Nobel Prize of Medicine 2020

Nobel Prize in Medicine won by Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice for discovery of Hepatitis C

Some of you may recognize Harvey Alter who was involved in ME research in the XMRV times, and Michael Houghton from Alberta, Canada was also involved in ME research.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/05/health/nobel-prize-2020-winner-medicine-scn-intl/index.html

 

Thanks for highlighting this @Milo

I wasn't following things closely back then, but from what I remember Alter was a proponent of a connection between XMRV and CFS symptoms.

 

If Harvey Alter is a scientist at Nobel Prize level, how could he have been wrong about xmrv?

How likely is it he made a mistake or was "fooled" by Mikovits' work?

I did follow the story when it all started and the yrs following. I still can't wrap my head around it.

 

Even good scientists get it wrong. Then they admit it. The bad ones don't.

 

Dr Alter if i remember well, was the chairman of a ‘State of the knowledge’ conference that gathered all the ME experts around 2011 or 2012. He is a compassionate man and was extremely professional and highly respected.

 

It's interesting to note that Harvey Alter won the Nobel Prize for work conducted in (and prior to) 1988 and which was published in 1989.

He was in his mid-50's then and is 85 now.

There is usually a very long delay between doing the work that wins the Nobel Prize and actually winning it. My guess is that the committee wants to see if the work passes the test of time. They're probably not too keen on the idea of giving the prize for something that might be invalidated later.

The shortest delay I can think of in the modern era occured when the prize in physics was given to the team that discovered that not only is expansion of the universe not slowing down, it is actually accelerating. That discovery was announced in 1998 and the prize was given just 13 years later, in 2011.

 

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/new...-wins-2020-nobel-prize-physiology-or-medicine

 

Nobel humour - they accelerated the award to match the discovery.

 

He was not fooled by Mikovitz or make a mistake. Mouse leukaemia like viruses exist, that is not controversial. They are the cause of a deadly epidemic among koala bears for instance. He identified ones which were X, unable to infect mice anymore and P forms which still can.

He became very frustrated because they kept asking him to run tests to prove there was no contamination. Eventually he run out of samples and they announced this was a "virtual" retraction.

The controversy was if X/PMRVs were prevalent in the human population and they found the answer they wanted. When they infected gibbons to see what would happen the virus was undetectable in blood after a few weeks but the lymph nodes were full of them.... So they looked at blood samples from blood donors.

I don't think that XMRV is particularly connected with ME but the "evidence" against it made no sense.

1. All reagents were contaminated so that is why positive results were found. They could not say how they became contaminated but suggested that mice may have piddled on the jars while they were in storage.

2. No other teams could detect XMRV in samples so it was an artefact in the teams that claimed to have found it.

3. XMRV was created in lab tissue samples in a single recombinant event they deduced happened about 1990(?) After this all cell lines were infected. This was after some of the ME epidemics so there could be no connection with ME.

Many mammals have mouse leukaemia like viruses as they have lived in close proximity with them for generations. No one has ever explained why it should be different for humans.

Harvey Alter first heard about ME then and was aghast at how we were treated. It heartened me that a proper scientist and doctor who looked at us without any prejudgements saw us so clearly.