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Accidental Discovery Could Lead to Cure for AIDS Virus
sydlexius writes "A press release from Sandia tells of the discovery of niobium HPA, a chemical that bonds to viruses. Many scientists have been interested in the properties of various HPAs (heteropolyanions), however this is the first such case that is stable in basic and neutral solutions. The Albuquerque Tribune covers the story here. For subscribers of Science Magazine, you can find an article in this month's issue (Abstract)."
As science, this sounds very cool. HOWEVER, this is a report of some ultra-preliminary initial discovery. The chance of it living up to the first-press-release hype is essentially zero.
There are jillions of chemicals that will disable/destroy/etc. HIV in a test tube. Like plain old chlorine bleach. You know any AIDS sufferers being successfully treated with bleach?
I didn't think so.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
Well, could be, but there are questions and concerns to be raised.
IANAMD, but my mother is an infectious disease doctor (working, in fact, in a trial testing a prototype HIV vaccine). I have yet to ask her about this (seeing as I am at work), but one of the common concerns she has when she hears about antibiotics being used frequently is that strains of resistant bacteria may result faster due to overprescription of drugs.
There seems to be very little on the web about HPAs, but from what I've gathered, there seems to be conflicting, hazy theories about how they work on viruses. Now, HPAs very well may be resistance-proof: if a virus cannot replicate due to the physical constraints on retroviral replication, then they have little chance. However, evolution is a weird thing (to put it lightly). The most far-fetched mutation of a virus might just end up working, resulting in its proliferation.
Then there are the safety issues. Even though does not decompose in neutral solutions (and therefore compatable with the pH of blood), there are still the standard concerns about toxicity, carcinogenicity (is that a word?), and the like. One site I found seems to have a description of a HPA that worked....until it started causing cancer in the patients.
Of course, this all might work, too. I hate to sound like a nay-sayer, though, but it's got a ways to go.
Herschel didn't think he was seeing an asteroid. A comet maybe, but not an asteroid. Uranus was discovered on March 13, 1781, 20 years before the first asteroid (Ceres) was first spotted by Giuseppe Piazzi (January 1, 1801). The term asteroid was coined by Herschel, but not until after the second asteroid (Pallas) was discovered by Heinrich Olbers on March 28, 1802.
Uranus is in some way tied to asteroids though. The discovery of Uranus "proved" the Titius-Bode law, a mathematical formula that gave the distance of the planets from the sun. Based on the location of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter, Bode's law predicted the location of Uranus. When Uranus was discovered in nearly the exact location it was supposed to be, astronomers started taking the law seriously. The interesting thing about Bode's law is that it also predicted a planet in the gap between Mars and Jupiter. Kepler also suspected that there was a planet between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers planned a cooperative search for the missing planet in the gap. Before they could get started, Piazzi found Ceres. Pallas, Juno (1804), and Vesta (1807) were discovered shortly thereafter. After Pallas, they realized they weren't looking at planets, but instead minor planets.
So that's the story of asteroids and Uranus.