Pax and Poetic Justice
It's hard to get off a joke in this area, where the truth has been surreal.
I've read through the topic, trying to skip a possible flame war. My own take on Judy Mikovits' statement is that it was very deliberate. I cannot believe she would do this without approval from the authors of the paper to which she alludes. In fact, I would propose she had tacit approval from FDA, NIH and PNAS. Turn things around and imagine what they are experiencing. Every day some number of telephone calls and emails hit them asking what has happened to this paper on what they considered an obscure topic. Having the alleged target of a plot announce that the publication is on its way should defuse a great deal of hostility. Making her co-chair of a session at the coming workshop is another indication.
As for having more than one paper, let me ask you "Can you imagine any researcher getting positive results, and suddenly quitting?" If you have one paper in the pipeline, and you are getting results because you finally have the hard-won technique down pat, you are going to ride that horse for all it's worth. Expect ever positive paper to produce a follow up.
Peace, people.
Meanwhile, back on the actual science front, I've been thinking about possible scientific booby traps which got several groups into their present unenviable situation. I went back and reread the Science paper to see where they mentioned activation of immune cells. They certainly mentioned this in talking about culturing virus, (which nobody looking for negative results appears to have attempted, even knowing the right cell line (LnCaP) to use.) The WPI group appear to have obtained results from PCR without explicitly activating cells, though they later advised this.
It was at this point where it suddenly hit me that the deniers had been "hoist on their own petard". Remember the finding of hypermutation in sequences inserted in PBMC caused by APOBEC3 enzymes? If you leave provirus sitting in those cells long, it will be mutated, foiling PCR. If you stimulate (activate) the cells, and they insert new viral sequences, these will not be mutated immediately, giving you a chance to amplify them before they change. Plasmids outside cells will not be mutated, so spiked positive samples will show up.
The natural way these immune cells are stimulated is in response to active viral infections. Now, this takes us back to a logical short circuit in the deniers reasoning. They excluded patients with signs of recent active viral infections, (sometimes burying this fact through two levels of indirection in citations,) then went ahead with tests for virus. Most patients in the WPI study were very sick, most had signs of active viral infection. The WPI researchers did not need to specifically stimulate immune cells because they were activated by actual virus. Those with the logical fallacy in reasoning could not detect XMRV without activating cells. If it was there, it was not inserted recently, and the sequences were mutated.
There is considerable poetic justice in this view.