Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsIntriguing story but poor editing
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 1, 2018
A very important subject is plagued (no pun intended) by very poor editing. As others reviewers have pointed out, a more chronological progression of this story would have made wading through the frequent scientific word jargon more bearable. The bottom line here is that Judy Mikovits, after careful thorough research and testing made an amazing discovery: That a retrovirus created by the mixing of human and animal (mouse) tissue might be a contributing factor in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and other new maladies that have arisen or become more frequent in the past century, specifically starting from an incident that occurred in a Los Angeles Hospital in 1934 to today.
Unfortunately in her own naive unsuspecting way, as she let the world know what she had found she made two mistakes. You might say that greed was at the heart of both - not from Mikovits, but from her employers and from the rest of the scientific community, some of whom initially supported her, but later strangely turned against her, by using obviously faulty criteria in tests trying to duplicate her results.
Mistake 1 was telling her employers that the test they had developed to sell that would detect the presence of this retrovirus in humans was faulty. Mistake 2 was that in discussing her research at various conferences around the world she used two words in the same paragraph that could effect billions of dollars in profit from pharmaceutical companies: autism and vaccines. Even though she didn't state there was a definite connection, just to suggest there might be cause for further research in the area is enough to ruffle some very powerful feathers. In fact, since I have used these same two words in the same sentence just to describe what happened in this book, I would not all be surprised to see this review deleted by Amazon.
It's really a shame this book wasn't more readable. I finished it, but it was a chore. Its a revealing story about scientific research, both how it gets done and how it gets undone. It needs to be more widely understood.