whether the "AIDS virus" is present in blood. In 1985, the Pasteur Institute alleged that Gallo had misappropriated LAV in developing the blood test. The ensuing conflict, which reached the American courts, was eventually settled by a negotiated agreement signed in 1987 by Gallo, Montagnier, US President Reagan and French Premier Chirac. The agreement declared Gallo and Montagnier to be co-discoverers of the AIDS virus, presently known as the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Nevertheless, the misappropriation conflict drew the attention of John Crewdson, an investigative journalist, and US Senator John Dingell. In November 1989, Crewdson published a lengthy article in the Chicago Tribune newspaper, "With allegations that Robert C. Gallo stole from French scientists the virus he discovered to be the cause of AIDS."(10) This led to a National Institute of Health (NIH) internal "inquiry" into the allegation with "an outside committee of expert but disinterested parties [led by Yale biochemist Frederic Richards] to oversee the activity of the internal panel".(11) Following the inquiry, which was viewed as a fact-finding mission, the Richards committee insisted on a "formal investigation ... on suspect data in one of four seminal papers published by Gallo's lab in Science on 4 May 1984".(12) In this paper, the first of a series of four, with Mikulas Popovic the principal author, "their appears to be differences between what was described in the paper and what was done".(10) A draft report of the formal investigation written by NIH Office of Scientific Integrity (OSI), was published in September 1991. In the draft report, Popovic is accused "of misconduct for misstatements and inaccuracies" that appeared in the paper, and that Gallo, as laboratory chief, "created and fostered conditions that give rise to falsified/ fabricated data and falsified reports". However, Gallo's actions were not considered to "meet the formal definition of miscon...
