WTW57: Judy Mikovits, the Most Unreliable Narrator

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:41 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke. This is episode 57, part two of the Things Fell Apart, Falling Apart, John Ronson series. I'm Thomas. That's Lydia. How are you doing?

0:00:50 Lydia: I I am doing great. I'm excited to hear what more we have to learn today about this crazy story and this crazy person.

0:01:00 Thomas: I am really excited for this part because this is such an interesting scientific mystery story kind of thing. And that's like, that's just like drugs for me. I love, I love those kinds of things. And Jenessa does such a great job at taking us through it. So why don't we just get to it?

0:01:05 Lydia: Yeah totally.

0:01:16 Lydia: Let's just do it.

0:01:17 Thomas: Let's just put our listeners out of this misery of hearing us do an intro. And let's just get over to part two with Jenessa here of the series. And we can find out this lab intrigue stuff that is this MSRP thing. Oh I thought you were trying to do this music, uh No. Anyway, after this break, Patreon .com, Where There's Woke.

0:01:17 Lydia: Yeah else all right

0:01:52 Jenessa: Is, uh, this virus in the CFS patients basically. Other labs aren't finding it as soon as this gets published in 2009, and

0:02:03 Thomas: I think you mentioned this is, like, a big deal. Like, if real, this was, like. Super scary, right?

0:02:06 Jenessa: Yes. Yes. Super scary, because it would mean, you know, if three percent of healthy controls have this, well, okay, but there's 330 million people in the United States, like Three percent of that is a lot of people. Um concern. Like, people are comparing it to, like, HIV and hepatitis like, oh my god, is this infecting the blood supply? Because they found it in blood samples, and like, oh no, what is this? Oh

0:02:17 Thomas: Mm -hmm.

0:02:19 Lydia: Yeah, this

0:02:24 Thomas: Mm-huh. Yeah, I want to clarify. I, I, do you mean in blood? So like, what was this experiment? It wasn't just like, oh, she collected some people's blood. It's like, she has samples from like a, some sort of blood bank. I didn't understand that before.

0:02:43 Jenessa: Okay, let me clarify. She has samples from patients, patients, who, people who have CFS and normal healthy controls show up for research. They take blood samples, in addition to, you know, all kinds of other things, and this person's doing this research, this person is doing that research. This is an institute that is housed on the the University of Reno campus. They are, you know, they're doing this, they're doing that, and Judy's thing is looking for this virus, um, looking for viruses, and sure enough, the virologist finds a virus. It's kind of like, you know, hammers and nails, right?

That's the comparison a lot of people have made. So She is doing a pretty, pretty, pretty much a standard thing: is get, get blood samples from patients, and one thing that'll become really important is running gels. So if you've ever done this in, like, bio labs, they get the DNA out of there, basically you use some enzymes to cut it up, and you have this, like, literally it's like a little square piece of jelly, and it's got these wells in the top. You, you pipette your samples in the wells, you run an electrical current through it.

DNA is negatively charged. I hope I'm remembering that correctly. And it pulls it through the gel matrix, and basically, like, little small, tiny pieces of DNA will fit through the matrix easier, and so they'll get down to the bottom faster. Pieces will have a harder time fitting through the gaps, and they'll be up near the top, and so you get these lovely little bands of, like

0:03:06 Thomas: Oh, okay. Wow.

0:04:24 Lydia: Isn't high school bio, right? I didn't learn any of of this. I was sitting here like, I didn't think my class was that bad, but apparently. Geez Like

0:04:24 Jenessa: No No, no Sorry

0:04:26 Thomas: Yeah. You know, in high school biology, when you sequence the human genome, everybody, you did that, right? Yeah.

0:04:38 Jenessa: Yeah. This would have been, um, if you did, uh, if you pursued, like

0:04:39 Thomas: A Nobel prize in genetics, for example.

0:04:43 Jenessa: Okay. Yeah, so not, not Bio 101 at college, but if you went, like, a little past Bio 101 in college, you or like, uh

0:04:53 Thomas: Sure. We'll take your word for all this.

0:04:54 Jenessa: Sure.

0:04:55 Lydia: Pre, pre-med route or something, right, where you're having to take those higher level. Yeah, okay, okay.

0:04:57 Thomas: Yeah. But looking for DNA or

0:05:03 Lydia: Got

0:05:02 Jenessa: Yeah, so, so they end up finding the DNA of this retrovirus. It's a tiny little sequence that

0:05:06 Thomas: Okay. Might be a dumb question. What was the, the, how she have a hypothesis of, I think I will find this virus in blood? It's not that she's just like, yeah, I'm just going to do, just doing blood stuff over here. Just whatever, whatever we find, you know, you find like some old trash in there. Like it's a riverbed, you know, there's like a TV there's I found a virus, you Know, or is it like she had some reason to suspect this?

0:05:20 Lydia: It Okay.

0:05:32 Jenessa: Boy, isn't that an excellent question. If we were doing like thorough, excellent science, we would be having some a priori reason. So there's one a prior reason to generally look at viruses. Viruses, um, and that is it looks like many people with CFS, it started with some sort of viral, like, onset So

0:05:59 Thomas: Okay. So this is all in the name of people have this chronic fatigue syndrome, and that's, and chronic fatigue syndrome, somewhat, I don't know if it's still the case, but mysterious, right? Like, yeah Still so mysterious. So, okay, that makes sense. So like, yeah So one one hypothesis is maybe they've picked up something that has caused this, and so I'm gonna do, I'm gonna just skim through their blood, just put, put my hands through their blood, just see if anything comes up. Yeah.

0:06:09 Jenessa: Still, yes, very Yeah.

0:06:12 Lydia: A real thing But yeah Yeah Yeah Interesting.

0:06:23 Jenessa: Yeah So to be clear, like, what is still a more of a fringe idea is that they have an active infection causing this. What seems to be the more mainstream belief, and, like, I am not a medical doctor, I don't, I'm not a virologist, but what I gleaned out of this was basically, it may well be that any number of viruses, you know, while many people would get sick and recover. This could be like the trigger for somebody who, for whatever reason, is going to be prone to CFS. The virus happens, they get, you know, viral-like symptoms, and then instead of recovering, they will continue to have these lingering symptoms that are really not cold symptoms, like, the, you know, the chronic fatigue part of it would be the, like, doing even a little bit of exercise is incredibly exhausting. Like, they have to, you know, 24 hours later I might be able to do another activity, and we're talking like you, your teeth is up, getting out of bed, brushing your tooth

0:06:35 Lydia: Okay, exerting

0:07:37 Jenessa: Yes.

0:07:37 Lydia: Any energy. Yeah, yeah.

0:07:38 Jenessa: This is now exhausting, and I'm so tired. Yeah.

0:07:42 Lydia: And that's like the kind of diathesis-stress model, right? Like that we would see, we in a lot of other, like, psychological illnesses and everything, and, you know, and understandably in physiological manifestations too, and So like this is kind of one of those situations where they think there is a reason that that stress or that trigger impacts people in that way, and so it's figuring out exactly what the, what diathesis part of it is

0:07:55 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a great way to think of it is like something is, you know, some people have proposed and, uh, this is where a lot of the like anger and offense has come from of the, like, this is 100% psychogenic. Um, I mean, a illness is incredibly powerful. Um. Know, people underestimate the extent to which you can have, like, psychogenic, like, blindness. Like, that seems like, how can that be? Your brain is unbelievably powerful, um, can be really offensive to people when, when that's implied, but, like, you know, psychogenic illness is real illness and

0:08:31 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:48 Thomas: I feel like anyone who's had anxiety, I don't know why you would downplay that. Like, it's awful.

0:08:52 Jenessa: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Like, hey, um, if anybody's experiencing that, like, you deserve to be treated like a human by your doctor. Like It's Even if it turns out the thing you have is psychological, like, your doctor shouldn't be dismissing you. Yes.

0:08:52 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:09:01 Lydia: Yeah. It's still part of your body. Yeah.

0:09:09 Jenessa: Your brain is your body

0:09:09 Thomas: The bottom line is you it's one thing to be like, well, it's all in your head, here's what we're, you know, we're gonna try to do. It's another thing to be like, it's all in your head, go home. Like if someone did that for anxiety, someone could tell me like, well, it's all on your heed, and be like, hey, fucking great, man, that's awesome. Anyway, can you fix my head then? Because it's Yeah I can't just get a new head head. Yeah, exactly.

0:09:17 Lydia: Yeah, exactly. Yeah then let's treat it if we know where it's happening Yeah. Yeah.

0:09:10 Jenessa: Right. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where part of it comes from, is like, think many people experience, it's all in your head, like, get over it, as opposed to like it's all in your head, let's treat your poor head. Yeah.

0:09:39 Lydia: Yeah.

0:09:38 Thomas: Yeah. Lots of stuff is in our heads. Yeah, right.

0:09:45 Jenessa: And also I think that seems clear also, it's not all in your head, it's also in your legs. I think It's, it seems like it's more, I'm sure there's at least one person who is in the CFS bucket where it is truly completely psychogenic, and that person deserves treatment, and then there's a lot of people in this bucket who seem to have, like, something going wrong with their immune system, with their neurological system with their musculature.

0:09:49 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

0:09:52 Lydia: One

0:10:13 Thomas: Man do you think this could be related to like long coveted, anyway, like

0:10:15 Jenessa: Oh my god. Yes, I feel like it's got all the vibes. Yes.

0:10:20 Thomas: Interesting.

0:10:21 Jenessa: It feels very like that.

0:10:22 Thomas: Well, let it suffice to say that's

0:10:24 Jenessa: There's so much.

0:10:25 Thomas: What she's kind of working on. Okay. You

0:10:27 Jenessa: Yeah. So on the one hand, a lot of people would accept the idea that maybe there was a viral onset, that seems pretty common, that it is a current active infection that you are dealing with for the last 40 years, that's pretty fringe, especially the idea that 67% of patients, boom, we got it, we did, we figured it out, everybody, we solved CFS, it's one virus and, and you're all actively currently infected for decades, like, well, why haven't you fought it off? That's crazy. There are viruses that hang out in your body, but they don't usually, they hang out and very like, we know of one, it's called HIV, it's rough. So, uh, uh, hang out in your, your system for a long time. So like, it's

0:10:57 Lydia: Virus. Exactly. There's Like a dormant phase with those those viruses. So even though it's part of your body for a significant period of time, perhaps the rest of your life, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's like actively working on your body, but this is a virus that, potentially you would be acting in that way. And that's kind of odd, right? I mean, again, I'm not a virologist either, so I'm just spouting off here.

0:11:20 Jenessa: Yes. Right.

0:11:41 Jenessa: No, no, no. You're totally right. So like, most people will clear HPV within about a year of catching it, but not everybody, and Chickenpox is a form of Oh, is it a form of HPV or HSV? Um, but it hangs out, HSD I think. Um, and it hangs up in your nervous system. That's how you can get shingles. Um, it's the reactivation of that. So like, yeah, it seems unlikely. A lot of people are instantly skeptical because of this, like, geez, if this disease is so complicated and And it turns out it's just explained by one current active infection. Like, really? We didn't? Okay.

0:11:43 Lydia: Mm. -hmm. Right. Right.

0:12:23 Thomas: Can check, yeah.

0:12:25 Jenessa: Weird. And like, why didn't, you know, if it was just of current viral infection, like you would think like lots of treatments that, you It's raising suspicions. So she is doing, among other things, like the gel technique to find, oh, look at this little band of this tiny, tiny piece of DNA indicates a retrovirus.

0:12:26 Thomas: Okay.

0:12:48 Thomas: So the virus would leave DNA and you can pull that through that sewer grate whatever the hell you're talking about it.

0:12:54 Lydia: Yep.

0:12:53 Jenessa: Yeah, the virus, yeah, yeah, and the virus it is DNA. A retroviverse, it just is like a really aggressive piece of dna basically.

0:12:58 Thomas: Is DNA, yeah, right. That's What they call me too. Okay.

0:13:09 Jenessa: So basically, Judy is a virologist and finds a virus, and uh, she's a retrovirologist and she finds a retrovirus.

0:13:18 Thomas: Wears old clothes while she studies, yeah. Okay.

0:13:21 Lydia: Yeah. Curvy.

0:13:24 Thomas: She can like steampunk equipment and stuff, like, laughing.

0:13:19 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, God, okay, so basically that's where we're at is, um, can really replicate her finding

0:13:38 Thomas: So she found a virus and it was in these blood whatever's and the ultimate Wow, thing of like, holy shit, is this would mean a awful lot of people just have like a dormant virus or like an active virus, or what would it mean?

0:13:43 Jenessa: Yeah.

0:13:53 Jenessa: Yeah, so it would mean, because it was like found in the blood, it would would mean like circulating in your blood. The majority of people with CFS have it, which would mean, oh my God, we have a target for treatment. These poor people who have had no target for treat. Oh my God. Amazing. And then on the other end for the healthy controls who are showing it, oh, my God there's a virus circulating in their blood. They're just walking around. And for people who, for whatever reason are susceptible to CFS, if they go get a blood transfusion, is this in our blood, that when I said the blood banks, that's what I'm getting at.

0:14:11 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

0:14:30 Jenessa: Somewhere at the Red Cross is there a pile of three percent of it having XMRV? Oh God, no.

0:14:31 Thomas: Yeah. And I just didn't get, like, that's what she was studying was just some blood samples that would be from that. Oh

0:14:43 Jenessa: No, she's got patients coming to her and the suspicion is yes.

0:14:47 Thomas: Oh, oh, I see. So she's just thinking if if it's just population wise, 3 % of just everyone has it, it's going to be in there and it's okay. I gotcha.

0:14:55 Jenessa: Everywhere.

0:14:56 Thomas: I misunderstood.

0:14:56 Jenessa: It's Yes.

0:14:57 Thomas: Sorry.

0:14:57 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've got it now. So it's three percent of the healthy controls who sign up to be in her study, she finds it. So if that's the case, what if 3 % of people just have it and 3 % of them go, you know, if 3%, of people who go donate their blood to the Red Cross have it, oh God, are we spreading it?

0:15:19 Thomas: Yeah. And if just 3% of you listening will donate on patreon.com. So no, sorry.

0:15:27 Jenessa: So it's creating a panic about our blood banks. It is creating absolute elation in the CFS community because it's like, oh my god, if it's this virus, if we know what the cause is, finding a cure or a treatment is, yes, it's an answer. It's an answered for people who felt dismissed, who have felt like nobody believes me, you know, a lot of the symptoms they experience are not objectively measurable. And that's really frustrating for people when they have a lot of symptoms. A lot of times doctors talk about signs and symptoms. Signs are things your doctor observes. Symptoms are things you report to your doctor. And if you have something where there are a lot of symptoms that you experience and there are no signs that your doctor can observe, that's so frustrating because

0:15:31 Thomas: Sure. Mm. Mm.

0:15:41 Lydia: It's an answer Yeah. Yeah. But

0:16:16 Jenessa: You have to demand that medical professionals just trust you, and you know, a huge gender bias in it, that it's a lot of women. Yes.

0:16:23 Lydia: Yeah. I was just gonna bring that up. And Heaven forbid if you're a woman, right?

0:16:28 Thomas: Well, am I crazy? Like even a headache is like something you have to tell your doctor you have, right? They can't see it. Can I?

0:16:29 Jenessa: Yeah. Absolutely. Like Doctors are supposed to be trained on, like, symptoms are real, like

0:16:35 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Another reason why that doesn't mean that it's not real is just all I'm saying. Like, yeah.

0:16:39 Jenessa: Yes. Yes. Absolutely, your symptoms can can it, doctors are experts on what diseases are and how they work. And you, the patient, are an expert on what you are experiencing and how your own body feels and how it usually operates and how it's operating today. The expert on that. And your doctor should be taking that seriously. And of me just feels like how many of these people just have a disease that if they were a man, their doctor would listen to them and they would have a diagnosis, right? You know, because it's it's probably a bit of a bucket diagnosis, that there are some people who have this thing and there are some people who that thing, and like, maybe the causes are different and this is a syndrome that is a end state of multiple different problems, and that that could mean despite different causes, this end state is very similar and the treatment would be very similar. Um, so poorly understood and it needs more research, and not this research, that's nonsense. So so

0:17:11 Thomas: Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

0:17:45 Thomas: Well, tell us why. Why not this research? What happened?

0:17:46 Jenessa: She's Yes. Yes. Okay, so basically nobody can replicate it, and other labs are trying, like labs in different countries are trying, labs all over the U.S. are trying, it explodes, and then there's this instant, one might call it a dog pile, of just like, nope, can't find it, not sure why you can find it because we can't find it. So there's a couple of things that start to happen. Um, but I'll have you play the way this is portrayed in Things Fell Apart. So

0:18:25 Clip: Of the scientists who couldn't replicate Judy's findings were developing theory. Labs all over the world routinely acquire for their experiments lab -grown cells called cell lines. Maybe the XMRV had contaminated the cell lines that Judy was using in her lab. So the virus infected cell lines and so many labs have XMR -V sort of floating around in their research materials. But it's questionable whether it ever affected a single human being. So there's no suggestion of foul play here. This seems to have been like a genuine mistake. I think so. I don't think it's foul play at all. The

0:19:04 Jenessa: The other man you hear speaking there, in addition to Ronson, is Martin Ensorink. Um, he's a journalist who worked at Science -- capital S Science is a scientific journal where a lot of research is published. It's like really big, famous. Science and Nature are the two big ones where if you publish there, you got it made. And that's where Judy's original study in 2009 was published. Like, holy crap, the paper. And Ensor Inc. worked there as a journalist writing for Science Insider, which is like their popular reporting for the average person kind of thing.

And he covered this extensively and that's the other voice you hear there. So to cut Ronson some slack, when he says, "So there's no suggestion of foul play here, this seems to have been like a genuine mistake," and Ensorink does say, "I think so, I don't think it was foul play." No, that being said, and Ensorink is a journalist, not a scientist, and he wrote his biggest piece on what the the heck is going on with Judy the same day that a bombshell piece of evidence dropped. So I am a little confused why, you know, Ensorink is saying, "I think so, I don't think it was foul play." Okay, so we're getting Ensorink's opinion. Yeah

0:20:26 Thomas: Well also just right off the bat, tell me if this doesn't make sense. I thought, okay, what is he talking about exactly? Is he just talking about like why the initial results might've been something, or could there be more involved in like later on or something? And is he only talking about a specific part of it? I don't know. I haven't done this research, but that was just one thing that came to my mind.

0:20:46 Thomas: Cause all we hear is him saying, I don't think there was foul play in this one thing. We don't, we don't actually hear what he's talking about exactly.

0:20:54 Jenessa: I agree, I was, I kind of thought that through the whole show, to be honest, like 90%, I'm just throwing out a number, I didn't do analysis, okay, but like Like 90% of this feels like Ronson talking and people cut in to just have a clip as opposed to like, normally you think of an interview as like mostly the other person and the journalist cuts in sometimes.

0:21:13 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's whatever. That's, it's not an interview show per se. And so it's like, it makes sense. But that just means that, like, obviously there's room for either error or misleading if you don't do that perfectly right. Like, there's been plenty of times where people are like, hey, that's not exactly what I meant. Like, but who knows.

0:21:17 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:21:32 Thomas: I'm not saying that happened here. It was just what came to mind, right?

0:21:34 Jenessa: No, I thought the same thing. Like, I wonder if, if answering like the set up here was like, did it seem like a genuine mistake at that time? And then maybe later I changed my mind or like what exactly did this seems to have been a genuine like which This, this being XYZ, um, so yeah, I'm not quite sure. I don't want to put words in Ensorink's mouth, and he is ultimately just saying his own opinion about it. It is a little strange, it feels like to me, that we've got a journalist asking another journalist who covered the thing, and I'm just like, where is any of the actual scientists and all of this?

But whatever, other than Judy, who, again, is going to give you her own narrative. So okay, so on the one hand, to cut him some slack, he's got somebody who is you knowledge of what went on at the time but not personal direct knowledge. It's a journalist, uh, telling him, I don't think it was foul play. Um, you were to, I don't know, go on to Judy's Wikipedia page, you would see there are allegations that this was in fact intentional

0:21:53 Thomas: Yeah. Sure.

0:22:43 Jenessa: Fraud.

0:22:38 Thomas: Under the The section labeled "Foul Play." Oh

0:22:46 Jenessa: Yes, literally. Oh my god, it's so frustrating. If you Google her, if you go on her Wikipedia, there have been allegations that this was not like a genuine mistake from the beginning. So let's get into what the heck did happen here. One thing that it doesn't necessarily make it foul play or not, but to understand like why it was ridiculous to hold on to this idea, it got sillier and sillier the longer this went on. XMRB was eventually proven, ironically enough, to be a lab-created virus. It's never ever circulated in the wild. Um, it

0:23:23 Thomas: Wow. Huh. Wait Maybe I didn't understand this. Was this a novel virus at the time of her, her discovery?

0:23:33 Jenessa: Had been discovered a few years earlier and What happened was they found it in prostate cancer cells, and it had this, um, it has what's called a, genes have a promoter region, which is basically the thing where, what's going to cause it to be Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's going to cause it to be encoded So, like

0:23:35 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:23:52 Thomas: Social media. Yeah. Like, and subscribe, like, and subscribe to my gin genome.

0:24:00 Jenessa: Basically

0:24:00 Lydia: Patreon .com slash where there's work.

0:24:01 Thomas: Yeah, sure.

0:24:01 Jenessa: Um It's what's gonna get the attention of the things that encode the gene. So like every cell in my body has my entire genome, you know, every cell in my buddy has the genes to make an eyeball, but it's not doing it, like, thank god, right? So it's got to get encoded, like this piece or that piece. So basically, they find this virus in a promoter region that seems be triggered by male hormones.

0:24:35 Thomas: Hmm.

0:24:35 Jenessa: Oh my god, perfect. It's in prostate cancer cells. It's triggered by male hormone. We may have a virus that gets triggered by male hormones and and would It fits, right? Oh my god, maybe this is a thing. And we know that some viruses do cause cancers. Think about HPV for cervical cancer, right? Chronic

0:24:47 Thomas: It's called toxic masculinity. No,

0:24:51 Lydia: Boom. Boom.

0:25:00 Thomas: Wait, but already, isn't it weird? I thought that fucking restless legs in it. No. What is the fucking, what is the thing we're talking about? Yeah. Chronic Fatigue. I thought chronic fatigue syndrome was like disproportionately women And so

0:25:06 Jenessa: Fatigue syndrome Chronic fatigue Yes. So this is odd, is it not? So

0:25:13 Thomas: Yeah isn't it weird that the, okay, I don't know, unless there's some biology reason why that doesn't matter, it seems

0:25:18 Jenessa: Gonna matter, matter. So Um, so how do we end up finding out this virus doesn't even like exist, basically? So somebody finds this in a prostate cancer cell and is like, whoa, maybe this is a thing. And that was in 2006, it was first discovered, and they're like, what could this be? Um, and this is actually Silverman, who is one of the authors on the paper with Judy. He discovers it and he's like, okay, okay, okay, what am I looking at? Cool, cool, cool. One of the things he does, it's a really common lab technique. It's actually becoming a problem that the promoter region is triggered by male hormones. So much easier if the promotor region is a thing I can easily control.

He does some little splicing to make the promoters region into a cytomegalovirus piece that is, it's commonly used, and he sticks it into a bacterial plasmid. Bacterial plasmin is a circular piece of DNA that lives in your bacteria, have these like floating around inside of them, and also sticks an antibiotic resistance into it. And the reason to do this is basically, if you've got a piece of DNA that you want to hang on to and use for something, you have a promoter that that you are able to be like, got it, I'm using this.

I know how to trigger that promoter. You've got your antibiotic resistance so that I could put this all over a plate full of that antibiotic and nothing will live but my thing. So this will kill off all the other BS that I'm trying to keep my lab as clean as possible, but just in case. So he makes a specific clone of the virus that has the promoter region that is different from the mouse cells that this was found in and the antibiotic resistance.

And he has that going in his lab. But he's also found it in these, they call it a mouse virus. Basically, they had a mouse cell line going where what it turns out had been done. They got these prostate cancer cells from a human.

They did a really, really common lab technique that people do to get a cancer cell to grow, because you can't just like throw it on the ground and be like, grow. Um, they put it into, it's more gross, lab rats, sorry everybody, grow it inside a mouse. And so you kind of like grow a piece in this mouse and then move it and grow it in the next mouse. It's, it's nasty, sorry

0:25:19 Thomas: Okay. Hmm. Geez Oh

0:27:48 Jenessa: I know, it's horrible. And basically, uh, if this were a real retrovirus that was out there in the wild, retroviruses acquire mutations really, really fast. And so they often, one of the things I read was like about for if somebody has like a strain of HIV, they often think of it like you have a storm of like, there's slight variations in the virus all throughout the individual's own body.

0:28:16 Thomas: Even within your own body? Oh, okay. Wow Now

0:28:18 Jenessa: Yes, even within the individual it will acquire little variations in its genetic code every time it replicates. Um, what suddenly raised eyebrows people because now people are looking really closely at this thing that wasn't getting a lot of attention before. Yes.

0:28:37 Thomas: When you say now, sorry, just make sure, are we still in like shortly after this virus was discovered, or are we back to this experiment where she found it in blood?

0:28:39 Jenessa: Yeah this is shortly after Judy finds this in the blood. Yes.

0:28:44 Thomas: Oh It's after she finds the blood. Okay. And but they still didn't know it was necessarily lab grown? Okay. Quite

0:28:50 Jenessa: Yeah Yeah. So Basically, somebody finds this in prostate cancer cells that had been grown and grown and grown in a mouse and then plated and then created into a cell line. And then, oh my god, it's, it's technically, you know, it's a mouse cell, but it was a human cancer cell, and blah blah blah, um, mouse virus. But oh my God, you know, is it one of those cross species species viruses like COVID, you know, we think cross species? That happens in 2006. And people are like, this is interesting. I wonder if this maybe could have something to do with some prostate cancers. And it's percolating, but it's not a big deal yet.

0:29:30 Lydia: Yeah.

0:29:30 Jenessa: The people who are working on that think it's an interesting thing. Then Judy claims to find it circulating in the blood of living humans that she sampled and is like, whoa. And now when everybody is looking at it, somebody goes, this seems a little suspicious. And they look and they realize from one sample to the next, the genetic sequence of that is about like 99.923% identical. I'm just making that number up, but it's always like 99.9 something it's It's never 100%, but it is like 99 point nine blank. It's incredibly high, so high it can't possibly have replicated. Yes.

0:30:08 Lydia: Yeah, never 100%. Yeah.

0:30:14 Thomas: High Because Every time you replicate, it's gonna have some amount of variance. I

0:30:25 Jenessa: Exactly.

0:30:25 Lydia: Degrade kind of thing. Interesting.

0:30:28 Jenessa: Exactly. They were like, "I don't think it is physically possible that any organism, let alone a human, human had this, because there should be this variability, this, this difference in the virus, this storm-like appearance." And instead it's just like damn near identical. And so what somebody did, brilliant scientific work, they went back to the original samples from 2006, they're frozen in a freezer, here's this piece of prostate cancer, and it doesn't have the virus Yeah.

0:31:05 Thomas: Was saving it for later. Yeah, wow.

0:31:07 Jenessa: Yeah, yeah, that cancer doesn't, it doesn' have the virus, it never did, and they trace it through and they find when that cancer cell was put into a mouse and tried to grow, that's when it jumped into the human tumor tumor cell, and then somebody made a mouse cell line out of it. So it basically crossed once and got a little bit of variability there. And then that was it. Then it was asexually reproduced as a cell line in labs forever.

0:31:40 Lydia: That's crazy.

0:31:42 Jenessa: On the one hand, that is like an incredible scientific discovery and like amazing detective work to go back and find. And it's also a huge relief of like, oh thank god, this could never have affected a mouse or a human, this virus isn't real, it's a lab made virus and it, it's not out there. Yes.

0:32:03 Thomas: So Therefore you don't even really need to figure out exactly how her experiment went wrong, you're You're just like, well, we know it's lab grown, so it's not like people are walking around with this.

0:32:13 Jenessa: Yes. And if only, if only everyone could have gone, "Sorry, guys, sorry for CFS patients, I'm sorry I got your hopes up, people who manage our national blood bank, I'm so sorry I wasted your time." And that is not what happened. Um, was a continuing thing of like, well, what about this, what about this, what if it's this other thing, what if it's slightly like this, what, it's a, you know, it's not exactly XMRV, but it's a virus kind of like this, it turns into a whole thing. So doing that, but she's one of 13 authors on this paper and

0:32:21 Thomas: Whoops. Yeah.

0:32:43 Thomas: From who? Just from what's her name or from lots of people? Oh, I see.

0:32:52 Jenessa: And some of those authors are, there's her and a couple of people at WPI are clinging to this, and Rossetti is backing her kind of in a more quiet sort of way, is still like, well, you know, it could still be this. And I think there was, honestly, a lot of what people end up talking about is that there were a lot of CFS patients who latched on to Judy as a savior, a hero, and now they are convinced there is a government conspiracy, and they are sending death threats to people, allegedly, and there is, like, this huge harassment campaign going on.

Of course, this is not all patients, but there is a, like, religious, like, group of people who are, have latched on to Judy as, like, the person who's going to save them, and now the attack on this paper is an attack on them personally, and this is people trying to once again tell them it's all psychological, it's not this virus. And it, I think that is a huge part of what led to, like, we have to triple, quadruple prove this isn't really happening. Like, Judy at one point starts saying, well, just because it did emerge in a lab, it doesn't mean it also didn't emerge

0:33:19 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. I

0:33:44 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

0:34:10 Jenessa: In the wild, and Uh, somebody in one paper said that would be the equivalent of saying that I dropped a quarter out of a helicopter and it fell into the Grand Canyon and landed on top of another quarter. Like, just no, man, no. Okay, that doesn't mean this was fraud, that just means this definitely didn't happen the way that, like, it's not the finding isn't real, it's Yes. Okay, so then why do we get suspicious here? Um, two major issues. Silverman, who was on the paper, gets suspicious about, well, wait a minute, because here's the thing: is in 2007 the way that Silverman ends up working with Judy is he meets her at a conference and she says, "I know you discovered this XMRV in cancers, and a lot of our CFS patients have rare cancers. I'm wondering about that virus, if maybe they have it. Could you give me a sample of your plasmid?" And he gives her a sample and

0:34:11 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:34:34 Thomas: Contamination. Yeah.

0:35:15 Thomas: Wow.

0:35:15 Jenessa: It's not the mouse. Yeah.

0:35:17 Lydia: Don't love that.

0:35:18 Jenessa: It's not the mouth cell line that everybody else is using. The mouse cell line is known to contaminate other people's stuff, and so they'll test and find not just XMRB but like mouse DNA. It's like gluing itself to the side of test tubes everywhere and causing problems. He gave her that special plasmid, the one that is no longer part of a mouse cell. It is a bacterial plasmide. And so he says, I'm going to grab these samples Judy gave me that came from the CFS patients and that came for the normal controls. And I'm not going to look for XMRV this time. I'm going to look for that antibiotic resistance piece and I'll look for the cytomegalovirus promoter, the thing I added and he finds it. He finds it only in the CFS patients, not in the healthy controls.

0:36:17 Lydia: Put like a marker in there and then, oh,

0:36:18 Jenessa: That is... Oh,

0:36:19 Thomas: But why not the healthy controls? Because I thought 3% of them had the virus or something. Thing

0:36:23 Jenessa: So he grabbed a sample of their sample. No No, so he's part of this study. He grabbed of their, like, you know, hundreds of participants in the study. He was like, "I'm just gonna test, like, you now, 10 and 10," or whatever. Yeah.

0:36:23 Thomas: Oh His Own Healthy Controls. No, sorry.

0:36:39 Lydia: Okay. So he might've just not, have landed on the 97% of controls that do not. Yeah.

0:36:43 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah, you wouldn't You Yeah.

0:36:44 Thomas: Oh, okay. Okay. Sure. Yeah.

0:36:45 Lydia: Okay. I got it.

0:36:46 Jenessa: And so what's critical is, if this is a lab contaminant, an accidental contamination, what you expect is either 100% of your samples because it got into a

0:36:55 Thomas: I was gonna say That, that's why I was confused about this three percent the whole time. Sorry, go ahead.

0:36:56 Jenessa: Yeah. Yeah, you would either expect it got into one of the reagents I'm using, and it's in 100% of my samples, or it would be kind of randomly distributed, just like if it's floating around my lab as a cell line, like these little cells are just like all over the place. There's no real reason it would only be in my CFS patients. Silverman does this analysis and will issue, what we'll find out is, behind the scenes was begging the magazine Science to do a full retraction at this point. He was like, "Get this out of here, this

0:37:04 Thomas: Interesting.

0:37:35 Jenessa: Is BS." I

0:37:37 Thomas: Wow. That Makes sense. I, that's, feel like, like that's what a responsible scientist would do at that point. What

0:37:41 Jenessa: Agree. He gets a partial retraction, basically. He is taking himself and his lab off of this. Uh,

0:37:48 Thomas: Who's in charge of that? Like, Science, or would you need to get all the authors or something?

0:37:53 Jenessa: Yeah, so normally the way that this works, ideally, when people are being reasonable and not fighting, is, ideal world, you get everyone to agree, all the authors sign off on a full retraction or a partial retraction, and, uh, the editor at the journal will ultimately publish that. And, like, you know, coordinate that, basically. What will end up happening here is a lot of in-fighting and this, you know, these people can't agree, these people can agree, and it sounds like what happened is really, Silverman is vehement about, he works in a lab in the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, he is like, I don't care what everybody else is doing, but my lab is not on this anymore.

0:38:13 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:38:39 Jenessa: The part I did, I now know to be bullshit, because I now know the XMRV is my plasmid And it's not mouse cells, and it's definitely the thing I made, which is definitely a contamination. Unequivocally, even if the virus did evolve out there in the wild a second time, which is bullshit, by the way, it didn't happen. This one didn't. This one is the bacterial plasmid that I gave Judy. No to all of this.

0:38:48 Thomas: Right.

0:39:11 Thomas: So It's crazy. That not all the scientists would join in on that. But okay, the

0:39:12 Jenessa: Yes, one would think. The other labs are WPI, the Whittemore Peterson Institute, where Judy and Lombardi work, and the other one is Rossetti's lab in Maryland at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health, Rossetti being her PhD advisor.

0:39:34 Thomas: One that was like anti-vax curious or whatever. Okay. Very

0:39:37 Lydia: Right.

0:39:37 Jenessa: We have reason to suspect that on both of those labs.

0:39:41 Thomas: Weird. Yeah.

0:39:42 Jenessa: Suspicions, allegations, I'm not, - I don't want to make confident statements on that. So, but Silverman's like, we are out. I at least demand a partial retraction of my piece of this. I'm out. Um, he was asking for a full retraction. Um, this is the guy who discovered XMRV. Is like, I now believe Xmv is not real. I now believe that the plasmid I created has been put in this, and what you will find is, again, let's say you think Judy got this sample from Silverman and then an accidentally, somehow accidentally contaminated CFS patients only, and like only 3% of her healthy controls. Maybe you believe that. It is still the case that if you go research this, you will find allegations that this is clear evidence she intentionally spiked it with the plasmid.

0:40:06 Thomas: Yikes. Right. Right.

0:40:40 Jenessa: Everybody else who has a contamination, it's the mouse cells that are contaminating it, not this plasmid that she asked him for in 2007 when No evidence that her CFS patients had this, no reason to suspect this was like, "Hey, Silverman, I heard about this, can I have some?" And then she finds it only in the CFS page. Like, why would your contaminant only get into one? There's, like, a random sentence in one of Mikovits's articles that says, just out of nowhere, where really it says, "Some people argue that, uh, the patient samples would have been handled more," and I'm like, this sounds a little defensive of maybe why you think that would get contaminated and not the healthy controls. Like, it, article feels defensively written

0:40:47 Lydia: That she specifically had that. Yeah, that's crazy. Wow.

0:40:51 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

0:41:02 Lydia: Wow.

0:41:30 Jenessa: In some ways. Yeah.

0:41:31 Thomas: But The point is, even if we can't be 100% sure, prove that, like, this is foul play, at the very least there's lots of suspicion about it, so saying no, no suspicion of foul play at all, not accurate. Right, so

0:41:43 Jenessa: Those three sentences to just go, "No, no foul play, no foul played," like, okay, well, well, it's about to get worse. So

0:41:54 Thomas: Right, well, that's where we're gonna leave it with that huge cliffhanger, but man, I want to hear how it's gonna get to work. Do we have to poke in here, hun, and end this part, or we just keep playing it? Because I want hear how its gonna get way worse.

0:42:06 Lydia: You got to tune in to the next episode. You got to do it.

0:42:08 Thomas: Oh! Oh! All right. Well, I guess I got to do that, and I'm sure I could get that faster if I go to patreon.com/wherethereswoke, I imagine.

0:42:17 Lydia: Probably.

0:42:18 Thomas: Most likely. There's no way to know for sure. Yeah.

0:42:20 Lydia: We're in charge of the page, so.

0:42:21 Thomas: Yeah. So we just we're just guessing. Hey, we're as in the dark as you are. I don't know what you want from us.

0:42:30 Thomas: Oh, no. This is I love this just unraveling of the scientific mystery that Jenessa has done. And it's as she said, it's about to get worse. So tune the next where there's woke. It's about to get worse. We'll see you then.

0:42:40 Lydia: Yeah, yeah.