Candid discussion about the two-year XMRV saga from the ‘This Week in Virology' team – Vincent Racaniello, Rich Condit and Alan Dove.
After some jocular introductions and discussions of each other's doings over Christmas, the XMRV discussion takes up the next half an hour or so.
http://www.virology.ws/2012/01/01/twiv-164-six-steps-forward-four-steps-back/
Maybe these people have not noticed how no lab has replicated the proven methodology in either positive paper or that the viruses were polytropic in Lombardi and polytropic in Lo. Maybe they haven’t notice that no evidence of contamination has ever been found in those papers?
Perhaps these people are unaware of the published literature that has repeatedly shown such retroviruses do integrate into the same nucleotide position.
Maybe they have not read in full the assay details of the Lo study that detected polytropic viruses with one assay and then how they again used another assay that failed to detective virus in those 5 patients in Lo et al. in the blood study.
Maybe they have not read the Lombardi paper so that they can see the assay in Lombardi are different to the assay used in the blood study.
I’m thinking they are also not aware that Science changed the labelling on the gel to guard patient identities for ethical reasons and to simplify the evidence presented as the gel in question represented only a fraction of Dr Frank Ruscetti’s western blots.
Maybe they are unaware that no PBMCs were tested prior to blinding and so no person included in the study could have been said to be negative. In other words there were no controls in the blood study.
Perhaps they missed how only Silverman retracted and that the Ruscetti’s and Mikovits did not want to retract, or that Lo and Alter were told to do so.