Subject: U. S. AIDS Expert Agrees Lab Used French Virus
Date: Published: 5/31/91 (38 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    Technology & Medicine:
    U. S. AIDS Expert Agrees
    Lab Used French Virus

    SAN FRANCISCO -- American AIDS expert Robert C. Gallo, in
 a brief letter to the journal Nature, formally acknowledged
 this week that the AIDS virus claimed for eight years by his
 lab was, in fact, a virus obtained from French researchers.
    The three-paragraph statement provided a terse closure to
 a bitter trans-Atlantic dispute over "who discovered the AIDS
 virus" -- a dispute that clouded much of the past decade's
 work on the epidemic.  Patent royalties from an AIDS
 blood-test kit have been split 50-50 since a 1987 settlement
 between the parties, but the dispute still simmered until
 recently.
    Dr. Gallo's letter comes in response to a report by Luc
 Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris.  As reported,
 Dr. Montagnier's report in the journal Science two weeks ago
 said the similarity between the two teams' viruses stemmed
 from the contamination of cultures by an AIDS virus strain
 from a French patient identified as LAI. 
    It is this scenario now endorsed by Dr. Gallo, the often
 combative chief of tumor cell biology at the National Cancer
 Institute, a unit of the National Institutes of Health in
 Bethesda, Md.
    "It ...appears that cultures of virus from people with
 AIDS became contaminated with {the human immunodeficiency
 virus} LAI at NIH," Dr. Gallo wrote.  This would explain the
 nearly identical genetic fingerprint of viruses analyzed by
 the two teams in independent publications.

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