Lasker Award winner at the forefront of XMRV research

CFS Central:

I have to address the odd comment by [British retrovirologist] Greg Towers, who said of Harvey Alter: "He doesn't get variation, he gets a totally different virus." Harvey Alter would beg to differ. I interviewed him about his XMRV study for my blog, CFS Central.

Alter [the NIH researcher who, along with Shyh-Ching Lo, found XMRV related viruses in CFS patients] said that he does indeed believe that his group and Mikovits’s group are looking at the same retrovirus. “Viruses tend not to be homogeneous,” Alter explained. “The fact that we didn’t find XMRV doesn’t bother me because we already knew that retroviruses tend to be variable. They mutate a lot, basically. This is true of HIV and HCV [hepatitis C virus]. It’s not one virus. It’s a family of viruses.”

Alter is far more than “a hepatitis expert” that [reporter] Callaway describes. He's a Lasker Award winner--his NIH research led to the discovery of hepatitis C--and he ... Read more>>