Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

How a collapsing scientific hypothesis led to a lawsuit and arrest


From bad news to surreal events

Some of the data in Mikovits' original Science paper turned out to be a result of the contamination identified by other labs; a partial retraction of that paper was issued in September, in the same edition that contained the nine-lab, government-backed study.

About a week later, Mikovits was out of a job. One of her former collaborators had requested a cell line used in her work, and she refused. The Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease a private institute associated with the University of Nevada's medical school in Reno, and where Mikovits was director—became involved. Mikovits was apparently asked by the Institute to provide the cells. Again she refused, and was fired for insubordination.

That wasn't even the worst part of her week. A science blogger who does research on retroviruses obtained a copy of a slide used in a talk by Mikovits. It showed some of the same data used in the original Science paper, but the data had been relabeled and was then described as part of a very different experiment. Even a charitable interpretation of Mikovits' attempts to explain the discrepancy indicates a serious lapse of research ethics. (Oddly, Mikovits claims that she had a dispute with the Institute that was focused on its partnership in producing the tests for XMRV. As noted above, an earlier article quotes her as endorsing those tests.)

By the beginning of November, her situation was completely unravelling. Not only was Mikovits unwilling to turn over a cell line to other researchers, but she took her lab notebooks and various computer files with her when she was fired from Whittemore Peterson. These were the property of the institute, which responded by filing a lawsuit demanding their return and receiving a temporary restraining order that required Mikovits to preserve the materials.

Although Mikovits retained a lawyer who contested the charges, within a week she was arrested in California. The charge: possession of stolen property. Apparently, the Whittemore Peterson Institute was taking no chances when it came getting its notebooks back. In yet another surreal twist, ScienceInsider was told that the charges were related to a break-in that was reported on November 9—several days after the lawsuit was filed.

The science worked like it should, even when people didn't

There's no shortage of human frailty on display in this story. Mikovits was clearly wedded to her idea long after the evidence supporting it should have been convinced her otherwise. At best, she clearly had a lax attitude towards accurately presenting research results; moreover, she felt possessive of her data and resources. Even if the charges about the lab notebooks and computer files end up being overblown, the fact that she was refusing to send cells to former collaborators is itself a significant breach of scientific ethics.


If individual humans come out looking badly here, some of their institutions performed remarkably. Most journals, funding bodies, and research institutions have requirements for the sharing of published reagents precisely to block the sort of behaviors that Mikovits allegedly engaged in. For the same reason, research materials are the property of the institution where research is performed, rather than the property of individual researchers (although this is also a bit of self-interest, as the institutions get to keep intellectual property).

The Department of Health and Human Services, part of a government that's often derided as a paragon of inefficiency, managed to recognize a potential threat to the nation's blood supply, organize a consortium of research groups with relevant expertise at nine different institutions, arrange to give them all blinded samples, and get the resulting publication out. Interim results were also published along the way. Anyone who has experienced how difficult it can be to get academics to agree on anything will be doubly impressed with all that the working group accomplished.

The publishing system also seems to have acquitted itself well. Even though XMRV detection was clearly somewhat iffy in the prostate cancer studies, Science was willing to publish the original paper provided that its reviewers said the data looked solid. Other researchers weren't automatically convinced by publication in a high-profile journal, and they quickly set about trying to replicate it in different sample populations. The results, even though they were published in a lower-profile, open access journal called Retrovirology, proved persuasive and helped build a scientific consensus against the XMRV/CFS link.

These features are all necessary parts of scientific self-correction. Frequently, non-scientists view the corrective process as one where people question some results and attempt to perform an exact reproduction of the experiments that generated them. That's not what usually happens. Instead, the best questions usually focus on the consequences of the result—what should we be seeing if this is right?

In this case, various researchers looked at the initial XMRV results and determined that, if they were correct, we should see similar things using different assays and with samples from different patients. When we didn't, the results raised questions about the whole hypothesis. If evidence in the idea's favor couldn't be found by anyone else, it would look shaky even if we assume that the original experiments had all been done properly.

Those sorts of questions, which focus on the consequences and prompt an inexact form of replication, are essential to ensuring that the scientific record remains robust over the long term.

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