'politics' seems to be Mikovits's way of saying 'I can't get anything published'. Might there be some valid scientific reasons for that? I don't think politics is her trouble... although she is trying to politicize the issue herself with these comments. See my comment above.
Kurt, the WPI are of the opinion that their studies are not getting published for reasons other than the science. Of course you don't have to believe them but are you forgetting the hoops that the authors of the Science paper had to jump through to get that published? No one can accuse those authors, including Judy Mikovits, of not knowing their science. The paper was extremely rigorous, and it took the authors months to get it to the level of proof that Science demanded. If you compare this to the quality of recent PACE trial, or some of the papers that have been published in PloSone for example, then I don't honestly see how you can accuse the WPI of being sloppy with their science.
The simple matter is that the journals don't want to touch XMRV for whatever reason. Maybe it's just too much of a political hot potato for them, or maybe they are being lent on. I have no way of knowing that this is the case, for certain, but I do not believe that the WPI lacks rigour in their science. If you watched the Alter/Lo presentation, you would have seen that the WPI's research is good enough for Harvey Alter, a world class virologist. But apparently it's not good enough for lesser scientists.
Until we see the peer-reviewed reports this is hearsay.
Yes, some of it is hearsay... But that's the point... In the absence of published studies, it is these leaks of information that are giving many people in the ME community hope.
You might not approve of patients hanging any, of all, of their hope onto XMRV, and it might not be a healthy thing to put all of our eggs in one basket, but XMRV does certainly give us a narrative to follow, and a glimmer of hope to hang onto. It also gives the media a CFS/ME news story to follow and develop, which i believe has been exceptionally helpful.
So I think you should allow people to follow the positive XMRV narratives as well as being subjected to a barrage of negative XMRV studies by curiously incurious researchers who seem intent on denying any connection between CFS and XMRV, even though it has not yet been disproved.
We know that Judy has further potentially significant XMRV research results to share, because she has said so. You can call this hearsay if you want to.
Things could change, some labs have not found contamination until after they leaked information they found XMRV... Also, there are researchers continuing to elaborate on the contamination angle, they will likely also have more to say. Silverman, for example, is studying a possible source of XMRV contamination in his lab that could affect other labs using his reagents or samples (which may include WPI). So taking a balanced view, maybe there will be something new on both sides of the debate.
Yes, things could change, and already have changed. Do you remember how everyone was accusing Judy of only detecting mouse contamination? Well the science has moved on now, and suddenly no one is accusing her of that anymore. Now everyone has realised that XMRV is real, but instead of investigating it with the curiosity of a scientific mind, they are not detecting XMRV themselves, and because it doesn't fit into an expected pattern of behaviour, everyone is now accusing her of contamination, but from a cell line. How things change!
If you watch the Harvey/Lo presentation, they seemed certain that very small differences in PCR protocol can make all the difference between a positive and negative results, especially because they are testing at the limits, with extremely low titres.
I have commented on this in another thread, this report lacks 'face validity'. Just seems improbable that a low-resolution test like a full genomic profile could pick out a viral fragment in plasma that much more sensitive PCR tests missed. The difference in sensitivity can be thousands of orders of magnitude between the two types of test, there is just no comparison. As I understand the math, XMRV would have to be flooding the plasma for gene profiling to find it. But that is not what WPI says is happening. The fact there were no LTR chains is also very strange, without LTR, how did the XMRV fragment integrate into the 'chimera'? Also, did they run all the contamination studies that have been now shown to be important? More than just mouse mitochondria DNA... This sounds more like what you expect from finding a HERV, which can be partial fragments like that. Maybe this will be the 'big news' being promised, but I think we need to wait to see how it turns out, and see what peer reviewers make of their finding.
I happen to share you scepticism regarding the 'chimera' news, because it doesn't seem to be based on any facts yet.
At the end of the day, all of this is going to play out in the science, no matter what our personally opinions are. But I just wanted to point out to you, Kurt, that some of us still feel hopeful about XMRV, based purely on the evidence. We are also interested in other research as well, such as the recent protein study which seems quite hopeful.
Maybe I'm being unfair to you, and I've misrepresented what you've said, but it does seem like you are keen to stamp on people's optimism. Apologies if my emotions are colouring my perception here.
