By John Crewdson Tribune reporter

This story was first published in the Tribune on Jan. 1, 1995.

In March 1987, President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac appeared in the East Room of the White House to announce that their governments had settled the question of whether scientists at the Pasteur Institute of Paris or the National Institutes of Health had invented the blood test for the virus known as HIV.

The answer, it appeared, was both. The names of the Pasteur scientists were added to the American patent on the AIDS test, and the formal agreement that formed the core of the settlement declared that both countries' scientists had independently "succeeded in isolating a human retrovirus which proved to be the causative agent of AIDS." Just eight days later, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, a scientist specializing in the genetic analysis of viruses sent senior officials at the National Institutes of Health a confidential memo warning that "a double fraud" had been perpetrated on the scientific community.

The Los Alamos scientist, Gerald Myers, had compared the genetic codes of the French and American AIDS viruses and determined they were not independent discoveries but had undoubtedly come from the same patient.

Moreover, Myers said, the American virus and its progeny could not have been isolated from a pool of blood samples from several AIDS patients, as the NIH publicly had maintained.

"I suggest that we have paid for this deception in more than the usual ways," Myers wrote. "Scientific fraudulence always costs humanity . . . but here we have been additionally misdirected with regard to the extent of variation of the virus, which we can ill afford ... "

Myers' memo, which would have undermined the historic settlement before the ink had dried, was promptly buried in the NIH's files-where it remained until it was accidentally discovered late last year by investigators for Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), who in a few days will relinquish the chairmanship of the House subcommittee that oversees the NIH.

According to a draft report of a three-year investigation by Dingell's staff, the interment of the Myers memo represents a single example, albeit a "particularly egregious" one, of what the report describes as a "continuing cover-up" by successive administrations of the role played by American scientists in the discovery of the AIDS virus and the invention of the AIDS test.

While the Department of Health and Human Services, of which the NIH is a part, "did its best to cover up the wrong-doing," the report states, "the failure of the entire scientific establishment to take any meaningful action left the disposition of scientific truth to bureaucrats and lawyers, with neither the expertise nor the will essential to the task."

The Dingell report summarizes the last, and also the most sweeping, of several inquiries into the case of Dr. Robert C. Gallo, the NIH researcher who claimed credit for the discovery of the AIDS virus and the development of the blood test. Subcommittee aides said, however, there was little chance the report would be released as an official subcommittee document after the Republicans, who have their own investigative agenda, assume control of Congress on Wednesday.

A previous NIH investigation of Gallo's AIDS research was narrowly drawn, ultimately focusing on the veracity of a few sentences in one of Gallo's many scientific articles. The Dingell inquiry also scrutinized Gallo's research, but it ranged far beyond Gallo's National Cancer Institute laboratory to examine the roles of past and present officials of NIH and HHS in the events that followed Gallo's highly publicized claim.

The draft report, which one senior Dingell aide said represented "a bipartisan consensus of the staff investigators," is as unstinting in its criticism of the current NIH director, Dr. Harold Varmus, a Clinton appointee, as of Varmus's predecessor, Dr. Bernadine Healy, and other officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations.

Although the report credits Varmus with ending "the atmosphere of overt protectionism of Dr. Gallo" at NIH, it criticizes his recent decision to give the Pasteur Institute a greater share of AIDS test royalties as "based on a disingenuous explanation of accounting anomalies, rather than the proven fact that the (Gallo laboratory's) scientists, contravening a formal transfer agreement, used (the Pasteur's) AIDS virus isolate to make their blood test."

According to the report, the Dingell investigation began as a probe into alleged kickbacks and diversion of federal funds by two of Gallo's assistants, both of whom were convicted of federal felonies. It expanded to include the circumstances surrounding the decade-long Franco-American dispute, and its completion comes at a difficult time for the cancer institute, where Gallo still heads what was once NIH's biggest research laboratory.

The cancer institute's director, Dr. Samuel Broder, announced unexpectedly Dec. 22 that he would be departing after six years in the institute's top job. Several of Broder's senior aides also are leaving or have left, and the Dingell report states that "Dr. Gallo, at the strong urgings of Dr. Broder, is reported to be seeking employment outside of NIH."

What is likely to be the final chapter in the Gallo case comes almost 10 years to the day after the initial revelations that the AIDS virus Gallo called HTLV-3B and claimed as his own discovery was virtually identical, at the genetic level, to the AIDS virus the French called LAV.

As recounted by the Dingell report, the original focus of the Gallo case was what Gallo's laboratory did, and did not do, with a sample of LAV lent to him by Pasteur, and Gallo's assertions to the media, in published articles and under oath about what happened to that sample.

When Gallo announced in April 1984 that he had discovered the virus that causes AIDS, he said his discovery differed from the French virus and implied that the French LAV might not be the cause of AIDS. Eventually it became clear that the two viruses were more alike than any other known pair of AIDS viruses, and Gallo suggested the French had contaminated their cultures with his virus.

When such a "reverse contamination" proved to be physically impossible, Gallo proposed that the French patient in whom LAV had been discovered had been infected by the American patient, never identified, from whom Gallo's HTLV-3B had come.

Gallo dismissed suggestions that LAV might have contaminated his own virus cultures as "the height of outrage," declaring that it had been "physically impossible" for his assistants to grow the LAV sample. These claims, the Dingell report says, "were not true."