Science Fictions
Subtitle: A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo
Edition: 1st edition
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: January 31, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 672
ISBN-13: 9780316134767
Subjects: Science; Science/Mathematics; AIDS & HIV; Research & Methodology; Medical / AIDS & HIV; History; AIDS (Disease); Fraud in science; HIV (Viruses); Research
First sentence: In the spring of 1981, a handful of young men began turning up in the emergency room at the UCLA hospital in West Los Angeles with the same mysterious complaint: a prolonged fever and swollen lymph glands, followed by a rare type of pneumonia previously seen only in the elderly or in malnourished children.
Description: "More than ten years in the making, John Crewdson's Science Fictions is a brilliant work of investigative reporting that raises the curtain on a scientific scandal of major proportions. Science Fictions is the narrative of how one of this country's superstar scientists, Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute, falsely claimed to have been the first to isolate the AIDS virus, HIV, and to develop the HIV antibody test that saved the blood supply.

These achievements brought him honor and riches at the expense of the true discoverers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Crewdson traces how the AIDS virus was actually discovered and the blood test developed and by whom, how the French AIDS virus ended up in Gallo's test tubes, and how the National Institutes of Health and other agencies of the Reagan administration struggled to cover up the truth."--BOOK JACKET.