Q. Many patients with chronic fatigue viewed the finding of the virus as additional evidence that their disease was “real,’’ not a figment of their imaginations, as some doctors had charged. They were quite disappointed with your findings.
A. I really wish this had come out the other way around. I would much rather have confirmed these earlier reports and shown that the virus was there. It might have provided some path to some kind of useful treatment.
Q. You’re a virus expert, not an expert in chronic fatigue, but do you believe that chronic fatigue is a psychiatric disorder or a physical condition, perhaps caused by a different virus?
A. It sounds to me like it’s a [physical, not psychiatric] disease, but I don’t have any scientific knowledge to help with that particular question. Certainly, many of the patients are seriously disabled.
Q. Could this XMRV, which you say developed in laboratory mice, have escaped and be causing different problems in people, if not chronic fatigue?
A. We don’t think it could survive well. It conceivably initiates a small infection [but] we think it’s very unlikely to initiate a major infection.
Q. But viruses closely related to XMRV are known to be dangerous, right?
A. One of the attractive features of the XMRV [theory of chronic fatigue] is that the group can cause quite a few diseases - cancers, wasting disease - it was plausible that this virus could have done that.
Q. You’re also investigating a similar virus that’s insinuated itself into our genes?
A. We have large numbers of these [viruses] in our genome, maybe thousands in our ancestry. Over the last 3 million years or so, our ancestors have been infected many, many times with viruses.
Q. The virus you’re looking at, HERV-K, may be connected to breast cancer?
