Jay Levy, a virologist at the Univer*sity of California, San Francisco, has a window in his closet-sized office that looks out into the laboratory where, in the 1980s, he became one of the first scientists to isolate HIV. After his discovery was scooped by other researchers, Levy turned his attention to chronic fatigue and started a long but fruitless search for an infectious cause.
Now, Levy is putting the finishing touches on what could be the most thorough response yet to Mikovits's Science paper, adopting the same cell-culture techniques to detect the virus and using samples from the same patients. He's done this with the help of Daniel Peterson, who left the WPI in 2010 for what Peterson says are "personal reasons". Peterson has questioned the institute's singular pursuit of XMRV, a research direction that was pursued without his consultation.
Mikovits says that she kept the XMRV work secret from Peterson over fears he would tell his patients, and left his name off the original Science manuscript until a reviewer questioned the omission. When asked whether that episode contributed to his departure, he says, "I was surprised at the secrecy and lack of collaboration." As for his motivation to team up with Levy: "I'm just trying to get to the truth. It's my only motive, because this is such a deserving group of patients who need to know what's going on."
