What Silverman’s colleagues did was to take DNA from three different patient biopsies and splice them together in a Frankenstein fashion to create an infectious molecular clone that he referred to as XMRV. In fact, we were the first to isolate the natural XMRV from humans, as we reported in Science. Silverman’s stitched-together Frankenstein monster clone XMRV, which had never existed in nature, was given the designation VP62.
