Dr. Mikovits began a 20-year collaboration with Frank Ruscetti, a pioneer in the field of human retro virology. She helped Dr Russetti isolate the HIV virus + link it to #AIDS in 1983. Her NIH boss Anthony Fauci delayed publication of that critical paper for 6 months to let his protégé Robert Gallo replicate, publish and claim credit. The delay in mass HIV testing let AIDS further spread around the globe + helped Fauci win promotion to director NIAID.

In 2006, Dr Mikovits became director of Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease + collaborated with Dr Ruscetti searching for the cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which suddenly became epidemic in the 1980s. The male dominated medical community dismissed CFS as psychosomatic "yuppie flu" caused when fragile females cracked in corporate jobs.

Dr. Mikovits discovered that 67% of affected women carried a virus—called Xenotropic Murine Leukemia related Virus—that appeared in healthy women only 4% of the time.

XMRV is also associated with prostate, breast, ovarian cancers, leukemia, and multiple myeloma. Many women with XMRV bore children with autism.
In 2009, Drs. Mikovits and Ruscetti published their explosive findings in the journal Science. But the question remained: How was XMRV getting into people?