This is an interesting story to say the least and I’m sure we will hear more about this and and studies and data presented as a result. One report said she refused to share the cell data, was fired and then left.
From reading here it appears she took off with the research data and other information relative to the disease research. She lead a team that was quoted to have ground breaking discoveries with Chronic Fatigue Disease syndrome and then later some of the data was considered “tainted”. XMRV or related viruses were not found to be reliable with the patient samples collected. Again stay tuned on this one. BD
After police in Ventura County, California, arrested and jailed Judy Mikovits on 18 November, they gave few details about the felony charges levied against the well-known chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) researcher. According to the Ventura County Sheriff, she was a fugitive from justice arrested on a warrant from Washoe County, Nevada, and was "not bailable."
Now ScienceInsider has learned that her felony arrest warrant was issued by the Reno Justice Court in Washoe County. The District Attorney there has charged Mikovits with "possession of stolen property," according to a document filed with the court, and "unlawful taking of computer data, equipment, supplies, or other computer related property." Mikovits's former employer, the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, also filed court documents yesterday that further shed light on the arrest.
WPI fired Mikovits on 29 September because it said she refused to share a cell line with another researcher there.
Mikovits stepped into an international spotlight in October 2009 when she headed a team that published a study in Science about a possibly groundbreaking discovery related to CFS.
Mikovits and colleagues reported that 67% of CFS patients they tested harbored a recently discovered mouse retrovirus dubbed XMRV. Other labs soon reported that they had difficulty confirming the finding, which led the CFS community to split into different camps.
WPI staunchly stood by Mikovits's work, even after one of the labs she collaborated with in the Science study retracted its contribution to the paper because contamination had tainted data it supplied. The falling-out between WPI and Mikovits came about after a second Science paper that she co-authored reported that nine labs—including WPI's—could not reliably find XMRV or related viruses in blinded patient samples.
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/11/details-emerge-of-the-criminal.html?rss=1
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