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Dr. Gallo’s statement of March 7, 2002:

Statement by the Institute of Human Virology re: Crewdson Book

The Research Integrity Adjudications Panel of the Department of Health and Human Services nine years ago dismissed John Crewdson’s biased, distorted and discredited falsehoods, which are rehashed in the book, Science Fictions.
      As stated in the final report (1993) of the U.S. Health and Human Services, Research Integrity Adjudications Panel; "one might anticipate … after all the sound and fury, there would be at least a residue of palatable wrongdoing. That is not the case." This was summarized in a November 14, 1993, article in The Washington Post called "The Fraud Fraud", and in a December 26, 1993 article in the Sunday Magazine Section of The New York Times called "Method and Madness: The Vindication of Robert Gallo." Revisiting a long settled dispute 10-15 years later serves no purpose except to question the author's motive.

John Crewdson’s reply:

The report of the Research Integrity Adjudications Panel to which Dr. Gallo refers certainly does not dismiss my reporting of the Gallo case for the Chicago Tribune ‘as containing discredited falsehoods, bias and distortion.’ In fact, nowhere in its seventy-nine pages does the panel’s report characterize my reporting at all. Readers are invited to download the report from the ‘Cited Documents’ section and read it for themselves.
      Although one cannot tell it from Dr. Gallo’s statement, the panel’s report has nothing to do with Dr. Gallo’s behavior, either in or out of the laboratory. Rather, it is narrowly focused on the dispute over a few, mostly trivial, aspects of research conducted by one of Dr. Gallo’s associates — a dispute which, in the panel’s own words, was ‘largely vestigial’ to the far more important issue in the Gallo case, among them Dr. Gallo’s claim of credit for landmark discoveries made by scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the resulting patent dispute between the French and American governments that was ultimately resolved in favor of the French.
      As Dr. Gallo neglects to mention, those issues, all fully explored in Science Fictions, were never even adjudicated by the panel. Despite Dr. Gallo’s suggestion to the contrary, the principal questions in the Gallo case — How did an AIDS virus discovered in Paris emerge from Dr. Gallo’s laboratory with a new name and pedigree? Who directed the cover-up of Gallo’s work with the French virus? — remain unresolved to this day. Rather than inventing new science fictions, one hopes that Dr. Gallo and his colleagues will at last come forward with answers.