“She said, ‘Is Dr. Judy in? It’s Jaime, I’m a patient, she knows me, she said I could come by any time,’ ” Mikovits recalled. “And I said, ‘It’s okay, David, I’ll take it.’…….
Mikovits’ arrest, for possession of stolen property—her own research notebooks from the lab where she worked—was an unlikely outcome for the 54-year-old. Having spent 20 years at the National Cancer Institute, Mikovits is a seasoned research scientist, an expert on viruses. In 2006 she accepted the position of research director at the brand new Whittemore Peterson Institute, a private lab that had been co-founded by Annette and Harvey Whittemore, one of the most politically connected couples in Nevada. The sometimes-debilitating disease she went to study, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), has long baffled scientists, and sufferers were desperate for information. The Whittemores themselves had founded the institute because their daughter, Andrea, now in her thirties, has struggled with CFS for years.
What happened there sounds like fiction: a scientific breakthrough, suspicion of contamination, a well-meaning scientist, a nonprofit institute, a fee-for-service diagnostic lab, and a legal battle that is still unfolding. In the process, Mikovits plunged from a leading light in the fight against a mysterious medical condition to an unemployed woman with a mark on her name in the world of science.
The first years of her stint at the WPI were smooth, Mikovits says. She says she was close to the Whittemores, whom she regards as being “like the Kennedys” in their closeness, charisma, and power. (Annette Whittemore, citing the advice of her lawyer, declined to comment for this article. Harvey Whittemore’s lawyer, Dominic Gentile, said his client was unavailable for comment.)
In 2009, Mikovits published her breakthrough finding. Testing 101 samples from patients with CFS, Mikovits and her co-investigators reported that 67.5% percent of them were infected with XMRV, a retrovirus never before known to infect humans. It was a discovery with huge implications. Patients might be able to get better by taking the same anti-retroviral drugs that have helped treat HIV/AIDS. Never before had there been such a promising starting point for diagnosing chronic fatigue syndrome, much less developing a way to treat it.
Mikovits submitted the paper to Science, a preeminent scientific journal, where it was peer reviewed. When it came out in the fall of 2009, she was an instant celebrity, traveling the world, meeting patients, presenting data.
Her research brought luster to the WPI—and cash, too. In 2009, WPI licensed its diagnostic test for chronic fatigue to a clinic next door, VIP Dx. “We structured the licensing contract to be sure that any and all profits that might emerge at VIP Dx from XMRV testing come directly back to WPI to benefit the research program,” Annette Whittemore said in a press release in 2009. Patients were charged somewhere between $400 and $550 per test, and the lab tested at least hundreds of patients between 2009 and 2011, though likely significantly more.
The move raised eyebrows within the scientific community. “The VIPdx was very problematic,” said John Coffin, a scientist at the National Cancer Institute, whose lab is one of several that has attempted to replicate Mikovits’ XMRV findings, “That they would be offering, commercially, this test on what are basically preliminary research findings from their group … is obviously very questionable.”
Meanwhile, other research groups around the country were trying to replicate the 2009 results, but in the two years that followed, almost all had failed. The word “contamination” began to surface more and more frequently.
In the summer of 2011, Mikovits and her young lab assistant, Max Pfost, began poring through their notebooks, trying to find where such a contaminant might have entered their process.
In July, she says, she found it—an entry from March 2009 indicating that a culture of the XMRV virus had been placed into the same incubatorwith the rest of the lab’s blood samples. Mikovits says she was out of town the day this occurred.
In July 2011 she told Harvey Whittemore of the potential contamination, she says, and expected that the VIP Dx lab would cease testing patients for the XMRV virus. “I just kept saying, stop it, stop it, stop it. We have to sort this out,” Mikovits says. According to Mikovits, the testing did not stop. And after a tense summer, she was fired in September.
She says she was back home in California the day after her firing when her cell phone rang at the crack of dawn. It was Pfost, she says, calling to say that her notebooks, flashdrives, and other experimental records at her lab had been rifled through.
Mikovits was worried most about the notebooks. “I said, ‘Max, secure them. It’s obviously been ransacked.’ … I said, ‘You have to secure them—it’s chaos. Take ’em home, take ’em to your mother’s house.’ ”
Pfost declined to comment on the substance of this article, but in a signed affadivit, given in November 2011 shortly before Mikovits’ arrest and used by the WPI in its civil case against her, Pfost says he removed the notebooks from the lab at Mikovits’s behest and hid them at his mother’s house until Mikovits returned to Reno the following month.
According to Mikovits, on Oct. 16 she returned to Reno to gather her remaining possessions. Pfost picked her up at the airport and pointed to a big birthday bag in his backseat of his car. He had just turned 30. The notebooks are in there, she recalls him saying.
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