Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Coverup, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo

"Science Fictions" is Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist John Crewdson's exhaustive yet riveting narrative of how one of this country's star bioscientists, Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute, falsely claimed to have been the first to isolate the AIDS virus, then garnered the resulting honors and riches at the expense of the true discoverers, an unknown group of scientists at the Institute Pasteur in Paris. Crewdson's story traces how the AIDS virus was actually discovered and by whom; how the French isolate ended up -- accidentally or otherwise -- in Gallo's laboratory flasks; how the Reagan and Bush administrations struggled to cover up the truth; and how it all finally came out anyway, at the expense of the reputations of celebrated scientists and important government officials. The book reads like a scientific whodunit, with a large cast of colorful figures -- many villains and a few heroes -- and tells us for the first time how big scientific laboratories really work. This is the kind of major work that wins prizes.