I think you really have to be careful with this slant Eric. Suggesting that Dr. Peterson who has focused on CFS patients for over 30 years - would torpedo a study that could benefit them simply to get back at the WPI just doesn't make sense to me .....Dr. Peterson is very well liked by his patients and his peers and has been for a long time. It's far easier for me to believe, given negative study after negative study, that the WPI is simply wrong rather than that Dr. Peterson has lost his integrity..
Dr. Levy is in the picture as well. By implicating Dr. Peterson in that manner you're also suggesting that one of the top HIV specialists in the world - a man who co-discovered HIV - somehow doesn't know how to follow the WPI's published culture procedures or do a culture test - and he is also trying to get back at them - even though he has no connection to the WPI.
The best explanation for me is that they did their best and they didn't find it. Everybody has a stake in getting this right- they all know that the Lipkin and BWG and other studies are coming up and that this issue will definitively solved at some point. Somebody is going to be proved very, very wrong in the end - because of that they all have a big stake in doing their studies correctly and determining the best they can if XMRV is or is not there.
It just doesn't make sense that anyone would try and sabotage XMRV because the truth will come out in the long run.
Cort, i think we also have to see that more or less nothing has seemed to make sense in the entire XMRV/MRV story so far. You could even say nothing in ME/CFS has ever made much sense.
I agree it would not make sense and please be careful as well to realize i did not try to come up with an explanation for why Peterson did what he did. I think it's better not to speculate too much and leave blanks where there are blanks.
But i still think if Peterson, at the point where he could see they are not finding the virus, did not try to establish this exchange, this was a mistake that can hardly be explained. And it could have extreme consequences for this research and all the patients, so it's serious. Can you give me a good reason why it would have been ok to not do this? Especially if ones sees that everybody who so far reported positive results did so after contacting the WPI. This only leaves two likely conclusions, in my mind.
a) The WPI has some knowledge that is needed to find the virus and is not easy to find out for yourself
b) The WPI's methodology will produce false positives, through contamination or another way
So i think you need to contact them and let them share their knowledge with you so that you can either find the virus or show that b) is correct.
Many people have been well liked. I don't say i can explain what's going on, i've said many times it seems strange, but i can see danger and possible actions that are not right.
They have sequenced their findings in different labs around the world. So what they found was XMRV and not some mouse DNA or not (i really don't know, it's not a rhetorical question)? Also they have taken many other steps to check for contamination. Given this, does it really make more sense to you that there is contamination and they just can't find it after so long than that the negative papers are wrong?
I don't say all the negative papers are part of a conspiracy. But are the authors of the positive ones incompetent or liars? I don't think it's enough to come up with 0/0 and say "case closed", even if you are an experienced researcher, given all the other facts. Why not contact the WPI and ask for their help? Is that asked too much? And it would seem like an intelligent thing to do.