Firestormm,
How would you judge the negative studies now that we know about the VP 62 clone. If you are so eager to believe in replications how would you explain away that huge problem?
There is a lot of sense in the argument that Lombardi et al has never been replicated.
The conserved portion of the genome (pol) would be the same for any strain of MLV, including VP62 or any others WPI might have found. The pol gene MUST be present and no mutation survives if it changes, thus it is called the conserved portion... So although WPI focused on gag and env, many of the negative studies also tested the pol gene and they therefore ruled out the entire MLV family. So the VP62 clone issue is probably a non-issue.
I fail to see your point. Not mentioning 5AZA is a BIG no, no. Time will tell and I think that time will come very shortly.
I agree, leaving out important information is a scientific sin, and the science community is slow to forgive something like that. However, I don't think the 5AZA issue with the gel images is very important at this point. The XMRV hypothesis has been proven wrong in a scientific process, due to all the PCR testing, and the consensus is in and at this point any further studies will be formalities. Even if a new study found XMRV, it would not be believed by the scientific community, not unless there was some pretty major new development.
Cohort issues alone make most of those negative studies DEFINITELY not replicated.
That is definitely INCORRECT. Only a few of the negative studies had problem cohorts. Most were cohorts of real ME/CFS patients. Several used fresh samples from very carefully defined cohorts. For example, the second CDC study (Satterfield et al) used the CCC criteria, they included PEM as a cohort requirement. I have seen a list of studies on another form that has that wrong, so I can understand why you might think the cohorts were all bad, whoever made that list did not do their fact-checking.