarter. As a result, this agreement ended the dispute between the Pasteur Institute and the NIH regarding royalties. However, it did not resolve whether Gallo’s NIH research team had diverted the French virus, either accidentally or deliberately. Luc Montagnier, for his part, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 (alongside French virologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi), without Gallo receiving any credit. History had thus made its decision.