6 ms·
San Francisco man becomes first in history to be ‘cured’ of AIDS
- GeoffreyHull 15y agoThe end of condoms as we know it. Good riddance
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- StavrosK 15y agoI don't know about you, but AIDS is the last thing I use condoms for. Unwanted pregnancies and the occasional STI are far more common than AIDS.
- nvictor 15y ago"Doctors still aren’t exactly sure what part of his treatment allowed his body to purge the virus, but clinical trials are scheduled to begin in 2012." there you go. the catch.
- pyre 15y agoWhat's the catch? > Doctors still aren’t exactly sure > clinical trials are scheduled to begin in 2012 or just > 2012 ?
- wtallis 15y agoA double-blind test with proper controls can prove the efficacy of a treatment without anyone understanding how it works inside the body. There are plenty of medicines that are commonly used and proven to work, but through an unknown or unclear mechanism.
- prkchp_sndwch 15y agoWhat's more interesting is apparently some people are immune to HIV. I can't believe that's possible.
- pyre 15y agoWhy is that so hard to believe?
- cabalamat 15y agoHumans, and other large animals, are prone to infectious diseases. Yet large animals aren't extinct, which means that infectious diseases seldom kill off an entire species. Which leads me to suppose that for any species and any infectious agent, some members of that species will probably be immune to that agent. It has been hypothesized that the main advantage of sexual reproduction -- which causes every member of a species to be genetically different -- is resistance to microbes and other parasites.
- Peaker 15y agoThe main advantage of sexual reproduction is faster evolution. It makes evolution like a huge parallel computer instead of like lots of small, very slow serial computers. If you examine asexual reproduction: you get a "tree of evolution". Each node in that tree is slightly "more evolved" than its parent on average (natural selection prunes the devolved ones more than the evolved ones). However, each branch in the tree has to evolve every single feature independently from its sibling branches. You only inherit evolutionary enhancements of your own ancestors. Assuming a tree of depth N: each node in the tree has only O(N) ancestors, and thus, about O(N) evolution experienced in each node. With sexual reproduction, you also recombine the evolutionary advancements of two ancestors into new nodes. It is no longer a tree, but a DAG of nodes (Directed Acyclic Graph). Each node now has O(2^depth) ancestors. Evolution can recombine features that took a long time to develop into a new baseline, and evolve from there. This is an exponential increase in evolution speed -- and I believe that is so incredibly huge of an advancement, that I predict that even species we believe are incapable of sexual reproduction, are probably sexually reproducing (e.g: exchanging DNA in some way) because it is too huge of an advantage to give up. Lastly, I find that it is interesting that there's a similarity between sexual-based evolution process to one of the frameworks we use for parallel computing: "Map/Reduce". Take a single node in the tree, and just "Map" (mutate & select) over it multiple times, you get slightly better nodes. Now combining the mutated & selected nodes together into descendants is much like "Reduce". "Map" is not a useful parallel computation, but "Map & Reduce" is.
- ck2 15y agoIs there actually only one kind of HIV/AIDS virus?
- rms 15y agoNope. HIV-1 versus HIV-2, and this treatment would have been less effective against HIV-2.
- 3dFlatLander 15y agoThere was a comment here the last time this story was submitted that summarized things well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007265 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007265
- gohat 15y agoNo, there are many, many strains of HIV virus. One person's infection evolves into a wide variety of strains during an infection due to immune system pressure.
- namdnay 15y agoJ.D. Shapely?
- D_Alex 15y agoIn 1982(-ish)i have first heard of the AIDS virus. My father (a biologist) said "I feel sorry for the young people of your generation, this will make life so much less fun" or something like that (I was 16). And I said something like "You old fellas just do not appreciate how potent science is today, we'll have a cure in 5 years max"... The fact that 30 years later we cured ONE person has really deflated my hubris. Also, no mission to Mars, no general purpose AI, no flying cars, etc, so many disappointments! I have a theory why it is so, I'll not bother you all with it, I'll just say that the other symptom of the underlying cause is the GFC.
- michael_dorfman 15y agoGFC? I've looked over this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFC, and still don't have a clue which you might mean.
- bad_user 15y agoHe probably refers to the financial crisis -- there have been theories flying around that our society is rotten to the core because of money. Taking money out of the equation would be an interesting experiment - what if you'd had access to wealth based on your achievements that benefit human kind and not based on whether you're playing stock market games? So in other words, we are doomed :) On the other hand, as a cynical contrarian that I am, I'm thinking that medicine may have gone too far. Natural selection doesn't work anymore.
- D_Alex 15y agoYes, I meant the financial crisis. I did not mean that our society is rotten to the core, but it seems to me that an inexcusable proportion of our best brains are drawn in to play zero-sum games (much of finance, also law).
- NickPollard 15y agoFinance isn't a Zero-Sum game (well, not all of it anyway). Investing money in the right place can create more wealth for all of humanity.