was it my waning eyesight, or was Judy looking in the direction of huber throughout her (judy's) presentation? talking about why qPCR in non activated cells is useless, how they went through xyz to prove contamination theoretically impossible etc etc she was ninja kungfu shreding to bits possible criticism all the while piercing huber.
could have been my eyesight
No natasa I don't believe it was your eyesight. I made exactly the same observation and Dr J literally shot Huber down into a shrinking wreck in her seat, her backside was almost on the floor as she tried to hide. Huber was then reported to approach people outside asking whether she was badly received. Which she was!!!
Like has been said in the above blog, there are a lot of docs panicking that they are going to be out of a job soon as their theories and protocols go down the pan. Huber looked like she was chewing a wasp throughout the whole thing and had the audacity to claim the Science paper was due to contamination. Of course she keeps missing the fact that "contamination" is only happening in 3-4% of healthy controls but up to 98% in people with ME. She also referred to the "extremely sensitive" PCR methods she used in her testing, which incidentally was so sensitive it couldn't even find one XMRV positive even though she admits it exists in the general population. That was her logic for concluding that the WPI findings are due to contamination.
She acted like some kind of Fairy Godmother issuing a "warning" about XMRV, when during her whole lecture, and believe me it was a lecture, she kept referring to the illness as chronic fatigue or fatigue. This was after admitting that she works with a psychologist and she is a believer in the "virus come virus go" theory. So that just leaves people who had a virus like mono, its gone, but they are still "tired".
And to think I actually paid to hear that crap. Judy Got a standing Ovation, Huber should have got a slow hand clap!!
Now, lastly, I stuck around at the end when nearly everyone was gone and saw Huber at the back of the hall being interviewed and videoed in full flight. I say being interviewed but actually it looked like she was just motor mouthing ten to the dozen. I would really like to know who it was filming her, and was this some kind of sound bite propaganda being prepared or was it part of the conference DVD in which case she was probably given just enough rope to hang herself. It is ironic that she carried out a study and had a chance to disprove the WPI paper but the best she could come up with was a verbal attack using the already disproved contamination nonsense. I am not even sure if in her study using "extremely sensitive" PCR testing she proved that she could find XMRV in a blinded spiked sample before she went on not to find any in "chronic fatigue" patients or healthy controls after testing over 200 samples.
I believe her paper was also refused publication, perhaps someone could clarify that? Perhaps all of the above is an explanation as to why she appeared to be chewing a wasp throughout the whole episode. During Dr Judys presentation she was looking straight down at the floor and when Judy addressed all her nonsense looking straight at her she couldn't bare to make eye contact and slumped down into her chair for the duration of the conference.
She was not an impressive woman and regardless of the outcome of XMRV she is immensely threatened by any advancement in the field of ME, that was plain for anyone to see!!
