Yes, that caught my eye too Oceanblue. Particularly interesting in relation to the PCR inhibition problem identified by O'Keefe, and as you say, Mikovits also reported that for some samples, several rounds of testing were sometimes required in order to get a few inconsistent positives and conclude that the sample was positive.
Those observations of Mikovits probably seemed very dubious to sceptical commentators, leading them to suggest extreme and unrealistic scenarios where Mikovits had just lost all perspective and tested the patient samples again and again until they were found positive, while not doing the same for healthy control samples. Those kinds of suggestions always seemed to me to be utterly unrealistic, insulting and disrespectful of an experienced and highly competent expert in this field, and developments in the last year, including this observation in this study, indicate that all of these very difficult problems that are being wrestled with really are yielding genuinely groundbreaking developments in the understanding of PCR. And O'Keefe's work, apparently confirmed in this study too, suggests that Mikovits may well have been right about this point...and ahead of her time...
O'Keefe's finding may well prove to be the beginning of the most significant development of all in those entire story, in the long term, because if the new science that is being uncovered here reveals that PCR has weaknesses both in false positives (previously unknown effects of previously unknown widespread forms of contamination) and false negatives (contamination from the test itself which affects subsequent tests, and perhaps further unknown reasons that cause false negatives), then this better understanding of PCR would have widespread implications beyond retrovirology.
As I've said many times before, similar anomalous results that have not proved reproducible have been discarded for decades; problems introduced with many rounds of PCR remain unexplained and researchers differ on how many rounds are too many - but throwing those anomalies in the bin because you can't reproduce them is just not good enough. One should be curious about such matters; a curious scientist should want to get to the bottom of this question rather than dismissing such results with unproven explanations. Both in the laboratory and in the surgery, far too many unexplained anomalous results are discarded and forgotten, thrown into a wastebasket as rubbish rather than treated as a rich source of clues about the frontiers of knowledge. As patients, we understand this process all too well, our illness has been fundamentally defined out of existence on the medical map by systematising such a rubbish bin. It seems ironic, but may perhaps be inevitable, that the scientific solution to our problems may end up with us digging up various scraps of discarded paper from past research and testing, and saying "wow! now we finally understand what all those strange anomalies were about!"
