As he writes:

“It appears likely, therefore, that these XMRV sequences originated not from the patients but rather from the XMRV VP62 plasmid.”

All the XMRV contamination that happened in other labs (or in cell lines for that matter) can be traced back to mice and were accidental. Either reagents or lab equipment was contaminated with trace amounts of MLV-like viruses, or cell lines were contaminated by MLVs by passage through mouse tissue. XMRV VP62 plasmid on the other hand is an artificial entity created for lab work and XMRV research. This makes an *accidental* contamination highly unlikely and it looks more like it was *put* there.

Funny that, because my impression is that Dr. Mikovits *is* throwing them under the bus with the accusation that it was the Cleveland Clinic that was contaminated. The statement should read “We decided to throw them under the bus when it suited us.”

And I wonder how the Cleveland Clinic managed to contaminate the samples in the WPI lab:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore?term=Khaiboullina

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966842X11001636

Sorry if the link doesn’t work, the reference is… Trends in Microbiology
Volume 19, Issue 11, November 2011, Pages 525-529.

It’s making me worry about the integrity of the tool, which is a problem since virtually every medicinal chemistry paper I’ve read uses one or more Western blots to “prove” the efficacy of a potential drug in vivo.

Science is talking about the allegations against ERVs unnamed designer of the non blurry gels. As they would not have been in possession of the originals.

I’ve seen some talk of this when I followed links to a couple CFI blogs and forums. It seems the allegations are the work of a nut (at least everyone (one person?) who is repeating them sure acts like a nut). First of all, it doesn’t matter because the images are clearly of the same gel in Lombardi et al and in the Ottawa slides. Where they came from is a distraction from the main point. Second of all, I don’t see the extra detail they keep talking about. Perhaps they are confused because the PDF that you can get behind the paywall has higher resolution figures than the reprint that’s been circulating on the CFI forums. It also seems that, from the Tribune article, there is a non-jpeg copy of the Ottawa slideshow, presumably with higher resolution images (and original gel labels preserved?) circulating via email amongst some scientists.