BIOL 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Robert Gallo, Retrovirus
11/28/2017
Lecture 23
• If you let an animal look in the mirror with a mark, they won’t recognize themselves
o Birds can recognize themselves though (magpies), and they try to remove the
sticker
o Dogs never recognize themselves in the mark test
• Mark Houser said tamarinds can pass the mark test
o Gallop says he doesn’t believe him
o Mark Houser sends him the videos
o Gallop looks at them and says you can’t conclude based on those videos that the
tamarinds are recognizing themselves
o Mark redoes the study, then publishes a retraction saying he can’t produce same
results again
o Once an expert questioned him, he published this failure to replicate on himself
o Then, his students went to Harvard and told them that other weird things were
happening in other studies by Mark Houser
o His books were really popular and it was unfortunate that his research was bad
• Gallo, Montagnier and HIV
o First paper published talking about HIV was published by Montagnier
▪ They isolated a retrovirus from a patient and published it (LAVbru) based on
identity of the patient
▪ Their paper used Gallo’s methods to isolate the virus
▪ The goal was to try to identify the agent that could be transferred in blood
transfusions
▪ Gallo’s lab and the Pasteur lab where Montagnier worked sent each other
samples back and forth
▪ Montagnier publishes in science saying he’s not sure that this is the cause
of AIDS
▪ Gallo then publishes saying we found the causal agent in AIDS, that they
found the retrovirus in 40 patients with AIDS-like symptoms
• A ELISA revealed that 43 of 49 (88%) of patients with AIDS
tested positive
• Only 1/186 controls scored positive
▪ Gallo got the patent on his test even though Montagnier isolated the virus
(M discovered the virus, G demonstrated the association)
▪ A few years later, it turns out that in Gallo’s lab LAVBRU had contaminated
a pool of viruses from different AIDS patients
• Pooling viruses was the idea of Mika Popovic in order to get
survival of the fittest
• Clearly patient BRU had a very virulent strain
• Did Gallo and Popovic know they were working with the french
cell line when they claimed they were working with their own cell
line?
o “I’m not “formerly credited as co-discoverer of HIV” - as far as I’m aware the
agreement whereby Montagnier and I were co-credited remains in force. The
central point is that Montagnier and I published data on two viruses which turned
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