The first project I worked on was purifying interferon, which at the time was being investigated as a highly potent anti-cancer and anti-viral therapy.
Late in 1982, our team was assigned a project which would put me in direct contact with many of the most important players in public health. Dr. Robert Gallo wanted us to provide his lab with thirty grams of human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV-1) from a two-hundred-liter (about fifty-two gallons) culture of Hut-102 cells.
Hut-102 cells were drawn from the peripheral blood of people with adult T-cell leukemia. HTLV-1, the first identified disease-causing human retrovirus, was discovered in 1980 (HIV would be discovered in 1983) and associated with the deadly leukemia, found most commonly in Japan, of adult T-cell leukemia.
To extract thirty grams of infectious HTLV-1 virus from two hundred liters of cell-culture, we required an open-air centrifuge known as the AK centrifuge.
My boss Mark and I immediately realized that nothing was known about the potential for this virus to become airborne and infect the technicians, particularly a few who were pregnant. I understand I’ve had a PhD after my name for more than thirty years, but in my heart, I’m a technician, just like Frank. I’m never happier than when I’m working in a lab. Little was known about the transmission, infectivity, or mechanisms by which this virus caused disease. Mark and I wrote a letter to our superiors requesting additional time and resources to complete the assignment with proper safeguards.
Later, I’d learn, it was Robert Gallo—who fired Frank, the discoverer of HTLV-1 and IL-2, because he was “getting too much credit”—who himself made the decision to use Reagan’s “Reduction on Force” mechanism to fire the members of our team for questioning the safety practices at the NCI.
***
Prior to his departure from the NCI under an ethical cloud in 1992 for possible criminal actions in HIV/AIDS research, Robert Gallo had more control over public health than any scientist in history, prior to the quarter-century-long march of power given to Anthony Fauci with each plandemic.
Starting with HIV and marching through SARS, bird flu, swine flu, XMRV, Ebola, Zika, and culminating in SARS-CoV-2, the supposed monkey virus never isolated from a person with COVID-19, these criminals have destroyed the economies of nations. COVID-19 was never that monkey virus, but the criminal Fauci-led plandemic, one of the most-deadly worldwide plagues in modern history.
I’d like the reader to understand that there have been just a few key scientists over the past forty years who’ve dominated public health. It’s not a long list.
Robert Gallo, Anthony Fauci, John Coffin, Ian Lipkin, and Harold Varmus.
I speak against these men, but I also speak against a system which has allowed them to stay in positions of power for so long.
While most were enjoying the Christmas holidays in 1992 and getting ready to celebrate the New Year, the federal government quietly gave their answer to the long running allegations against Robert Gallo, hoping few would pay attention as the country was making its transition from President George Bush to Bill Clinton.
On December 30, 1992, the Federal Office of Research Integrity released a report, based on three years of investigation, which found that Robert Gallo had committed “scientific misconduct.”1 This is how it was reported in the pages of the New York Times on December 31, 1992:
Dr. Gallo has faced questions about his scientific claims ever since the paper was published in Science magazine in April 1984. Most of his critics argued that Dr. Gallo had tried to take credit for work that French scientists were studying and claimed it as his own. At the time, the virus was difficult to isolate and grow in sufficient quantity for research …
Dr. Gallo has denied any wrongdoing in the most vehement terms. He has also alleged that there is a conspiracy to discredit him and has asked why it is only his laboratory being investigated, and not that of Dr. Luc Montagnier, the French laboratory leader who has largely escaped detailed scrutiny.2
Okay, who’s the conspiracy theorist in this story?
Let’s put a timeline on this. Dr. Gallo takes credit for isolating the HIV retrovirus in April 1984. On December 30, 1992, eight and a half years later, the government released a report just before the New Year, when practically nobody would read it, that Gallo was a thief.
In an Islamic country, you might get your hand cut off for theft.
In the United States, you’ll likely get a stiff prison sentence.
But if you’re a nationally recognized American scientist, whose lies “impeded potential AIDS research progress,” likely contributing to the unnecessary death of millions, you’ll be able to set yourself up at your own “Institute of Human Virology” at the University of Maryland, which will list you as the founder and director and note that you’re “best known for [your] co-discovery of HIV.”3
Besides being a virus thief, the government report cited Gallo for using his role as a referee on another article in a French journal to rewrite several sentences to favor his hypothesis, four instances of scientific misconduct in his 1984 paper that he tried to blame on his co-author, poor record-keeping in his laboratory, and refusing to share his cells with other scientists to duplicate his work.4
And the conflict with French researchers Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi became an international incident, requiring delicate international diplomacy.
The dispute over Dr. Gallo’s claims became so linked to national scientific prestige that the Presidents of France and the United States attempted to end the conflict in 1987 when they agreed to a 50-50 split of credit and patent royalties from work with the AIDS virus and the blood test to detect it.
But the issue did not go away, and Federal investigations were begun in 1989, after a reporter, John Crewdson, of The Chicago Tribune wrote a 50,000-word article laying out many of the charges against Gallo and his laboratory.5
It’s one thing to get into a fight with a sibling so bad that your mom or dad have to step in. It’s quite another to screw up a scientific inquiry into a disease killing millions that’s so bad the leaders of your two countries have to step in to resolve the issue.
The work of Chicago Tribune reporter, John Crewdson, was so critical to the case that the paper’s public editor, Douglas Kneeland, felt compelled to publicly comment on it.
What has been at issue all along here is something much greater than the sum of those parts: the failure of the American government, including the Bush administration as a whole, the Departments of Justice and of Health and Human Services, in particular, and of the national scientific community to deal appropriately with the outrageous behavior of so many involved in the affair.
That behavior ranged from the repeated lies of Gallo over many years and in many respected journals in defense of his unconscionable claim to the discovery of the AIDS virus to the obvious efforts by some officials at the National Institutes of Health to cover up politically and scientifically embarrassing findings in the case.6
That’s the way journalism used to work in America. It might have taken the Chicago Tribune three years to finally get the goods on Gallo, then three years for the government to do its investigation, but some measure of truth was finally told.
Compare that to Meet the Press and Chuck Todd taking less than a month to slander our book Plague of Corruption and reputation without even giving us a chance to respond.
***
I had some time left at the NCI until the reduction in force kicked in and I was out of a job, so I thought I’d look for other work.
As Frank mentioned in Part One, one of the great things about the NCI was they’d often have these lunchtime talks given by researchers that anybody could attend.
There was a talk being given by Dr. Joost Oppenheim, nearing fifty at the time, which seemed ancient to my perspective at the age of twenty-three. His talk was about interleukin 1, a cellular communication protein, which like interferon, was being looked at as a possible cancer treatment. I was terrified to approach him and wait
ed until everyone else had gone, for fear my question about using IL-1 and interferon combined in a single protocol to cure cancer was a stupid one.
To his credit Oppenheim didn’t laugh, but rather invited me to have a lengthier discussion about the topic over lunch in his office. That was where I’d always wanted to be, on the leading edge of medicine, developing the cures of the future.
During the discussion with Dr. Oppenheim I let him know about the reduction in force and that I was looking for a job. I was hoping he might have a position available in his lab, but he said he knew a colleague who could use a good technician. He told me his colleague was Dr. Frank Ruscetti, who was interested in studying HTLV-1 and T-cell growth factor (later designated as interleukin 2).
Years later, I learned of Dr. Oppenheim’s history. Dr. Joost Oppenheim, born in 1934, is still working at the NCI as I write this in June 2021. He’d been born in the Netherlands, and as a young Jewish boy had been forced to wear a Yellow Star of David by the Nazis. For the duration of the war, he was hidden by a non-Jewish family when his parents were sent away to Auschwitz. His father was murdered in Auschwitz, but his mother survived the camp. When he was reunited with his mother after the war, they immigrated to America and he pursued a career in science.
When I learned of his history, it answered a lot of questions for me.
Rarely have I met a kinder individual.
Jo would always invite visiting fellows to his home for holiday dinners. And he did not hesitate to invite this twenty-four-year-old to chat about his research in the spring of 1983. It never occurred to me that Dr. Oppenheim had a very busy lab and might have many important things to do.
That’s the difference between the real scientists and the gatekeeper misogynists of science.
For Robert Gallo, Anthony Fauci, Ian Lipkin, and Harold Varmus, it was all about what science could do for them.
For Frank Ruscetti, Joost J. Oppenheim, and Luc Montagnier, it was about the pursuit of knowledge and the ability to alleviate suffering with their discoveries.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were both victims of Robert Gallo’s megalomania. This professional jealousy was hard for me to fathom, especially as a young idealistic woman who was simply interested in advancing human knowledge and helping people live longer, healthier lives. Yes, I do ask a lot of questions, and if you give me a stupid answer, I don’t care about your position in the public health hierarchy, or your distinguished publications, because it’s still a stupid answer, and I won’t be quiet about it. It’s a scholar’s obligation not only to produce knowledge, but to communicate it honestly. I don’t tolerate BS or fools lightly.
As illustrated by our conversation during my job interview, detailed in Part One, I did not need to measure my words or fear asking stupid questions. No matter what he thought, Frank Ruscetti would always answer in a way that showed he welcomed the question. But make no mistake, his answer would always be an intelligent response, supported by data. Even if I was brimming with the confidence of a twenty-five-year-old and totally wrong, Frank Ruscetti would try to get me out of the embarrassing situation, even if it appeared otherwise to me.
The first months of our, as of June 6, 2021, thirty-eight-year collaboration, were very difficult for both of us. Frank’s intuitive genius was clear to me from the start, just as it was likely clear to Robert Gallo. Without Frank, the discovery of HTLV-1, IL-2, IL-5, IL-15 for immunotherapy, or TGF-beta as a bifunctional regulator of the hematopoietic stem cell would have been greatly delayed.
Many a day in that summer of 1983, I’d sit in front of the biological safety cabinet well after 5 p.m. and cry because I couldn’t figure out how to make a bottle of media for cell culture. I was the only kid in our family to go to college. My parents would brag about their daughter who worked at the NCI and was going to be a doctor. I could never face them or quit. I was going to have to start over and hope Frank was more than just brilliant. I prayed he was a man of honor.
I was a chemist and couldn’t find a cell under a microscope. I rarely understood a word Frank said. Not just because of his thick Boston accent, but because he spoke a different scientific language. For example, I had never heard the expression “colony stimulating factor” when Frank used it in one of our early meetings.
I only knew of the original colonies in Virginia and nudist colonies. That was a question even I knew was likely too stupid to ask, and I suffered in silence. Imagine my terror when Frank casually mentioned he wanted me to “split the cells” or “feed the cells.” I fed snails while a student at the University of Virginia. Some chalk, a piece of lettuce, and a square of toilet paper in a Petri dish. How difficult could feeding cells be? All of this would probably have gone much better if I could have found the cells under a microscope.
I often pretended to know exactly what Frank was saying, nodding in affirmation. In addition to his thick Boston accent and new scientific language, was his atrocious handwriting. How would I ever get this job done?
I came up with what I thought was a perfect solution. I bought myself a journal and simply wrote down every word he said. Then, I compared it to his written instructions in the hope I could translate it overnight. That allowed me to come to work the next day with an experimental protocol ready to go.
My plan worked.
I was coming to work each day with growing confidence I could make Frank happy and complete the experiments he’d assigned to me. My mom was a great secretary and she’d taught me aspects of shorthand so I could write quickly and accurately. It was a habit I’ve continued in my now thirty-eight-year collaboration with Frank.
Frank was so wounded by what happened to his career and reputation because he made two discoveries that changed all of immunology. Who knew in 2011, my dozens of personal journals would be called “intellectual property theft” and my career would end like Frank’s had almost ended thirty years earlier? Now the gatekeeper scientists, whose views of the scientific world were sacrosanct, simply eliminated me and my work because it did not fit with their plans.
How do they expect me to defend my work?
It’s as if the Catholic Church marched into Darwin’s study, took his notebooks, and then challenged him to prove his theory of natural selection.
Frank Ruscetti should have had more postdocs, technicians and scientists working under his direction than just me. I was wounded by the Reduction in Forces canceling of my job, but more damaged by the dawning realization that science and curing cancer were not the true goals of the gatekeepers at the NCI. The primary goal of these gatekeepers was simply more money and fame.
Fortunately, Frank and I both learned to relieve the frustrations with science by throwing ourselves into competitive sports. I loved baseball and squash the most because you could win at both if you outthought your opponents. Close behind were rowing crew and ice hockey.
My career in colony stimulating factors and hematopoiesis turned out to be short-lived.
One day I came back to the lab after a lengthy lunchtime squash match to find Frank fuming mad and throwing my little Petri dishes into the autoclave bag for incineration.
I did not dare move or ask what was wrong.
I could clearly see the green and white fuzzy stuff growing in the Petri dishes. There were dozens of them in this experiment, which had been going on for weeks.
Now, weeks of data were ruined.
Frank pitched one Petri dish past my face in frustration, passing so close to me it was as if I was at home plate and the pitcher threw a classic brushback pitch to rattle my nerves. Frank was certain I had rushed the feeding (addition of growth factors) to play squash.
He was at least partially right.
I simply hated counting colonies and preparing those agar plates without an air bubble.
Recognizing my failure, I said simply, “Okay, I’ll take the project with the deadly retrovirus.”
Clearly, I wouldn’t survive long in science doing colony assays. I decided to fall back on m
y viral purification skills.
However, this choice would bring me into direct conflict with the then reigning king of corrupt science, Robert Gallo, and his crown prince, Anthony Fauci.
***
Frank and two other scientists from NIAID had been working on confirming the work of the French researchers, Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, confirming their isolation of the HIV retrovirus. At the time the virus was called LAV (lymphadenopathy virus) and AIDS was called GRID, which stood for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.
Frank had trained me in the lab culture procedures to do the work using primary cells and the Hut-78 cell line, just as he’d trained Bernie Poiesz, prior to their discovery of HTLV-1. We had a cell line growing the virus for characterization and confirmation. Frank wrote the paper. As a technician in those days, I was not allowed to be a coauthor, although I had certainly read and made certain the experimental procedures were exactly as I had done them. That has changed in the ensuing years, and technicians can be credited in the publication as a coauthor.
However, somehow Gallo found out and he and Fauci called Frank’s office when he was out of town. Since I was his only employee, I answered the phone and took care of the mail when Frank was out of town.
That day, in the late summer of 1983, I answered Frank’s phone, to find Anthony Fauci and Robert Gallo on the line, very angry. They were looking for the manuscript describing the methods and virus isolates from confirmatory studies we had done concerning the lymphadenopathy virus, LAV, later called HIV, isolated from patients suffering from GRID.
I replied that Frank was out of town and since I was not a coauthor, I lacked the authority to give it to them.
Of course, they threated to have me fired, wreck my career, etc., and I hung up on them.
But just as I thought I’d blown it with Frank in my initial interview when I said it didn’t matter who authored the papers, it was all about the data, Frank appreciated why I’d refused to hand over his paper. I wasn’t just defending Frank from Gallo and Fauci.
Ending Plague Page 21