Dj vu all over again
I just started to read this paper carefully, and was immediately struck with dj vu.
For those with typically short attention spans, and those too young to remember, there was a shift in medical politics apparent in research papers published during disputes over AIDS. During the period when denial was politically acceptable, many studies of physical abnormalities with suggestions of viral involvement were attacked as seriously flawed, particularly for the way they dealt with samples from sick people diagnosed with conditions which might not be AIDS. Researchers trying to avoid criticism couldn't produce strong results.
When finding a single viral cause became a political hot button, there were immediate studies by respectable researchers using pooled samples from up to a dozen separate AIDS cases. These seemed mysteriously exempt from criticism, except by 'lunatic fringe' critics. We now have a shift from concern over contamination, taken to extremes such as demands that positive and negative controls should be handled in separate buildings, to use of pooled samples to get levels of abnormal proteins up to a point where they can be detected.
Researcher affiliations include SUNY, Columbia, Albert Einstein schools of medicine and Uppsala University. Tandem mass spectrographic equipment is not cheap.
The major change is not what they are finding, (Dr. Baraniuk showed significant anomalies in CSF of ME/CFS patients,) it is who is finding things, and how much money they are spending.