The moment an oppressive system begins to fail is when it loses the support of its best and brightest minds. It is for this reason that we so proudly welcome Dr. Judy Mikovits to the Advisory Board of GreenMedInfo. In a different time, the background, character, and publications of Dr. Mikovits would have put her on the fast-track to head one of our most prestigious public health entities, whether that be the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control, or even the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Mikovits earned her BA from the University of Virginia and her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from George Washington University and started her research career in the lab of legendary retrovirology researcher, Dr. Frank Ruscetti, who along with Bernie Poiesz and Robert Gallo, isolated the first human retrovirus, HTLV-1. As a post-doc, Mikovits helped create the first infectious molecular clone of that retrovirus. She rose from being an entry-level lab technician to become director of the Lab of Antiviral Drug Mechanisms at the National Cancer Institute before leaving to direct the Cancer Biology program at EpiGenX Pharmaceuticals in Santa Barbara, CA. Dr. Mikovits has published more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and before she entered the chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) world, her work had never been questioned.
In 2009 she shocked the scientific world by publishing evidence that a recently discovered retrovirus, XMRV, (xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus) was found in 67% of a well-defined chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) population and only 3.7% of healthy controls. This research was later confirmed by Dr. Shyh-Ching Lo of the Food and Drug Administration of Dr. Harvey Alter of the National Institutes of Health. The findings of Lo and Alter were of a wider group of murine leukemia viruses which included XMRV, but the results were even more robust. In a different chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) group the rate of infection by these viruses was 86% and 6.6% among healthy controls.
In a different time, in a better world, these results would have been celebrated, and great efforts would have been expended trying to find how to help these patients. Instead of jubilation, the response of much of the scientific community was to attack her findings. In a discipline which prides itself on a sober, methodical approach, the reaction to her findings was a hysterical one, followed by research which dramatically departed from her methods and patient profiles.
It is interesting to note that the same Dr. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University who proclaimed the retroviral theory of chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) to be dead in 2012, would quietly admit in 2013 that among a different group of chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) patients there was evidence of a retrovirus in 85% of those patients. But rather than boldly exploring that finding, Lipkin is choosing to study the abnormal pattern of inflammatory markers (chemokines and cytokines) that underlie this disorder only in the those without evidence of retroviral infection. This is also confirmation and validation of the work of Dr. Mikovits, as she presented evidence of an abnormal pattern of chemokines and cytokines in this disorder to an invitation-only meeting for twenty-four leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health which was held on July 22, 2009.
But Dr. Mikovits is no fading violet, content to fade into the background as more powerful men in the scientific community attempt to take credit for her work and marginalize a desperately ill patient population. Many have commented that Mikovits has a "quality of fierceness" that is rarely seen in scientists today. But even more remarkable is her compassion for patients struggling with cancer and diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and autism. She seeks out patients, befriends them, and listens to their stories in an attempt to understand their diseases. She believes this is the method of classical scientific investigation, formulating a scientific hypothesis based on information from those most intimately connected to a problem.