Francis Ruscetti about XMRV in CFS patients: "I grew it with my own hands"

Mikovits and her co-workers addressed many of the critiques, and on 14 July, they resubmitted the paper, this time with Peterson's name on it. The next week, a committee—which included John Coffin, a prominent retrovirologist at Tufts Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences in Boston, and Silverman—organized a workshop at NCI with Mikovits and Ruscetti to help the institute better understand the unanswered scientific questions and the potential public health ramifications. Dusty Miller, a retrovirologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who had studied XMRV, left the meeting convinced that the link to CFS was real. The group had not only detected the virus using PCR but also grown it from patients' cells and found antibodies to it. “It sounded really good to me because they had all these different lines of evidence,” Miller says. The fact that an NCI veteran such as Ruscetti endorsed it helped convince him. “Frank said, ‘I grew it with my own hands,’” Miller recalls. “At the time, it sounded really exciting.”