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December 22, 2009
Brent Leung’s request to interview me and his subsequent manipulation of the footage in his so-called “documentary” were deceptive and unscrupulous. I said nothing in the interview excerpts that he included in this “uncensored” movie--—thirteen brief sentences—that is incorrect or that I regret. I do, however, regret agreeing to speak with Brent Leung. It is clear now that Leung’s purpose in interviewing me was to attempt to undermine the well-established scientific evidence that HIV causes AIDS and to promote a dangerous HIV denialist agenda.
In his mangling of the footage, Leung also attempted to debase and discredit me personally, because I was first to clearly state that we had evidence that the new retrovirus, now known as HIV, was the cause of AIDS (April 1984). Our finding was based on:
(1) 48 detections and/or isolates of the new virus from AIDS patients and a few people without AIDS from known risk groups.
(2) We failed to isolate this virus from over 100 healthy heterosexuals.
(3) We could continuously culture the virus in cell lines making an antibody blood test possible, and the blood test we developed was widely applied with coded samples that linked HIV to AIDS patients and to some people in high risk groups (May 1984 Science 88% AIDS seropositive; June 1984 Lancet 100%), and only rarely in healthy heterosexuals.
(4) Though we knew from our earlier work with retroviruses, and from the logic of how retroviruses establish themselves, that antibodies would almost always mean infection, it is not well known that we proved this point in a collaboration with the National Institute of Heart and Lung Disease at NIH by isolating HIV from coded samples of blood and demonstrating a correlation with HIV specific antibodies and virus isolation (a finding not published in those May 1984 papers).
(5) In collaboration with many clinicians and Dr. James Curran, then of the CDC, we also found antibodies in coded samples of blood donors who developed AIDS and in their recipients who subsequently developed AIDS.
(6) We knew the virus was modestly cytopathic for CD4 T cells, and we knew that like the epidemic was new in our population. By January 1985 we described in a PNAS report a total of 105 detections and/or true isolates of this retrovirus associated with AIDS or risk groups.
For me, these results were absolutely convincing, and two and a half decades of dedicated work by tens of thousands of virologists, infectious disease specialists, microbiologists, physicians, epidemiologists and other scientists has confirmed them again and again. But Leung chose not to include in his film the science of HIV as I explained it to him, or as presumably the many other HIV researchers he spoke with explained it to him. Instead, he chose to focus on old personal and professional conflicts, hardly a rarity in any field. He wove together fragments of commentary to misrepresent longstanding animosities as cracks in the bedrock of HIV science. They are not. Leung chopped up his interviews and edited the short pieces of footage together in ways that render them wholly unreliable. Therefore, I will not respond to what appear to be attacks on me and my work by a couple of other people he interviewed; having experienced first hand how deceptive and manipulative Leung is, I can only assume that he deceived and manipulated others in the same way.
Our publication record is there for those who actually wish to understand how we proved that AIDS is caused by the retrovirus HIV. In addition, a detailed history of the events and primary documents relevant to our virus isolates are now both available in the book “Dissecting a Discovery: The Real Story of How the Race to Uncover the Cause of AIDS Turned Scientists Against Disease, Politics Against Science Nation Against Nation” by Nikolas Kontaratos.
Robert C. Gallo, M.D.
Director and Professor
Institute of Human Virology
University of Maryland School of Medicine
