Could you repeat that? Fixing the 'replication crisis' in biomedical research has become top priority

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Sarven Sabunciyan was intrigued.

He had been reading about xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, or XMRV, a virus never before seen in humans. But according to attention-grabbing studies in PLoS Pathogens and Science, it was now showing up in people with prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Sabunciyan, a pediatric neurovirologist in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, studies the role of viruses in psychiatric diseases and behaviors. He decided to see if people with schizophrenia also had XMRV, a finding that would yield important clues about the mental disorder and how to treat it.