4 ms·
Looks like a really bad article on a possibly promising treatment...
by zitterbewegung 17y ago
Looks like a really bad article on a possibly promising treatment...
- kljensen 17y agoThis is the former.
- mbreese 17y agoIt's not that bad... it is very hard to translate the contents of a technical article like this one into a story that the lay-public can understand. It's like trying to describe why a particular compiler optimization doesn't work in an edge case to your mother[1]. --- Based upon the actual article @ PLoS Biology: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000095 http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.... The take home message is that we at one point had a gene that can block HIV infection. Somewhere along the way it got a mutation that produced a truncated protein. These guys found it, fixed the glitch, and showed that the resulting protein is effective at blocking HIV infection. They then took the next step of figuring out a way to "fix the glitch" in humans without using some complicated gene therapy approach. All in all, this is very impressive. --- [1] I'm assuming your mother isn't a committer to GCC :)
- biohacker42 17y agoIt is pretty bad, there's only a theoretical cream that may be in use some day, many years from now and it may reduce infection rates. If you take the article at face value, we just cured HIV. And IMHO articles like that are VERY bad because over the years they have built a consensus of science is wrong and confusing and disappointing into the general public. Anything that's repeatedly over hyped will end up like that.