Chimps, AIDS, And Immunity

Anonymous Coward writes "Researchers at the Biomedical Primate Research Center in The Netherlands have come up with a theory as to why modern chimps don't develop AIDS and its variants. The chimps in the study were found to share a usually uniform cluster of genes in the area that controls their immune systems' defenses against disease. This lack of genetic diversity suggests that a lethal sickness attacked chimps in the distant past. The theory postulates that approximately 2 million years ago an AIDS-like epidemic wiped out a large portion of the chimpanzee population. Those that survived developed an immunity to AIDS and its variants. If this theory holds true it may explain why some humans who are repeatedly exposed to HIV don't get sick."

Comments

Subject test group?

[broken.data]

I completely misread the last line as why some humans who are repeatedly exposed to HIV don't get sex. We are talking about code-monkeys, right?

Sharing DNS with chimpanzees

[Junior J. Junior III]

First of all, we share roughly 97% of our DNS with chimpanzees.

Hey, now, that may be true, but I don't think ICANN would appreciate you categorizing them thusly.

of course!

[Scrameustache]

If this theory holds true it may explain why some humans who are repeatedly exposed to HIV don't get sick."

They are in fact shaved monkeys, and not people after all?

Re:Life expectancy

[yobbo]

If only we had made the doctors of 300 years ago vote in the hand washing polls on slashdot, we could've exposed them for the dirty buggers that they were and saved many lives.