As CFS patients continue to feel abandoned by the scientific mainstream, a look back at the saga of fraudulent research, lack of government oversight, and some stolen lab notebooks:
Two years ago, Judy Mikovits and the Whittemore-Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease were triumphant. Mikovits had just published a report inScience pointing to a retrovirus called XMRV as the possible cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, a little-understood illness characterized by debilitating flu-like symptoms that worsen with exertion. A wealthy woman whose daughter has the disease had started the institute in 2007 to study CFS, fibromyalgia, and Gulf War illness—and it wasn’t long before its researchers appeared to have shown they could succeed where two decades of government-led research had produced little.
