The Magnificent Folly of Great American News Reporting

The charge of the Light BrigadeI don’t know John Crewd­son, but I’m sorry he’s out of a job. He’s the sub­ject of this post at the Chicago Reader:

The Nobel Prize in medi­cine was awar­ded last month to Luc Montag­nier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pas­teur Insti­tute in Paris for dis­cov­er­ing the HIV virus in 1983 — but not to the Amer­ican sci­ent­ist Robert Gallo.

This res­ult might be inter­preted as the ulti­mate vin­dic­a­tion of reporter John Crewd­son, who in 1988, in a 50,000-word story in the Chicago Tribune, argued that Gallo — cred­ited back then with codis­cov­er­ing the virus — had merely redis­covered Montagnier’s virus, which had been sent to Gallo as a pro­fes­sional cour­tesy. Con­tinue read­ing