Judy Mikovits

Judy Anne Mikovits is an American researcher. She was involved in controversies regarding her research in the area of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).

Mikovits was the research director of the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI), a chronic fatigue syndrome research organization and clinic in Reno, Nevada in the United States from 2006 to 2011. Mikovits led a research effort that reported in 2009 that a retrovirus known as xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) was associated with CFS and may have had a causal role, however the research came under fire, leading to an eventual retraction on December 22, 2011 by the journal Science.

In October 2011, Mikovits was terminated by WPI for refusing to turn over her work to another scientist and subsequently came under investigation for alleged manipulation of data in her publications related to XMRV. On November 18, 2011, Judy Mikovits was arrested in her Ventura County, California home. Her lawyer said she was arrested on charges of theft brought by the WPI, but that the charges had no merit. By November 28, after negotiations with the WPI, 18 missing notebooks were returned. Later, the criminal charges against her were dismissed by the Reno, NV District Attorney's office.

Mikovits worked for Francis "Frank" Ruscetti at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland during the 1980s. She then completed a joint PhD program in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with Ruscetti and remained in his lab as a postdoctoral researcher. Her work with Ruscetti included studies of several retroviruses and their interactions with the immune system.

The Whittemores hired Mikovits as research director of WPI in 2006. Frustrated by a lack of answers for the illness, Whittemore decided that, "if there was a place of our own where we could find the answers, we could do it more quickly." Her attempts to find a viral cause of CFS were initially unsuccessful. In 2007, she met a co-discoverer of XMRV, Robert Silverman, at a conference. Silverman had found XMRV sequences, which are highly similar to mouse genomic sequences, in prostate cancer specimens several years earlier. Using tools obtained from Silverman, Mikovits began to look for XMRV in her CFS samples. In late 2008, a postdoctoral researcher obtained two positive results from a group of twenty samples. He and Mikovits successively altered the experimental conditions until all samples gave a positive signal.

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