A Breakthrough - Then came some big news; Dr. Folks announced he’d found the virus in all six of Dr. Bell’s samples, 2/3 of the Atlanta patients and none of the local controls. Rerunning the test at a different stringency yielded similar results - it appeared a legitimate breakthrough had occurred. At the CDC, Dr. Gunn reported that the CFS jokes had stopped and the agency began, for the first time, to bring its resources to bear on the disease.* They lined up the purest sample of patients they could find; people who met the definition but without any psychiatric overlays.* If Dr. DeFreitas’ test could differentiate these patients and healthy controls, both she and the CFS community would be in business. This, Asst. Director Dowdle said “is what we’re good at.”
There was still one looming problem; Dr. DeFreitas’ primers appeared to work on her patients and some CDC patients, but they still failed to identify HTLV-2 in a standard cell line - something Dr. Folks felt they should have done given the genetic similarity between the two viruses.* Finding HTLV-2 in a standard cell line would indicate that Dr. DeFreitas had found a legitimate virus instead of some gene sequences belonging to what is called an ‘endogenous retrovirus’.*
The Unraveling - in the midst of all this, trouble reared its head. In a Sept 1991 meeting of the CFS Advisory Council, a wide-ranging group containing the central figures in the viral hunt, a Scottish molecular biologist and CFS researcher, John Gow , who had been collaborating with Dr. DeFreitas on a separate replication study, announced that despite spending “many months and many thousands of pounds” he had been unable to find any sign of an exogenous (acquired) retrovirus.* Based on his results, he felt Dr. DeFreitas had found nothing more than an endogenous (benign) retrovirus.* All the major players, with the notable exception of Dr. DeFreitas - locked in a custody battle over her son - were there.
Upon questioning, it became clear that Dr. Gow had used a different (brand) of enzyme in one part of the study.* Later the Gow team insisted that it made no difference: an enzyme was an enzyme and the one that they'd used had worked for them for years. In the aftermath they blamed Dr. DeFreitas for not being forthcoming with all of her work, and reported that she had not responded to a request that they visit Wistar so they could do a hands-on overview of her techniques. They noted that as University scientists (and long-time CFS researchers) they had no axe to grind.
Dr. Folks felt Dr. DeFreitas’ inability or unwillingness to attend the meeting or send a representative in her place hurt her.* He noted that the specific enzyme Dr. DeFreitas used had not been in her paper and he felt that any lab that followed the procedures based on her paper should be able to reproduce her results. In private, despite his earlier success, Dr. Folks reported that his team was finding much the same results as Dr. Gow's team."