Love letter from the Whittemore Peterson Institute

MYRA McClure is an idiot to follow SIMMON WESSELY .SIMON WESSELY CLAIMS THAT RESERCHERS SHOULD NOT WORK ON XMRV BECAUSE ME PATIENTS BEHAVE APPALINGLY and are vile .The sort of language once used BY THOSE IN POWER to condemn AIDS patients or those WHICH ONCE WAS CLAIMED BY THEM to be a gay disease . He also claims that he has suffered and is in great danger more than gulf war soldiers experience in the gulf war? Being shot at blown up or clearing landmines is preferable? .According to Simon or Simon says he feels safer working in the gulf .He has also worked on gulf war syndrome in the 1990s for the government who like spending money and really care? .he also says he has retired. Which is good news hopefully he will move out to the gulf soon. Myra McClure has also stepped down she says nothing on godâs earth would make me work on ME again, another statement from a spoilt brat book of sayings pointedly accusing the people she wishes or doesnât wish to help. except she hasnât decided to quit she is attending the same a psychiatric conference to talk TO PSYCHIATRISTS OR HER FRIENDS about XMRV AND THE CONTAMINATION THEORY WHICH she herself instigated. These are the sort of am so fragile and persecuted SOBBING VICTIMS who lock people with ME UP and then complain .It reminds me of bullies at a school they break someoneâs arm and then claim the other person started it. ...Kings collage London Simons home goes on about good practice ethics as does the BMJ .strange how ethics good science has been avoided for ME and XMRV research. DO these organisations with Myra and Simon know whant professionalism morals and ethics are or am I to feel sorry because they are so weak and defenceless and the real TRAGIC victims of THIS a disease they wish to help or not help understand?

I often scatter my condescending attacks upon others with foolish spelling mistakes, but try to avoid doing so while attacking other's spelling. Those posts are so cringe-worthy it's made me shudder with fear at the possibility of ever having come across in a similar way.

I can't stop laughing. Thanks for the entertainment ERV and illiterate person from the "Wittemore" Peterson Institute. One should not accuse another of not being able to spell when one can't spell themselves. In the future, when you write something like "If your so smart" you should change it to you're, nonsense is one word not two etc.

Ron, you are a cunt.

I like how ron didn't even take the time to notice that the post he was responding to was written a year and a half ago, and the most recent reply seventeen months. I guess when you have that much rage you have to let it out else risk spontaneously combusting.

LOL!

I wonder who of the not so many people at Wittemore "Ron" is.

Ron's rantings make me full of happy because I appreciate irony.

RE: the wedding. I hope your feet hurt for a good long while and the smile doesn't wash off for weeks.

Enjoy!

Show him your boobies. That'll hush him up.

Yeah, but tell the truth. Don't you have to feel sorry for someone who's so filled with feelings of impotence and rage? I do.

ron - whatever's making you so miserable, let it go. It's not worth it.

(What smurfette said.)

Well, ERV, as love letters' go (and I have had my fair share lol), I have to say, that one takes the biscuit!

O to be so popular. Do these 'nutbars' ever think they will not be traced?

Still, I doubt it was the WPI - I mean surely they can spell?! :)

Awww... you get the cutest little fans.

To be marginally fair, calling someone a "cunt" is ridiculous. Cunts are wonderful, beautiful, delightful things. There's nothing shameful about them, and nothing disgusting unless you have some kind of infection or just don't, like, ever bathe.

On the other hand, think about shit. What is it? It's waste. Leftovers. It's the stuff that was in your food that's so utterly useless that your body, honed by three billion years of evolution to use with competitive efficiency whatever resources are available, couldn't find anything better to do with it than, maybe, use it to stick together other stuff that isn't even good for that, on its way out of your body. It stinks. It stains. It spreads disease. It's squishy and attracts flies. It comes in endless varieties that are all more or less uniformly disgusting, with certain exceptions. And, in fact, aside from being pretty loathsome, it's literally not good for anything unless it's buried and rotting and helping plants to grow.

So really, if she was publicly accusing other scientists of fraud/bribery/conspiracy, without any evidence to back up her claims, she'd be a real piece of shit.

Hm. I'm a former Virginian. Nobody except a Virginia resident (of the past ~15 years) would know WTF is the SOL, never mind would think to use it in an insult. (okay, my cat could pass the SOL, and your pup could probably pass advanced.) That narrows things even further.

Ten bucks says Dr. Judy Mikovits was googling herself. lol. stay classy, 'ron'!

So did you cc to SBC Internet Services? Come on, "buddy", grow a pair! ;-}

To be fair, @Azkyroth, just because our feeble mammal bodies couldn't use it doesn't mean shit is bad stuff. Glorius fungi arise from all sorts of scat, and the nutrients that we can't use (good old NPK) makes the trees, grasses and all sorts of vegetation grow tall and strong.

You're right; I did leave out fungi in the second to last sentence of my post.

Have you looked at the name of the company? That is not the WPI.

wow....I think you have a fan!

Yo ho ho, take the bottle from ron

@Terri -- it is the Whittemore Peterson Institute --ironically spelled incorrectly in this case -- the WPI would not have entered this information, it would have been some computer techie somewhere entering the deets for the IP address. Do a whois IP address lookup for the IP address -- it does go back to the WPI. If you google "Wittemore Peterson Institute", you will find that many people spell it incorrectly.

Ron's comment would have deserved comic sans font.

This person actually types âHAHAâ in emails.

Repeatedly.

Anyone who does that is capable of anything.

If it wasnât so obvious that this oneâs an incompetent cretin, Iâd be worried.

& now Iâve got the shootout at the end of Blue Velvet stuck in my head.

Love Love letters straight from your heart
Keep us so near while apart
I'm not alone in the night
When I can have all the love you write

I, personally, would find it to be hilarious if you 'grew a pair', considering the miracle of modern science that would be. Lesbian couples around the world would rejoice at having access to a means of conception.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

what is this "wittemore peterson institute" supposed to be, anyway? can't be a very big organization if it gets its IP connectivity through an adsl line...

That is still not the name. So people are only thinking this is connected.

How does ERV feel about the new isolate of XMRV?

Nice tip, HFM. LOL! Makes more sense now than "shit out of luck bullshit". I can totally picture "Ron" behind the letter.

By the way, this post is on the first page of Google for [Whittemore Peterson Institute], right below Wikipedia and Facebook.

Just browsing the amazing WPI website and found this:

http://www.wpinstitute.org/news/docs/WPI_pressrel_061411.pdf

they kindly ask for DONATIONS to join a seminar. they truly are impressive. I bet the ron wrote this document.

I am picturing an enraged spotty 14 year old perspiring away over an unattended keyboard waiting for his mom to get off work and drive him to GameStop.

I am also picturing Abbie bursting into the room wearing a pink bridesmaid dress with Everlast headgear, throwing a pair of boxing gloves at his lap and shouting "Parking lot! Now bitch!"

At which point Ron pees himself and starts to cry.

And scene

*jazz hands*

I would find 'ron' much funnier if he did not read like jail mail from rural clients on indigent defense contracts.

I just love how he is so perfectly and beautifully unaware of your gender.

That makes him just transcendently awesome.

Terry - you're wrong. The WHOIS for WPI contains the same misspelling. I know you idolise the MPI (Mouse Piss Institute) but even world-class geniuses like them are capable of employing techs who make spelling errors.

Hilarious. Oh man, the irony, at first glance, was awesome, but then the kicker of being from the WPI? Amazeballs, really. LOL

It must be heartwarming to know you have such loving fans.

LOL

OT...

that is a really great picture of Jerry and arnie over @ why evolution is true

Elburto,

Actually that entry was made by a sbc/AT&T DSL tech. Or, more likely, the person who took their phone order for DSL service.

If you're going to go all PZ "I got a letter" aren't you supposed to use that one font for idiots? ;p

You are made of win.

You have totally pwned JM, ron and the WPI.

This post wins all of my internets for the day. Well done, good Mademoiselle.

Erv is a dude now? I never would have guessed that there was a "chop-shop" in Antarctica.

(Lightbulb moment)!

Ron is the contamination at the WPI. He's replicated to the point that he has the ability to write email but has not evolved, probably never will, where he can understand the nuances and social skills required for an email.

Be afraid people. If might escape!!!

Foxtrot :>)

I'm guessing that ron is short for moron.

Wow, fail on "ron" for consistent misuse of "your" instead of "you're", poor punctuation, terrible capitalization, and random other misspellings. Apparently irony, like scientific ethics, is lost on on this poor individual.

Somewhat less crazy forum:

If we truly didn't have any, then people like ERV would make them up. In fact, I wouldn't put it past her for fabricating half the crap she posts.

Comment 1
Comment 2

Run the IP#s yourself. I cant edit those.

Oh look, evidence to support my claims! Demonstration of a novel concept for an XMRV True Believer!

If the WPI were a "real" scientific institute, they would investigate to see who was either posting trashy and threatening comments from their internet connection, or who was spoofing their IP#.

On the other hand, they probably have enough legal sense to never start an investigation or ask a question that you don't want to know the answer to.

Erv, I just thought of a question. Those poor monkeys that were infected with XMRV. Is the virus that they produced during their viremia "high fidelity", or "low fidelity"? In other words, if multiple samples of virus were collected from various tissue compartments, concentrated and sequenced multiple times, would they show the âquasi-speciesâ character expected from poor replication fidelity? If so, wouldn't that essentially exclude the finding of essentially identical XMRV sequences as being due to natural infective transmission in the âwildâ?

Oh but ERV, you could've expertly doctored those images or it could be a conspiracy where a scienceblogs.com IT admin could've gone directly into the database and inserted those IP address numbers. MUAHAHA! Sorry, giving the crazies ideas.

There is a large scale proper replication study on its way soon.

You know, proper science.

There are billions of years of evolution ahead of this, even the simplest of these micro machines makes all this human piffle look absurd against its beauty.

Scientists - all of you - get this idea into your heads that somehow your involvment in all of this goes beyond just working it all out - as if your own ego's will collapse the world into your vision.

Quantum physics aside, this is the vanity of academics.

Do you think Carl Sagan, or Richard Feynman would be giggling at the prospect of on line trash talk, or calling people 'cunts' online?!

Hey...maybe...!

@David

Nobody is doing this independent replication study. Mikovits will try to "replicate" her own results with freshly collected samples that are all collected by an independent phlebotomist at the same time and in the same manner. That is not the kind of "independent replication" that an (independent) scientist can undertake.

Therefore, your implication about these studies being "proper science", as if all those other independently performed studies weren't proper science, makes you a proper idiot.

If Mikovits had any balls, she would do just PCR on these samples and get this over quickly. After all, she found those 67% in Science using "just PCR". Suddenly she will now need to do 42 days of culturing. For each and every one of the 300 samples. Where is the need for 42 days of culturing mentioned in the Science paper? Proper replication my ass.

I am all for the Lipkin study BTW and I think it's great that everyone can just do whatever they think will get them to the best results (and thus they are allowed to divert from the originally published methods), but it rather shows that "proper replications" are really red herrings.

And I am sure that Sagan and Feynman wouldn't be bitching about tone. I think they would bitch about the things Judy "they skewed their experimental design in order to not find XMRV in the blood" Mikovits and Frank "I do not know how they think they get away with this ethically" Ruscetti have said though.

Someone on the mecfsforum has already said that they will only believe the results of the Lipkin study if they back up Mikovits' original findings *sigh*

Ok, Ok, someone at some forum has expressed some expression of probable idiocy. But why do you care?
Why respond by stooping to the same level?
Crank e-mails, who cares, this detritus will just evaporate.

Why are people wallowing around at the bottom of the intellectual pond? I dont loose sleep over creationists, I sleep comfortably in my own reasoning and my applied efforts to understand the natural world.

I was wrong to call that study a replication study, and I never meant to imply everything else was not proper science. I'm saying this is not proper science, a cynical response to an as yet done study, followed by a reply that some crank from the opposing camp is experessing essentialy, errr....the same thing!!!

I am a proper idiot for hanging around here I think.

I haven't been able to read anything by Simon Wessely for quite some time now due to feeling the blood throb in my eyeballs whenever I do. Now it's started to become the same way when reading the vast majority of pro-XMRV posts online; I was literally getting a tic in my eye for a while there and decided it was time to stop.

Basically the only out I can see for the WPI on this one is the serology test (aside from the million-to-one shot of them actually being able to differentiate cases from controls with PCR). If they find lots of antibodies in patients and not controls, with samples being taken from 6 different longtime CFS physicians located around the country, I don't see how it won't provide enough fuel to keep the XMRV debate open for many years to come.

Some in the pro-XMRV camp have taken to quoting the following- "The dumbest virus is smarter than the smartest virologist". It does make sense as XMRV is one fucking incredibly dumb virus.

Things do get frustrating when you realise that some kind of simple James Randi set up...

"I have 50 phials of blood here, and 1 million dollars...
now, who can tell me simply, which..."

would end it all.

At the 15th International Retrovirology Conference there were 3 important take home messages RE: XMRV:

1) In an ongoing multilaboratory study (Mikovits was a co-auther and is involved), the WPI found XMRV +ve patients - sometimes.

The plot thickened however. In their early trials, patients were not blinded, and the WPI found previously positive patients +ve, and none of their controls +ve.

In a later trial however, the same patients were tested blind. In this case, the WPI were the only people to detect XMRV, however their detection was inconsistent (some +ves were neg, some -ves were +ve).

Note: By XMRV +ve, they were looking at 'MLV-like seqs' by PCR. The 'previously +ve' patients were patients found XMRV +ve in previous studies. The '-ve' controls were 2 patients that were 'characterised negative'. That is, all the labs involved had previously tested them in whatever way they liked and all were agreed they were XMRV negative.

2) An Abbot Diagnostics sponsored development of a blood screening programme threw up some interesting findings (if XMRV is endemic, Abbot stand to make a lot of money from developing a high-throughput diagnostic for screening blood donations).
a) When they used samples from monkey models as controls, they found infected samples were +ve for all 3 proteins they were detecting.
b) They found a few positives in the 1000 US blood doners they tested - but in each and every case, only 1 of 3 proteins was positive.
c) They showed that there was high cross-reactivity between the antibodies they were using for XMRV and HTLV, suggesting these could be false positives due to antibody cross-reactivity.

d) During 'round table discussions' the next day, the PhD student discussing this Abbott work was verbally abused by Mikovits to the extent that the student was visibly upset and had to leave.

3) Francis Ruscetti presented work on a B-cell line from CFS patients that also had lymphomas, and found them to produce XMRV.

His hypothesis was that XMRV transformed these B-cells.
During questions after his presentation, he admitted that the B-cells were also infected with EBV, but that it 'wasn't active'. Right.

Hope that makes sense, in a hurry. Basically, pretty much only Mikovits can consistently detect XMRV in patients previously found positive, but this consistency is lost when the same samples are blinded - notably her negatives start turning positive. Development of XMRV diagnostics by a pharmaceutical company that stands to profit from XMRV in the population are also providing negative results - puts an interesting twist on Mikovits 'conspiracy'.

"His hypothesis was that XMRV transformed these B-cells.
During questions after his presentation, he admitted that the B-cells were also infected with EBV, but that it 'wasn't active'. Right."

There are some nice papers I could send his way on the restricted EBV latency (presumably that's what he means by wasn't active"?) programme seen in different kinds of B cell lines/cancers - you only really see EBV activation/reactivation in primary EBV infection.

David @#49

"Why are people wallowing around at the bottom of the intellectual pond?"

Because over a century of biological and chemical research confirms Darwin's original conjecture. The bottom of the pond is wherein lies the action.

Prometheus you are correct, we are nothing but an adhesion of pond scum, trying to figure out how to tell other boxes of DNA to fuck off out of it.

Oh no - after all that high handedness I swore.

Incidentally, does this dude know anything about viruses?

HIV 1 (a cousin to the AIDS and XMRV viruses)

WTF?!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-teitelbaum-md/chronic-fatigue-syndr…