
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 1, 1991                   TAG: 9103010173
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

AIDS CO-DISCOVERY CREDIT BACKED

A new series of tests on 8-year-old blood samples may put an end to allegations that a U.S. government laboratory used a French sample to gain credit for co-discovery of the AIDS virus.

In a study published Thursday in the British journal Nature, researchers show that a French virus sample sent to the National Institutes of Health laboratory in 1983 was not the same virus that the lab identified as the cause of AIDS.

Laboratory chief Robert C. Gallo and his co-workers published papers in 1984 describing how they had isolated and identified the virus that causes AIDS. The following year Luc Montagnier and his team at the Pasteur Institute in France published a report that they, too, had found a virus that causes AIDS.

Gallo called his virus IIIB. Montagnier called his LAV-BRU.

Both viruses are now known as human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which is the cause of AIDS.

After Montagnier's paper was published, scientists compared the structure of IIIB and LAV-BRU and found that the two virus were so alike that they had to have come from the same source.

Records showed that Montagnier in 1983 sent virus isolates from the blood of the patient identified as BRU to Gallo's lab.

This led to widely published allegations that the virus that Gallo discovered in 1984 actually came from the BRU sample sent by Montagnier in 1983.

by CNB