"She hoped to build an airtight case"

At the WPI, Mikovits established a sample collection from Peterson's patients and began screening it for signs of an infection. A litany of pathogens has been linked to chronic fatigue over the years, including Epstein-Barr virus, Borna disease virus, human herpes virus 6 and HTLV-2. None panned out. Still, the disorder bears some hallmarks of an infection. Many patients report acute illness before chronic symptoms appear, and their bodies often show signs of an immune system at war. The disease can also crop up in apparent outbreaks, including one characterized by Peterson near Lake Tahoe in the 1980s.

Just before Christmas 2008, Mikovits turned her attention to Silverman's reagents. She and her postdoc, Vincent Lombardi, known as Vinny, asked a graduate student to test for XMRV DNA in white blood cells from some of the most seriously ill people being studied at the WPI.

The first try turned up just two positives out of 20. But by tweaking the conditions of the test, Mikovits says her team found XMRV in all 20. "Vinny and I looked at each other and said, 'Well, that's interesting'," she says. They spent the next few weeks convincing themselves that they were onto something, and soon conscripted Silverman and Mikovits's former mentor at the NCI, Frank Ruscetti, to help prove that XMRV infection was behind chronic fatigue.

"We really retooled our entire programme and did nothing but focus on that," she says. They kept the effort under wraps, dubbing it 'Project X'. Even Peterson and the Whittemores weren't clued in. Mikovits says that the secrecy was necessary because her team also found XMRV in the blood of some healthy people, raising concerns about blood products. She hoped to build an airtight case because she worried that sceptical public-health officials would undermine her work.

Then why why why did she not do the study blinded?